It’s been a whirlwind of teasers, leaks, fan theories and explosions, but the Fortnite: Battle Royale Season 4 Battle Pass is finally here. It arrived in style early this morning with a slick little cinematic that showed off one of the new skins and set up the beginning of the narrative for the season: Season 3 saw us looking to the skies as a bright blue comet slowly made its way to Earth, but now that comet has smashed into Dusty Depot and left a crater in its wake. There are some strange glowing rocks in that crater, as well as a new location in the northern part of the map and a ton of smaller changes elsewhere. But let’s dive right into the Superhero-themed Season 4 Battle Pass.
First off, the basic structure of the Battle Pass remains unchanged. You can still pay 950 V-Bucks to access a few basic cosmetics and unlock the rest through leveling up and completing challenges throughout the season, all the way on up to level 100. You can also pay 2800 V-Bucks for a premium version that starts you off at Tier 25 — which brings you to Tier 30 if you played last season, because you get five free tiers for having purchased the Season 3 Battle Pass. And if you’re me and want to see everything as fast as possible, you can drop a bunch more to unlock the rest of the tiers individually at 150 V-bucks a piece.
To start off, the instant unlocks are a little more generous than before: we get both the Carbide skin above as well as another military-style “Battlehawk” skin, even though Battlehawk is fairly lame. By the numbers the pass contains seven skins, two back blings. two harvesting tools, 3 gliders, 6 contrails and 4 dances.We’ve also got a brand new emote type this time around — you’ll be able to unlock 20 spraypaint tags to leave all over the map, with a spraypaint-oriented hero to match. Here’s one of those:
Other skins include some special forces themed heroes, a spunky, bubble-gum infused brawler with green hair and that Wonder Woman-style character we saw from those teasers. Supervillains would appear to be absent, but who knows? Maybe some of these characters have a dark streak. Here’s the Omega skin unlocked at Tier-100 skin, the equivalent of John Wick The Reaper Last season:
If that looks a little…underwhelming, it’s supposed to. Both the Starter “Carbide” skin and the Omega Skin can be upgraded this time around, and so we’ll need to wait a little bit before we see what these things look like at maximum capacity. Stay tuned for more on that, but the Tier 100 challenge will take a little bit more this time around, with a potentially bigger payout. Per Fortnite Intel, there’s also a special umbrella that you can unlock with your first Season 4 win, which is a cool addition:
There’s some good in here, and there’s some less good. The special forces skins aren’t that much to write home about, though I’m all about these new gliders. They come with a different basic model than the standard glider, something that was notably absent last season. Let’s take a look at one of those:
I’m also a fan of this bubblegum “Zoey” character and her accessories:
Also worth calling out are the contrails, which may finally get me to give up the flames I’ve been rocking for a little while now. Let’s take a look at two of those with what I hope are appropriate skins:
There’s good stuff overall, and it’s much more thematically consistent than last season — though the strangeness of dropping John Wick on top of a space-themed season was always oddly charming. But that’s what we’re working with. As usual, you’ll unlock all these skins by completing challenges and ranking up the pass, a clever way for Epic to overlay an RPG-style progression system based solely on cosmetic items, giving people both a way to structure long-term play and an opportunity to spend a little bit of money on this free-to-play game.
This post has been updated with links and more images of Battle Pass loot.
