Yahoo Finance Fortnite Season 7 | Release date, map changes, skins and everything we know so far
We are around halfway through Season 6 of Fortnite, meaning Season 7 is just weeks away, and the Battle Royale phenomenon shows no signs of abating. Earlier this month, developer Epic Games said that Fortnite has 8.3 million concurrent players and that the game has now topped 200 million registered players. A quite staggering number, particularly as the game celebrated its first birthday in September.
That it continues to attract such numbers worldwide, with a recent release in Korea boosting its numbers still further, means that anticipation for Season 7 is about to reach fever-pitch. But what will the next major update to the game bring to its map and mechanics. Here is everything we know about the upcoming season so far.
When is the Fortnite Season 7 release date?
As ever, an official date for the season hasn’t been revealed. But according to the in-game countdown, Season 6 is due to end on the 5 December, with Season 7 following shortly after. Each Fortnite season tends to last around 10 weeks, though has been known to be delayed beyond that initial countdown. Season 5, for instance, was originally due to end on 17 September, but was held until Season 6’s arrival on the 27th.
Either way, ‘a few weeks before Christmas’ is a good bet as Epic look to clean up during the holiday season, even as it faces stiff competition from Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 well-received battle royale mode Blackout. The season will then likely run through to February 2019.
Fortnite Season 7: Map changes, skins and theme
We never know for sure until a new season arrives, but part of the fun of Fortnite is the rampant speculation over what each new major update may bring. The current map transformations, with giant purple cube Kevin exploding, transporting players to another dimension and leaving fragments of itself scattered all over, remain an intriguing mystery.
However, with Season 6, Epic seemed to embrace the spooky season with its ‘Darkness Rises’ theme; dropping shadow stones on the map and releasing skin costumes based on a funky Halloween party.
The current line of thinking, then, is that Season 7 will feature a wintery, Christmas theme. Possibly covering the map, or part of the map, in thick snow. Christmas skins will surely abound, with millions of folk dressed as Santa flossing all over the world.
While this all seems a fairly obvious assumption, further fuel to this line of thinking comes with the retail release of the Deep Freeze bundle. Epic released the boxed product on 16 November, which features a snowsuit skin and other wintery goodies. While these in-game objects will be exclusive to the bundle, it could be a portent of skins to come.
And as Season 7 approaches, a snowstorm has appeared on the horizon and is rolling towards the Fortnite map. As the swirling clouds have come closer, an intrepid player on Reddit has managed to surf right out into the mists to uncover an iceberg with a castle turret poking out of the top. So we could be in for some Titanic map changes when the iceberg finally reaches land.
The resourcefulness of the Fortnite community in uncovering Epic's equally impressive teases never fails to impress. Should you look directly at the snowstorm, it makes a particular sound. One other player apparently ran the sound through a spectrogram, which visualised the soundwaves as resembling the logo of the A.I.M. robot skin. Could the robot, which has also been appearing in loading screens more frequently, have a role to play in Season 7?
But that is unlikely to be all, with significant alterations to the map’s topography beyond a light dusting. What further effect will Kevin’s fragments have on the land? It has already destroyed Loot Lake entirely, after all. As Season 7 draws closer, expect further teases to come.
What is the Fortnite story so far?
Despite Fortnite’s simplicity in its core mechanics --drop onto an island, find weapons, survive until the end-- Epic have built an intriguing brand of environmental and even real-world narrative of colliding parallel worlds into its game.
Back in July a rocket launched across its map, creating a giant crack in the sky. Rifts then started appearing around Fortnite’s map, changing locations significantly as the game’s world and the real world collided. A sign for Durr Burger in Fortnite, sucked out of the game, appeared in the real-world California desert.
Meanwhile Fortnite’s map has undergone significant changes, with a comet crashing into Dusty Depot, leaving just a crater with variable gravity. Film sets have appeared as well as various other changes. Moisty Mire in the south-east, was replaced by Paradise Palms, a desert biome apparently pulled in from that California location.
Tilted Towers, meanwhile, was destroyed by the purple cube that travelled the map throughout season 5 after dropping out of the rift.
Then the cube, dubbed ‘Kevin’ found its final resting place in Loot Lake, turning the contentious water mass in the centre of the map into a jelly trampoline, before embedding itself on the bottom of the island in the middle. At the start of Season 6, the island began to levitate, floating around the map with Kevin protruding from the bottom. Eventually Kevin broke free, exploding in a flash of light at a special timed event, sending participating players to a bright netherworld for a brief moment in time.
The scattered remains of poor Kevin are now on the map. But whether the cube’s influence is over remains to be seen.
How much will the Fortnite Season 7 Battle Pass be?
Unless Epic have a major change of heart on its pricing structure for new seasons, the Season 7 Battle Pass, which will give players access to new skins and exclusive challenges, will likely cost 950 V-Bucks. That’s around £7.99/$9.99 in real money.
