This week has already been one of Fortnite’s most eventful ever after the Paradigm goof in the item shop and the changes to battle pass exclusivity. And there’s still more excitement to come. We have a big timer on the battle royale map counting down to something on Saturday, which will be followed by a major presentation about the future of Disney’s collaborations with Fortnite from D23 later in the evening, With everything going on, it can be easy to forget that Fall Guys finally entered the Fortnite ecosystem this week.
And to be fair, this is only the early stages of Fall Guys’ integration into Fortnite–it would be more accurate to say that you can play Fall Guys-style mini-games in Fortnite, at least for now. The most noticeable aspect of this being the limited-timeFall Guys obstacle course in the sky above Classy Courts in the battle royale map. You drop near the Courts, interact with the bean statue, and play a Fall Guys course for loot.
But you’re racing the clock, not the other players–the faster you get through it, the better your loot will be when you return to the island. When other players are around, you do get some classic Fall Guys shenanigans, but it’s not the same as a direct competition against other people, like the real Fall Guys offers.
The first phase of Fortnite x Fall Guys is underway.
Likewise, the creative maps that have been put together by Fall Guys developers at Mediatonic are approximations of Fall Guys games that have been re-imagined in a Fortnite way. Tumbly Towers, for example, is just another creative map where you have to climb a big towe–only now with traditional bean physics. The Fortnite version of Hex-a-Gone is a re-engineered version of the mini-game in which the platforms respawn after a few seconds (you’re scored according to how many platforms you cause to disappear by walking on them) so as to make the rounds longer and allow them to be joinable mid-match.
All this stuff is like Fall Guys, but it’s hardly a replacement for the real thing without the game-show structure. While I suspect Fall Guys will eventually be integrated all the way into Fortnite, Epic and Mediatonic will have to work out a couple of obstacles. And these obstacles are, frankly, so significant that it might take a while for all of this to come together.
The first issue is that these creative islands aren’t going to cut it. It doesn’t seem as though the current UEFN tools are able to support the multi-round structure of the game. Fall Guys needs to be a full additional mode on the same level as Fortnite Festival, Lego Fortnite and Rocket Racing, and that takes time. Since Epic usually holds its cards close to the vest, there’s not enough information to speculate about a timeline on that, but we can hope it’s saving it for the Chapter 6 launch, presumably coming in December.
That this first part of the Fall Guys rollout in Fortnite was delayed multiple times before it actually happened–this was supposed to be introduced much earlier in the summer–may not be the best sign that a full integration will happen in the next few months, though.
The other issue is what to do with Fall Guys cosmetics. Right now, nothing ports over between Fall Guys and Fortnite, and when you’re playing in a Fall Guys map within Fortnite, it simply converts the skin you’re wearing into a bean person. But Fall Guys has a massive number of its own cosmetics, and bringing those over isn’t a simple prospect because Falls Guys cosmetics don’t work like Fortnite ones do.
Fortnite’s Jonesy and his bean version
In Fall Guys, you choose your pants, shirt, hat, and more separately, whereas Fortnite uses head-to-toe skins that determine your entire appearance. Fall Guys in Fortnite would need its own section in the locker for customizing your bean. Some collaboration cosmetics, like Godzilla, are probably going to have to be left behind during this process, but as Epic has done with its drip feed of Rocket League’s cross-game cosmetics, they wouldn’t need to port everything all at once.
Despite the obstacles, it seems inevitable now that Fall Guys will end up as another Fortnite game-within-a-game someday. There are so many different sorts of passes in the game now that tossing the Fall Guys season pass in the mix probably wouldn’t be that big a deal, and Epic and Mediatonic have absolutely nailed the gameplay feel of Fall Guys. The base is there, and ready to rock. Now, we just need the rest of it. Fingers crossed that it won’t take too long.
