The sky is on fire right now in Fortnite: Battle Royale, and people are freaking out. There's always been the occasional shooting star zooming through the skybox, but recently they got a whole lot more frequent and a whole lot closer: there's now what looks like burning debris raining down from the sky, likely pieces of dust from the comet's tail. And it's lending credence to a fan theory that the slowly-growing comet in the sky above the game is going to crash into the map and destroy Tilted Towers.
I'm a believer: Epic isn't known for restraint when it comes to Fortnite updates, and -- weird morse code messages aside -- I think that this comet is going to smash into the map on April 30, when Season 3 ends and Season 4 begins.
I wonder, however, if that's all Epic has planned. Destroying Tilted Towers, while a big change to the current flow of the map, would not change the rest of the map in any way. And it might not fix the problem: for a week or so at least, people would be swarming over Crazy Crater just like they do over Tilted Towers now. I'm wondering about a recent interview Epic's Eric Williamson gave to IGN, where he describes a desire to surprise people with the current map rather than build a second one:
"There’s no urgency for us to create a new map right now. It’s not a priority right now, whereas continuing to evolve and make the map feel fresh is something we’re very excited and interested about. So stay tuned; we have some interesting ideas.”
Would destroying Tilted make the map feel fresh? Probably, but only so much at the end of the day. My theory is a little more out there, but if Epic could pull it off it would not only make for a colossal development accomplishment but -- as with everything Fortnite -- a big advertisement for what a developer can accomplish the Unreal Engine. I think that the map is going to get a broad redesign along the lines of the next season's theme, from the trees to the cabins.
It sounds crazy, but it might not be as crazy as it seems. Fortnite uses a lot of repeated assets designed to make the game easier to load on slower machines, and it wouldn't be impossible to just swap out enough of those to make the map feel genuinely different: just different trees, lookout towers and houses would go a long way to making things feel new. You could also change the tilesets for the different terrain types. Points of interest would require significantly more work, but Epic has the majority of its developers on this game right now. Like I said, it would be a big, bold move -- but that's sort of how Epic got here in the first place. We remember that Battle Royale itself was built in about two months: about the same amount of time Season 3 has been going on. And that was with a much smaller team.
Right now, the concept of a season in the game is a paid transaction only: the theme of the season is expressed only through cosmetic items unlocked through the $10 Battle Pass while the rest of the game remains the same. And while Epic clearly hasn't struggled to drum up excitement over that model, I think it's pretty clear that there are more possibilities here. What if the aesthetic wasn't just expressed through player skins and gliders, but through the map itself? What if every ten weeks you could tune in and see new points of interest? It's a big ask, and a dangerous precedent to set for a game that won't be on top of the world forever. But it sure would be cool.
