Loba (Apex Legends)

Appearances

Loba joined the playable roster of Apex Legends in its fifth season, which launched in 2020. She entered the Apex Games to get revenge on Revenant for murdering her parents, a scene shown in the fourth season’s trailer. The season five launch trailer shows her destroying Skull Town while failing to kill Revenant. Over time, she developed romantic feelings for Bangalore, but pulled away after hearing Bangalore describe her as “just a friend.” She later began a relationship with Valkyrie. In July 2023, Respawn started the year-long Kill Code storyline; in its third part, Loba points a gun at Valkyrie for refusing to hand over Revenant’s source code. By season 20, Loba and Valkyrie had broken up. She also appears in Apex Legends Mobile and was planned for the Apex Legends board game.

Concept and creation

Loba was conceived as a thief character, with multiple archetypes considered—including "treasure hunter" and "cat burglar"—before the team settled on a "seductively devious character." Writer Tom Casiello polled women at Respawn Entertainment for their thoughts, and fellow writer Ashley Reed helped finish development. Casiello stated he wanted Loba to "own her sexuality" and "like to look good when she wakes up in the morning." Reed cited inspiration from Catwoman, Bayonetta, and the music video for Shakira's "She Wolf."

Her model was designed by Patrick Yeung, and her face took several months to finalize, guided by designers Hethe Srodawa and Gary Huang. Her outfit went through multiple iterations, from haute couture to a sci-fi postapocalyptic huntswoman, and was designed to suit her gameplay and personality. Mechanically, she was conceived as a "legend that manipulates loot," a support-type character whose abilities help her team find items, especially rare ones. She can teleport by throwing a bracelet and allows teams to teleport nearby loot to their inventories.

Reception

Loba has been generally well received and described as popular with players of all genders. GamesRadar+ noted that the "hornier part" of the fanbase was mainly focused on her. After a leak of swimsuit skins for Apex Legends characters, the lack of a swimsuit for Loba caused controversy among fans; the developers offered to add one if a tweet reached 10,000 likes, which it did. Fan-made concepts for her swimsuit appeared.

Upon its reveal, a new controversy arose over the outfit not being "slutty enough," according to Kotaku writer Alyssa Mercante, who found it cute and appreciated seeing a swimsuit that would not cause chafing. Prima Games writer Daphne Fama called the design tasteful. Some players argued Loba should not have had the skin added, wanting to see "thirsty" fans irritated. Rock Paper Shotgun writer Natalie Flores criticized the design for perpetuating negative stereotypes of Latina women and bisexuals by making her "hypersexual."

Flores argued that Loba was defined by her sexuality, which "othered" her from the female cast, and that her bisexuality amplified issues due to stereotypes of bisexuals being hypersexual. She claimed Loba was frequently and "crudely" objectified by players, and that she lacked agency as a fictional character, making her sexuality seem imposed rather than owned. In a separate article, Flores also criticized her for being "entrenched in a world of crime."