Fortnite’s big Ice Storm event arrived with an event that was impossible to miss, the Ice King getting large and Mufasa-like in the sky and blasting the entire map with ice, spawning the definitely-not-Cube-Monsters Ice Legion all over the map.
But there’s something else happening in Fortnite right now at a snail’s pace, but it’s interesting to watch unfold all the same. Fortnite is slowly revealing what is almost certainly its Snowfall skin, attained through completing I believe 9 or 10 weeks of challenges this season, up from the usual 7, as part of an ongoing real-time event in the dungeon of the Polar Peak castle.
For the past few weeks, we have often seen the ice recede in Polar Peak whenever there was a new patch. We saw a huge decrease in ice from week 1 when it was literally just a tower poking out of the snow, and then there was the reveal of the “town square” Infinity Blade area. As the weeks pressed on, the ice inside the castle started to disappear as well, revealing several layers inside the castle which include a throne room, a round table for villains, and then one level below that, a dungeon.
At first it seemed like the most interesting thing in the dungeon were the dragon eggs that sat in one of the empty cells, and while those may turn out to be relevant, the main attraction is what’s happening in the middle.
Unlike all the other melting ice in Polar Peak, this ice block in the center is melting incredibly slowly over time, and now we can see there are two chains bolted into the ice ceiling that are going to be stringing up what I have to believe is the Snowfall skin, similar to how the drills mined out The Visitor skin’s pod from the meteorite several seasons back.
I originally thought that this might be the “world boss” that players may have to fight at the end of the Ice Storm event but A) being locked in this dungeon implies this thing is an enemy of the Ice King, not an ally, and B) it’s too small to be a world boss, as if these chains are a few feet long, this thing should end up being normal character-sized, which it would have to be to be a playable skin.
Even the most dedicated leakers have not been able to fully chart what’s under the ice just yet, though pieces of the skin have been extracted like hands, making it clear yes, it’s a person in there:
heres a prisoners hand pic.twitter.com/PndnTdbca8
— Lucas7yoshi_ // Fortnite News & Leaks (@lucas7yoshi_) January 20, 2019
I have been checking back every day to see the progress on this melting, and while I don’t know if it’s accelerating, I’d say in a few more days we might see those hands pop out of the top, with the entire reveal occurring by week 9 or whenever Snowfall becomes fully available. This would be a rare instance of an NPC appearing on the actual map. We recently did this with the Ice King hiding in his ice sphere, and I wonder if this prisoner will arrive in some final see-through block of ice before “escaping” and furthering the plot (“plot”) of Fortnite after that like The Visitor before him.
Visit the dungeon if you haven’t yet. It’s interesting to watch this in action and plus, there are usually a lot of chests down there as well.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.
