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INTRODUCTION
This review lists all the changes that the franchise has undergone since August 1. If you’re new to this battle royale game, check out the detailed Fortnite review at Games Mojo before reading further.
NEW BATTLE PASS
The new Battle Pass is more about nostalgia. If you’re an avid Fortnite fan with 9 complete seasons under your belt, you’ll enjoy the feeling. For instance, it includes remixed skins of Llama DJ, Dark Voyager, and many other characters from early seasons. Two years may not seem enough for nostalgia, but time flows fast on the Internet, right?
The biggest event of the season so far is the epic fight of the Teddy Bear Mech built into the volcano and a monster from Polar Peaks. It has qualified as the most impressive and action-packed battle of all seasons. It would be unfair to spoil the plot, so hurry up and watch the gorgeous 5-minute replay on YouTube.
Battle Pass has changed a lot in 2 years, but the price remains the same. The most basic form costs 950 V-Bucks, which is around $10. To unlock the first 25 tiers, you have to pay $28 or 2800 V-Bucks. Part of the sum will get paid back to you if you complete the battle pass.
BRAND-NEW FEATURES
The B.R.U.T.E. It’s a heavy vehicle that requires one player to control movement, while a second player takes control of rockets and an automatic shotgun. The mech can also dash through obstacles, jump over large distances with a power-up, and stomp through rooftops to get into buildings and catch players. Such a monster was considered overpowered by streamers and other players, so developers were pushed to make it less mobile and deadly to balance gameplay. These robots caused a lot of controversies.
As for missions, you should say goodbye to Fortbytes and weekly challenges. Instead, you can participate in themed mission bundles. The rewards include experience, battle pass points, and cosmetics. Completion of specific events will give you a pass to elite-class missions with a higher difficulty level and unique objectives.
MAP CHANGES
This time, Epics decided to return some good-old locations to the game because the idea perfectly matches troubles with the time continuum. Everyone knew about the Dusty Depot return from teasers and several leaks, and it actually happened, which means the map reverted to those times when the meteor hadn’t struck the island. In fact, it has frozen just a few seconds away from destroying Fortnite. Factories from early seasons are also back, but they stand right under the frozen meteor, which means they may disappear as soon as it falls.
Old locations are generally situated within Rift Zones. When you cross the borders of each zone, you enable specific gameplay changes, such as low gravity, building prohibition, automatic dress-code, and more. The developers promise to add multiple additional zones in the context of upcoming events.
Moving forward, we come across a mysterious Orb on the Loot Lake. Perhaps it’s the source of all troubles, and it seems to be slowly exploding throughout the month. It has multiple floating objects inside which may do a lot of damage to the environment in the near future. It looks like a clue as to some upcoming secret changes.
CROSSOVERS
Fortnite is famous for collabs with productions from the movie, music, game, and even clothing industries and it isn’t going to back off on that. Currently, one of the most favored Rift Zones, titled Fortnite x Mayhem, is dedicated to Borderlands. You can get a matching cosmetic pack to change the visuals in the zone to make it look authentic. The land of Pandora already has the true style of textures and terrains. You can also buy the skin of Psycho along with a Claptrap backpack. This one-wheeled robot will cheer you up with some hilarious jokes!
The next crossover will be rather dark. On August 27, the FortTory Twitter account published 2 files that unambiguously imply that the next crossover will be with IT: Chapter Two. The first file, called Illinois Laugh, is a record of a clown’s laugh that’s quite similar to that of Pennywise. The second one is a Creepy Balloon 3D model. You’ll have an opportunity to check the plausibility of the leak on September 6.
CONTROVERSIES
Though Epic tries to fix balance flaws as soon as possible, they’ve lost many important influencers. Every season’s launch is accompanied by a wave of criticism, but Season 10 faced the biggest one. Bugha, who won the Fortnite World Cup, DrLupo, and TimTheTatMan switched to Counter-Strike: GO streaming. Even one of the main Fortnite collaborators, DJ Marshmello, who won 2018’s Fortnite Pro-AM together with Ninja (Tyler Blevins), criticized the giant robots and suggested removing them.
He posted a call for that under the announcement of the collaboration with Major Lazer, saying: “Vault the mech!!!” Many players also argue that Epic fixes drawbacks too slowly, but it’s not fair enough. The development cycle of global and local balance patches requires weeks of coding, testing, and integrating. Epic isn’t the kind of company that can get rid of players deliberately, so it’s just a matter of time.
CONCLUSION
With both good points and flaws, this season succeeds in commemorating everything that happened to Fortnite over the last 2 years. The core message of the update might sound like this: “Here at Epic Games, we always look forward. We’re not afraid of making mistakes, and we implement positive changes due to your active feedback. Let’s evolve, but keep looking back to preserve genuineness.”
On the other hand, the rawness of some innovations reveals Epic’s propensity towards undertesting new stuff and just watching to see what happens when it enters the big game. A loss of a couple hundred thousand players is an apparently minor accident when you have more than 250 million. At the same time, we’ll have to wait for official figures at the end of the year to make objective conclusions about Epic’s strategy.
Author – Alina Burns
I’m a game journalist and a huge fan of battle royale. I create arts for my future video game and play every new AAA title in my spare time.