(Image credit: Epic Games)

For a hearty chunk of 2025, Fortnite was fallow.

It'd be an exaggeration to say the game's subreddit was pure misery between June and November, but there was more than enough gloom to go around: the novelty of a Star Wars cameo quickly wore off and the next two seasons, Super and Shock 'N Awesome, felt bland and messy. When players finally departed Oninoshima, Chapter 6's map, it was a sloppy soup of disconnected ideas, with First Order bases straddling bug-fighting military outposts and buildings from feudal Japan.

I struggled to cajole my usual teammates to install updates over this period, let alone dedicate an evening to the game. I wasn't alone—the peak player count regularly dipped below 1.5m over this period, which would've seemed unthinkable a year ago.

(Image credit: Epic Games)

At the end of that Simpsons mini season, the Chapter 6 finale Zero Hour drew over 10 million players: more than triple the peak player count of any game on Steam, ever. Fortnite is clearly still culturally relevant, even if some of its veteran players have migrated elsewhere.

And Chapter 7 is, so far, refreshing. It has a balanced loot pool of strong weapons including three solid shotguns, unique locations with hidden secrets, and a smattering of the cartoonish oddities that make Fortnite special, such as the DeLorean car that transports you back in time to find weapons from previous chapters. Player counts tick back up.

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I'm hopeful that as we move into 2026, the rest of Chapter 7 will continue to surprise us. Its overarching theme—the West Coast and Hollywood—is broad enough to tie lots of seemingly disparate concepts together. There are very few games where South Park characters could conceivably dance with James Bond without breaking the fiction, but both are rumored collaborations (I'm imagining a slapstick South Park shotgun and an outlandish Bond gadget, like a pen that fires an explosive dart, shaking up the meta).

(Image credit: Epic Games)

Nearly a decade into Fortnite, Epic has shown that it is still willing to take big creative risks, and that is promising. For Chapter 7 the studio added ragdoll physics and self-revive, reset gold between each match and made some of the reboot vans—where you can respawn downed teammates—driveable, so you can chuck your allies in and scoot away.

Each of those on its own have derailed the new season's start. Each, at least in my eyes, has worked. I love that vending machines actually mean something now, and gobbling gold from a cash register can genuinely transform your loadout.