The teaser from Epic Games was shared mid-day Thursday via the official Fortnite Twitter account. The tweet features an image, which includes a few different interesting elements. First, there’s a mysterious symbol that looks like a fantasy rune. Second, there’s a quote that reads, “You’re the one they call the Survivor; those scars on your arms give you away. You’re a troublemaker.” Lastly, there’s a Fortnite logo, which makes clear that this is a Fortnite collaboration in the works. The collaboration partner isn’t outright revealed, but fans of the collaborator will recognize both the symbol and quotation relatively quickly.
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The symbol represents the Allomantic metal of iron and the quote is taken from author Brandon Sanderson’s book Mistborn: The Final Empire. That’s the first book in the Mistborn trilogy, Sanderson’s best-known work and a project currently being pitched for a film adaptation. In the Mistborn books, Allomancers are able to “burn” certain metals that grant them magical powers. The power of iron, for example, lets Allomancers “pull” on metal objects to move either themselves or the object being pulled on.
A Fortnite collaboration with Sanderson’s Mistborn books is a curious and exciting endeavor. Being prose, there are no real visual aspects of the book for Fortnite to pull from directly. As such, Epic Games will be able to have fun creating skins and other crossover cosmetics from Mistborn. A tasseled cloak is perhaps the best-known visual, though giant blue Koloss and Inquisitors with metal spikes driven through their eyes could be options, too.
What’s most exciting, however, isn’t the opportunity for cosmetics. Rather, a Mistborn collaboration could add new magical gameplay elements instead. Players could use Allomantic metals to perform incredible feats, whether it’s flying, pulling objects toward themselves, becoming physically stronger, or slowing and speeding up time. There are a lot of options available to Epic if it wants to go all out tying into the Mistborn books.
No timeframe has been provided for Fortnite’s collaboration with Mistborn. If it’s a simple cosmetic partnership, it could drop anytime. If it’s a bigger crossover involving changes to the game itself, it could come with the start of Fortnite’s Chapter 2 Season 7 which happens the week of June 7. Expect more information in the coming days and weeks.
Fortnite is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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