A fresh season of Fortnite is here for us, dripping with chrome. Today witness the launch of Chapter 3: Season 4 for the battle royale game, anointed “Paradise,” and the meaningful change this time is a mysterious new substance.
It’s called chrome, and it seems to be able to change just about everything it touches: you can sprinkle it on walls to go directly through them or splash it on yourself for temporary fire immunity and faster sprinting.
This season, other additions include new locations, like a floating condo, and other points of interest that have naturally been infested with chrome. In addition, sniper rifles have received a significant buff, increasing damage and headshot multipliers. There’s also a new kind of vault, which can be opened by finding various keys across the island, giving players access to high-level loot.
Fortnite began from an internal game mess at Epic Games following publishing Gears of War 3 around 2011. Though it was not originally one of the developed titles during the spot, the concept of integrating the construction game genre, symbolizing games like Minecraft and Terraria, and shooter games occurred, leading to the foundation of Fortnite.
However, the development of Fortnite was delayed due to several issues, including changing from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4, a more in-depth role-playing game strategy to extend the life of the game, and a regulator of art style from a dark theme to a better cartoonish style.
Further, Epic was glancing to get into the games as a service model and brought in Chinese publisher Tencent to help.
Tencent took a significant stake in Epic as part of this, guiding the departure of several executives, including Cliff Bleszinski, who had been a crucial part of Fortnite’s development. In addition, Fortnite’s approach was changed to Epic’s testbed for games as a service, further slowing the growth.
Epic was ready to release Fortnite as a paid early access title in July 2017, with strategies to release it as free-to-play sometime in 2019 while gaining feedback from players to improve the game. However, with the unleashing of Fortnite Battle Royale, the player-versus-environment manner was distinguished as “Save the World.” Ultimately, Epic opted to release Save the World as a premium title, bringing it out of early access on June 29, 2020.
And a new season represents a new battle pass with many characters to unlock. Highlighting this season’s battle pass is Spider-Gwen, and players who purchase the pass will immediately get access to a new skin called Paradigm.
Longtime Spider-Man writer Dan Slott first envisioned a spider-powered Gwen Stacy for the 2014–15 “Spider-Verse” storyline. However, his initial vision was very diverse from what was published, especially the work of Spider-Gwen creators Jason Latour and Robbi Rodriguez.
In October, Nick Lowe revealed at New York Comic-Con 2014 that the fan-favorite Spider-Gwen, raised in “Spider-Verse,” would be getting her series after many requests.
The first volume was completed after the fifth issue, with the character carrying over into the second volume of Spider-Verse as part of the “Secret Wars” storyline. After the closing of that storyline, a second volume by the same creative crew began with problem #1 as a part of Marvel’s All-New, All-Different Marvel imprint.
In 2022, a new limited series titled Spider-Gwen: Gwen-Verse by Tim Seeley and Jodi Nishijima was published, featuring Stacy touring through time alongside alternative interpretations of herself (sported after other Marvel heroes) to correct a disturbance in the timeline. Other acquisitions include:
- A hipster cat
- A strange bear creature
- A werewolf
- Yet another very cool anime skin
Here’s the full battle pass lineup in trailer form: This season follows the light-hearted vibes of Paradise, which kicked off in June following a mech battle live event. That season of Fortnite was notable for a vast Dragon Ball crossover event that let players give Goku a gun. Fortnite, in general, seems to have received a big boost this year after introducing a Zero Build mode in March.