The company is backpedaling on the measure as it seeks a “long-term solution.”
After the recent Island Age Rating initiative sparked debate in the Fortnite community, Epic Games has announced that the feature will be scaled back until the company has a sufficient “long-term solution.”
Epic made the announcement on Fortnite’s official website, where it confirmed that cosmetic gating for the majority of Fortnite’s cosmetics will be disabled beginning with the v28.00 update on December 3. A few items will still be affected, but only a “small number of existing cosmetics and less than 10 outfits” were chosen “because of their obvious fear or violence elements,” according to the news post.
We hear your feedback & are back with more info ❤️🩹
Until we have our long-term solution, cosmetic gating will be off for the majority of cosmetics, starting with the v28.00 update.
And you can use any cosmetic at our next big in-game event.
The cosmetic gating measure was released alongside the previously mentioned Island Age Rating, which assigned ESRB ratings to each individual user-generated experience in Fortnite Creative. Certain costumes would be disabled and replaced with a generic costume if a map was rated E or E10+.
According to the blog post announcing the update, “only 7%” of skins were affected, and the majority of them would eventually be enabled for all age ratings. Despite this, the Fortnite community criticized the new initiative’s rollout, with a common complaint centered on paid costumes being restricted as a result of the update.
The v28.00 update will also mark the start of Fortnite Chapter 5, which will begin on December 2 with a new live event called The Big Bang. According to rumors, the live event will feature rapper Eminem as well as a collaboration with Lego, who responded to the event announcement post with a Lego version of the Fortnite llama.
Fortnite is now available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PC, and mobile devices.