A note, because Epic seems to be considering these things “secret”, and thus there’s no in-game guidance, challenge list or anything like that. But the reward skin for The Snowfall challenge is The Prisoner, and it’s a progressive skin with something of a twist. Instead of the usual challenge or experience progression, The Prisoner levels up by attaining specific, secret challenges out in the world. To get stage 2, you had to find a key stuck up at the top of Polar Peak. To get Stage 3 you have to rest by a campfire in the desert biome, not too far from the racetrack. There’s only one more challenge to go, and plenty of people will be looking for it today. Take note, however: they probably won’t find it.
Previous experience suggests that we won’t get to see the Prisoner Skin Stage 4 until next week, with the new challenges. This is more or less what happened last week: everyone got all excited about looking for Stage 3, but it wasn’t made available until this morning with the new set of challenges. This is likely what’s going to happen with Stage 4, as well, only things are likely going to be different in some interesting ways.
To start with: it’s pretty unclear what new challenges will mean next Thursday. We’ve never had 11 weeks of challenges before, and there are no week 11 challenges in-game. And yet some of Epic’s communication explicitly references Week 11 challenges, and we know that there is going to be a user-created coin challenge in the mix next week. So something is going to happen next week, but it’s pretty unclear what. We know that Season 8 doesn’t start until the end of the month, but that leaves us with a big question mark in the middle there.
Things we do know: the Prisoner has a fire motif going on. Also, the ground has started to shake in the beginnings of what appears to be a big earthquake event, and there might be a volcano or at least some lave involved with that. Also, fire is the opposite of ice, and the challenge skin traditionally ushers in the new season. So whatever happens to unlock the Prisoner stage 4, I have a feeling it’s going to be noticeably more dramatic than the previous
This week we had a pretty good idea of how to unlock Stage 3: the loading screen had already leaked, and it pretty clearly depicted an unshackled prisoner. Next week is a mystery and will remain so until dataminers pull the next week’s loading screen out of the files. I have a feeling that whatever it is, it’s going to involve a dramatically escalated version of this earthquake event with some large deposit of lava that will somehow activate Stage 4.
Whatever it is, it’s a mystery until next week, so don’t go looking. It should be interesting when we find out, however.
