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when is the fortnite live event 2022 chapter 3Fortnite
Credit: Epic GamesSee update below.
According to the in-game Battle Pass, Fortnite’s current season is set to expire today with a new season kicking off Sunday, March 20th.
But there’s a problem: Epic Games hasn’t so much as dropped a teaser for Chapter 3, Season 2. There’s no mention of a season-ending event for Season 1. There’s not even a juicy leak or two to suggest that a new season is ever releasing for the battle royale game.
Of course, we will be getting a Season 2, but nobody seems to know when it’s going to start. Some websites have posted guides suggesting we’ll see the launch of the new Season sometime Sunday morning, but I’m not at all convinced.
There is simply no precedence here. Epic has never released a new season without deploying various teasers, trailers, hints on social media and/or in the game itself. Every season since as far back as I can remember launched with some kind of build-up, whether that was a comet slowly growing in the sky, or a series of cryptic images released on Twitter.
This whole “mum’s the word” thing could just be a new marketing strategy, of course. Epic could be purposefully staying silent so that blog posts like this will be published and forums will fill up with people wondering out loud what’s going on. Maybe it’s all a prank—Epic is just trolling all the data miners and leakers and guide writers and game journalists and, well, the gamers, too. But I remain skeptical of this.
My guess? The season will be delayed. Maybe Epic doesn’t want to launch while the war in Ukraine is so fresh. Maybe there’s some technical hang-up. Who can say? All I know is that it’s very strange and out of character for the developer to not say a thing, have no live-event or in-game lead-up or anything at all. I could be wrong, and maybe we’ll get a surprise launch of Season 2 on Sunday, but it just doesn’t seem quite right to me.
I guess we’ll find out more (almost certainly the moment I publish this, they’ll come out with an official announcement!).
The only thing Epic has told me is a non-answer. When I asked if they had any information about Season 2, a spokesperson replied: “Thanks for reaching out! We have no information to share at this time.”
They also suggested that I have a good weekend, which I aim to do whether or not Fortnite Chapter 3, Season 2 kicks off. Stay safe out there, young padawans!
Update 3/19/2022
Finally, finally, Epic Games has announced downtime for Season 2. This is quite literally the extent of the company’s announcement at this point. No teasers, no blog posts, no press release or comments to the press, no in-game countdown. Just this tweet on the Fortnite Status twitter page (retweeted by the main Fortnite Twitter account) and an in-game notice about downtime.
Downtime kicks off at 3am ET, or midnight for those of us on Pacific Time. It will likely be down for a few hours, with Season 2 launching early tomorrow morning. There’s no information on the size of the update, the theme of next season, or really anything at all. I guess we get to have fun being surprised!
In any case, I was wrong about a delay, but I’m still rather perplexed by the whole thing and I don’t think it was that off-base to question whether the season was actually starting tomorrow. Happy to be wrong, though! New Fortnite seasons are always a good time (even though I play the game a lot less now than I used to).
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