There's A Good Reason We're Not Seeing Any Teasers For Season 11 Of 'Fortnite'

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Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

I remember, back when I first started playing Fortnite, reading about the start of Season 3. It was quaint by the standards that the game would later set: Epic showed some of the skins, talked about some of the changes we were going to see and gave us an idea of when it would release. By the time Season 4 rolled around, however, things were already different. The company was now teasing the theme of the new season four days in advance with an evolving picture that we poured over endlessly for any new detail about what we would be seeing in the next season. That was the format the developer has followed for every season since, up to the recent spate of teasers it showed us before Season X. This Season, however? Nothing so far.

We have a lot of good reasons to believe that Fortnite Season 11 is going to start on Sunday, October 13, after the Season X live event. If that's the case, we should already be getting teasers. There's nothing yet, however, indicating a different strategy for building hype about what seems like it could be the biggest change the game has seen yet: a brand-new map. Basically, Epic is doing the same thing that it did back in Season 3 when the meteor slowly appeared to be getting bigger in the sky: it's letting us build the hype ourselves. Which is an effective strategy, ultimately: mystery breeds excitement, and there's currently a lot of mystery surrounding Season 11. That's good for the game.

Fortnite was always bound to slip off of the heights that it reached in 2018, but I can't help but feel like some of that decline was avoidable. The biggest problem was that the developer created expectation: it was no longer exciting when a wacky new item dropped because a wacky new item dropped every week. New Seasons became less exciting once they started to follow a more or less defined formula, and even live events lost their shine once we were no longer spending our time guessing about what they were. There was a lack of mystery with new content, and that's a good way to breed apathy. Those dopamine hits get less strong once they're on a regular schedule.

This shows Epic going back to trying to surprise us, and I'm here for it. It seems like it's breaking a lot of its own conventions with the launch of Season 11, and hopefully, that can rekindle some of that meteor spark that made this whole system so entrancing in the first place.

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