Opinion: What the hell is going on with Fortnite Festival and Ballistic? 💢
In the past two weeks, Fortnite Festival has only gotten a single new Jam Track - The Simpsons theme, a whopping 1 minute and 21 seconds long. Epic Games originally teased the newest Music Pass, the first to not include a collaboration, as a "celebration of Fortnite Festival." But it is hard to see what exactly is celebratory about including two mediocre Fortnite-original Outfits in a Music Pass instead of deadmau5, Daft Punk, Doja Cat, or (reportedly) Tyler the Creator.
Needless to say, Fortnite Festival fans are not happy right now, and they have made that very clear on the official Twitter page for the mode. Surprisingly, though, the mode maintains a healthy (albeit declining) playerbase, with 8,000 concurrent players at the time of writing. Most assume that the developers are simply working on updates like Pro Vocals and Pro Drums which require resources to be pulled away from the live game. And we agree - Fortnite Festival will probably be fine, and in a few months, this will all seem like a bad dream.
However, it would be difficult to make the same assumption for Ballistic. The competitive FPS got its last update in August, and since then, radio silence - despite earlier teasers for an update introducing Tournaments in early September. With Ballistic consistently dipping to lows of 1,600 players during off-hours, it is very possible that the mode has been cancelled and will no longer receive content updates. And if this isn't the case, and the development team is simply working on major updates for the future... then why hasn't anyone said so?
If Epic Games is serious about creating a portfolio of popular games within Fortnite, their lack of communication - not just for Festival and Ballistic, but also for modes like OG, Blitz Royale, and LEGO Fortnite Odyssey - must be addressed. Their fans deserve better than this. After all, why should they care if it seems like Epic doesn't?