Pop megastar Lady Gaga is the next artist to collaborate with Fortnite, following in the footsteps of the likes of Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, and Eminem. Gaga will be the headliner for Fortnite festival season 2, which runs until April 22 and features a music-themed battle pass to go alongside its iconic figurehead, which features some surprisingly cool rewards including instruments and jam tracks.
The festival pass is upgraded by completing festival quests, and of course the most Gaga items are reserved for the premium track (there is also a free tier of rewards), including the song Poker Face. The premium pass costs 1800 V-bucks and ultimately lets players unlock the Enigmatic Gaga Outfit, which it says here is "an iconic Lady Gaga ensemble from her Chromatica Ball stadium tour, including a purple bodysuit designed by celebrity designer Nange Magro of Dead Lotus Couture."
The premium pass is also where the real musical goodies are found, with four unlockable tracks:
- Nelly ft. City Spud: Ride Wit Me
- Soundgarden: Black Hole Sun
- Topic w/ A7S: Breaking Me
- Lady Gaga: Poker Face
So there you go. There's also plenty of stuff sold separately in the shop themed around the 2020 album Chromatica, Gaga's most recent solo album, so players can buy the Chromatica Armor Outfit, a "full black leather bodysuit", which accompanies the Chromatica Bass, Chromatica Mic, Stupid Love Jam Track, and Rain Check Emote. Being a little monster is an expensive business.
The free jam tracks include two, 8-Bit Beat and Best Buds, that had previously been sold in the store, and any players who'd bought them before this season began will be refunded their V-bucks.
There's a whole bunch of minor fixes and improvements alongside the new season, though Epic's main focus seems to have been on the (relatively new) music element of Fortnite, with improvements to the music library's usability and players now able to use jam loops in more settings.
There does seem to have been one condition of the deal though. Gaga is famous to the degree that pretty much everything she does is news, and when she caught wind of Fortnite took to Twitter in 2019 to ask her followers "what’s fortnight". That has 216K retweets. So obviously, as Epic was agreeing to pay her oodles of cash for this, someone politely requested she correct the error. Thus:
*fortnite https://t.co/1FwPHmMfRJ pic.twitter.com/9BSG6S23zhFebruary 20, 2024
Fortnite's festival mode released late last year, and Mollie reckoned it was the best rhythm game she'd played all year. That's perhaps not surprising, given it was developed by the now Epic-owned Harmonix (Guitar Hero, Rock Band), but it shows that Fortnite's critical mass is sustaining this thing way beyond what anyone expected. It's easy to scoff at the idea this is a metaverse or a platform, but perhaps the most telling thing is that, seven years after release, it's harder than ever to tell what kind of game this is.
