‘Fortnite’ Update: Winterfest And Lightsabers Are Gone, A Big Question Remains

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Credit: Epic Games

The grass is poking through on the Fortnite map once again. Until this morning, the entire island was covered in a festive dusting of snow, but today it started to melt down in Slurpy Swamp and will likely continue to do so until we’re back to where we were before the holidays began. Winterfest is over in Fortnite: Battle Royale, taking the Star Wars event with it as well. So that means no more presents, no more lightsabers, no more santa-esque battle bus and no more crashed tie fighters swarming with first order stormtroopers. Instead, we’re left with just the quiet rhythms of dropping in and dying fighting to the death. Also there still seem to be lights in some of the bushes.

Lightsabers were a pretty divisive addition to the game, as most big things like this tend to be. But they certainly changed things up for a little bit. Fortnite has been a little bit short on standard, season-style content so far: we’ve had no map changes to tell us what’s going on with the E.G.O. organization, precious few new items and no overarching plot to track. For many, that’s been a disappointment.

But what’s interesting here is that these two events in tandem constitute some of the biggest we’ve seen in the game so far. Star Wars had a live event, two new items, map updates and new AI combatants that were quite a bit more sophisticated than husks(though the development of bots likely helped with that). Winterfest was not quite so ambitious, but it still involved a couple of new map items, a host of seasonal map changes and a ton of new, free cosmetics.

I think the disconnect here is that none of this had anything to do with a season-long plot, which has been a hallmark of Fortnite since Season 4. Instead it feels like a one-off thing, now concluded, while the rest of the plot remains sort of a mystery. We still have a little over a month left in the season, and it’s unclear what’s going to happen from here. More one-off events? Another live something? Movement on the season-long plot at last?

In a certain way, those questions are good: the rhythm of the game had become too predictable in chapter 1, and it’s better to have people wondering what’s going to happen. But there hasn’t been any movement so far, and so those questions become bad when people think the answer might be “nothing”. I doubt that’s the case, but we’ll see soon.

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