The Evidence Is Mounting For A New 'Fortnite' Map In Season 11

Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

If you look at things from a certain angle, we've been working with the same map in Fortnite: Battle Royale ever since launch. In a practical way that's not really true, because we've had dozens of points of interest coming and going, whole new biomes added and enough map features large and small that it becomes impossible to count. It's a defining part of what makes Fortnite unique: prime competitor PUBG started rolling out new maps relatively early on in its lifespan, but Fortnite has made sure that every player is on the same map, at all times, using new locations and features as a way to tell its bizarre, constantly-shifting narrative. And yet the core has remained the same ever since day one, with Salty Springs, Lonely Lodge and Pleasant Park holding it down as the only named locations that have made it through every single map revision. There's reason to believe that here, now more than two years into its lifespan, we're finally going to ge t a new map. We've suspected this before, but I really think it's going to be true this time.

The most compelling piece of evidence just has to do with how the team is handling Season X. It's a best-of, bringing back old POIs and old characters, a kind of love letter to the work that the team has done over the course of development. Not only would that serve as a fitting goodbye to the old map, but it also serves as a handy way to save development resources. Season X did not see a massive drop of new areas like every other season has, instead relying on already-built assets. We've had three new POIs: Pandora is pretty conservative overall, I still suspect Tilted Town was an unused location from Season 5, and Gotham is a full-fledged new area. Season 9 was also fairly conservative with new map changes, coming in somewhat short of the massive new jungle biome that we saw in Season 8. It's the sort of thing that you would do if you were shifting development resources towards gradually building out a brand-new map.

But we're getting more, as well. The Visitor--now "The Scientist" and looking a whole lot beefier--is building a new rocket to replace the one that arguably kicked off this whole weird narrative back in Season 4. He looks to be joining up with some other supervillains for something called "The Final Recoking". I'd just point out the word "Final" and leave it at that. On its own that could be any number of cataclysmic developments that have hit this island over the years, but in context it seems even more suspsicious.

Datamining would seem to support this as well. We had a giant list of brand-new locations that people found in a recent update, much larger than even the biggest drop of new points of interest at the beginning of any season. And yesterday leaker @ShiinaBR got a few new datamined loading screens, one of which looks as much like a goodbye to the old map as I could really imagine. Let's take a look:

The battle bus is heading to new lands, it would seem. At this point, I'm willing to make a big bet on getting a new map for Season 11, and we're at a point where the community is going to be very disappointed if it doesn't happen. We'll see.

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