Gaming

'Fortnite' Season 8 Trailer Confirms Pirates, Treasure, and a Volcano

We were almost entirely right about this one.

The Fortnite: Battle Royale Season 8 trailer was released Thursday morning with the start of the new season shortly after 4 a.m. Eastern.

At the start of the trailer, a pirate named Blackheart peers at an “X” on a treasure map and sees that the location is between him and a volcano in the distance. He’s got a few Fishsticks backing him up. We see something similar happen with the Ice King at the Ice Castle with two Trogs and again with the Prisoner and two dark-clad ninjas emerging from the volcano.

Watch us play Fortnite Season 8 on Twitch right now live.

That’s pretty much it as all three groups converge on a single chest in the new jungle near the volcano and we get the official Season 8 title: “X marks the spot.”

This as some kind of title at least makes more sense than Season 7’s “You better watch out.” These function more as loglines than titles per se. Season 7’s theme was more akin to winter wonderland, and Season 8 looks like a fun smattering of pirates with an Indiana Jones-type adventure.

The standard loading screen for Season 8 has a ton of characters and loot.

Epic Games

The trailer confirms several of our predictions about what would happen for Season 8.

Perhaps the biggest is the appearance of a huge volcano around the epicenter of the earthquakes that have been causing huge cracks in the map over the past few weeks. These were concentrated in the northeast area near the Prisoner’s ritual site.

Epic Games was really overt about implying that pirates would be a part of this season. As such, we also predicated treasure map challenges might return, but that remains to be seen. But what’s a little surprising is that the Ice King and Prisoner still seem to be big players. I genuinely thought the volcano would mean all or some of the ice would melt.

Magic ice and snow, however, are apparently different than the real thing. Global warming can’t stop the Ice King, apparently!

Last season, we saw gradual map changes based on what happened in the initial launch cinematic. The snowy area melted slightly to reveal the ice castle and snow eventually consumed the whole map temporarily. We’d wager that we’ll see the volcano slowly change parts of the island in Season 8, including melting some of that snow and ice.

A lot can happen in 10+ weeks, so who knows what directions Season 8 might go.

Fortnite: Battle Royale Season 8 is now available.

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