At the beginning of Season 5 in Fortnite: Battle Royale, Epic Games pulled a neat trick. In Season 4, it was possible to essentially buy your way up to the ultimate Battle Pass Reward: the John Wick Reaper skin, which you could get just shelling out the V-bucks to upgrade your pass to tier 100. There was a Tier-100 challenge to get his glider after that, but a competent player could easily finish it in a day. It left the game with a bit of a problem: a certain sort of player could essentially complete all of Season 4's content in just a few hours. Epic, assumedly, wanted to make sure that wouldn't happen this time, and that's how we wound up with the Blockbuster challenge. The reward skin for that finally hits the game tomorrow, and people are excited.
The Blockbuster Challenge asked players to complete every challenge in a given week for seven weeks, meaning that even the most talented players would never be able to finish it until the week 7 challenges went live, which happens tomorrow. Most players won't get the skin on day 1--yours truly has been struggling with a trap elimination, though the recent damage buff will help--but you can bet that a ton of streamers and Youtubers will be out strutting in the new skin at around 5:00 a.m. tomorrow, right after the challenges go live at 4:00 am. We got an early look at the skin via a recent datamine: it's called "Visitor":
With that, it means that Epic can put a pin in one portion of Season 5 and move on to the next. The Omega/Carbide/Movie plot is more or less wrapped, the meteor is open, and everyone is waiting to see what happens with that rocket. So far, the Season 5 plot has been a bit diffuse and hard to follow: we've got a ton of stuff going on on the map, but there's nothing quite like the simple narrative offered by season 4's slowly approaching comet. My theory is that Epic was waiting until the theoretical end of the Blockbuster challenge to kick things into a sort of Act 3.
I'm excited to see the Visitor in action, but more excited to see what happens with the map going forward. Fortnite just made its official esports debut last night, along with announcing an impressive 125 million players. If Epic wants to keep those numbers up, it's got to give us something that can match the comet.
