Data miners found a Bristleback model and a reference to “Axe?” as a character in the game files.

The data mining community shared the discovered Bristleback model and a reference to a robotic Axe as a hero character on social media.

Content creator Kirill “Fay” Serdyukov linked the discovered Bristleback model to a new robotic version of Axe, while the DotaFlow team found a reference in the game’s code to a slot for an automaton character and also reported on a staging server update to version 6 on the night of June 25.

Earlier, Mark “sikle” Lerman speculated about future events in Dota 2: “As much as I’d love for the release to happen today, I suspect they’ll steal someone else’s design soon. ‘_bb’ at the end of the filenames—that’s definitely Bristleback. He’s next.”

Photo: Valve.