Here’s a thing to look at it Fortnite: Battle Royale today. Jump into the starter island and go look at some of your opponents, or some of your teammates. This won’t work in replay mode, so you’ll need to do it live. Get right up close to your TV or monitor if you need to, and try to find somebody standing still. Look at their mouths. There’s the tiniest bit of condensation coming out with each “breath”, just like if you were outside on a day cold enough to see your breath. You can’t quite see the same thing outside in the real world where I am, but you could a few days ago. Regardless, the message is clear: Winter is coming.
Fortnite isn’t doing a big lead-in to Season 7 like it did for Season 4, 5 and 6. There’s no menacing cube, no giant rift in the sky, no comet hurtling to the Earth. That storyline seems, actually, to be concluded, though who knows what’s going to happen with cubehenge in Leaky Lake there. No, things are a whole lot more subtle this time around, but even so, there’s one element that seems like it’s almost completely certain at this point. We’re going to get snow. More snow, to be accurate.
This isn’t a huge leap: tons of games dump snow on their maps for holiday seasons, and it’s one of the easier–at least on a conceptual level–ways to get that old holiday feeling across. It makes a lot of sense for Fortnite, which spent the majority of Season 6 turning the map into something more appropriate for Halloween. People have been finding snow-related files in the updates for a few weeks now, and they’ve even begun to make their way into the game: Viking Village currently has a light dusting, but all evidence points to a much larger blizzard that could envelop either the whole map or a large chunk of it.
It will likely have something to do with the A.I.M. skin, but of course, it’s always hard to follow exactly what’s happening with this. We’ve already seen one insane live event this season, and so the big action will likely happen via an update. Next week, however, I imagine we’ll start to see some snowflakes falling before the actual launch of Season 7.
Personally, I hope it’s the whole map. I like the gradual shifting of biomes and the creation of new points of interest, but I’d love to see whole-scale palette swaps that change the way open areas feel across the world. That might actually be some of the easier changes to make, too: if you shifted some of the cut and paste trees and rocks around you could actually make the entire island feel pretty different in a hurry. We’ll see what happens.
