This morning, Epic Games announced what has to be the most ambitious Fortnite: Battle Royale limited time mode yet. It’s a crossover with Avengers: Infinity War, merging arguably the two biggest entertainment events in the world right now. Paul Tassi has the details: the mode will drop the Infinity Gauntlet down on the map, transforming the player that possesses it into Thanos himself, superpowers and all. The official partnership with Marvel also raises the possibility of other Avengers skins available for purchase, but there’s bad news on that front, unfortunately.
Shortly after the announcement, players began speculating on whether or not they’d be able to cosplay as Black Panther, Ironman or any other officially licensed characters in-game, but Epic Games’ Nathan Mooney shot down those rumors pretty quickly over on Reddit:
“rq just because I’ve seen lots of folks asking, we have no plans for Avengers outfits in the store,” he writes.
It’s unclear if this extends to Thanos himself, which we can see rendered in Fortnite-y stylings in the announcement image. We assume that Thanos won’t be available as a purchasable cosmetic because that would interfere with gameplay in his limited time mode, but it’s unclear whether or not possessing the Infinity Gauntlet will just give you the powers of Thanos or whether it will transform your character model into something that looks like him, too: maybe a little bigger to make you a more tempting target as well.
This isn’t entirely surprising: just the Infinity Gauntlet feels like a massive undertaking of a partnership, and navigating the legal issues surrounding Disney’s crown jewel of an intellectual property can’t be easy. My theory is that any in-game version of a popular hero would necessarily be a version of that hero with guns and no powers, and that doesn’t jive with how Disney wants its characters represented.
Entertainment Weekly has some more details about how this partnership came to be: apparently Infinity War directors Joe and Anthony Russo, like much of the rest of the world, are big Fortnite fans. They played on set, got inspired, and called up Epic Games’ creative director Donald Mustard with the notion of a mashup.
“Out of the blue, I get this call from Joe. And after a bit of geeking out over each other’s work, we start brainstorming these crazy ideas,” Mustard told EW. “It was really important that whatever we did, it had to be super authentic to both Fortnite and the Avengers: Infinity War, and something that fans of both would be excited about. About an hour later, we had the bones of this awesome idea for a limited time gameplay mode, and almost immediately our team got started.”
So far it sounds like they accomplished that goal handily, but we’ll see how it all shakes out tomorrow when the mode goes live. It is a bit of a shame we can’t play as Captain America shooting down Thanos, but the mode itself sounds very interesting.
