If your favorite Nickelodeon character hasn't been confirmed for the studio's new Super Smash Bros-style brawler, don't fret. A new Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl datamine has revealed several new characters and stages potentially coming to the game in the future.
What does this Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl datamine reveal?
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl has only been released for a few hours, but we've already got some juicy new info about it. The results of the Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl datamine were originally posted to 4chan. While that post is missing, snapshots of assets and stages discovered in the datamine have also been uploaded to Reddit and ResetEra. The most compelling leaks suggest that Garfield and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Shredder will be added to the game in the future. Here, you can see a screenshot depicting a Garfield stage, as well as a placeholder image for the gloomy cat himself.
In addition, another screenshot clearly depicts the artwork of Shredder, although he has been given the rather amusing codename of "cheese" (cheese? Shredder? Get it?), which we're sure he'd be delighted about.
There's also evidence pointing towards eight more characters being fairly safe bets for inclusion in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl in the future. Announcer voice line recordings suggest that Avatar: The Last Airbender's Prince Zuko, Rugrats' Tommy Pickles, and SpongeBob SquarePants' Mr. Krabs and Plankton are all up for a spot in the cartoon brawler, among others. Lastly, there's a list of placeholder announcer audio clip listings for characters like Turtles' Donatello, two more members of the Thornberry family, and Cindy Vortex, who we said we'd like to see in the game back in September.
How legit are these Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl leaks?
This Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl datamine has some legitimacy thanks to none other than designer and programmer Thaddeus Crews. In a post on the game's official Discord server, Crews said he "brought up concerns of datamining" but was told that content left in the backend would be removed. Evidently, this didn't happen. Crews goes on to say that everything found by dataminers was "explicitly meant for [the base game]" and that it wouldn't be DLC, as the team hasn't worked on DLC yet. In addition, Crews said that voice lines in the project are meant to "cover bases" and aren't confirmations of what "can and cannot happen".
It's not entirely clear what Crews means by this. Of course, it's entirely possible that all of the assets datamined here are just cut content, and we'll never see them in the game. Alternatively, Shredder, Garfield, Zuko, and the others could come to Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl as free post-launch characters, with paid options to follow afterwards. If Crews is correct when he says that this content was "explicitly meant for base", then it could well launch after the fact as free updates for the game. We'll have to wait and see.
You can grab Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl on PlayStation consoles, Xbox platforms, Nintendo Switch, and PC right now. Announced all the way back in July, it's a Super Smash Bros-esque fighting game starring some of Nickelodeon's most iconic characters and locations. We'll bring you more on this, including whether this content will ever see the light of day, as we get it.
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