Epic Games’ PvE experience in Fortnite, Save the World, was previously expected to become free to play this year. But that’s no longer the case, according to a State of Development blog posted by Epic earlier today.
“We decided to move the free-to-play launch of Save the World out of this year,” Epic said. “We’re working on a broad set of features, reworks, and backend system scaling we believe are needed to go free-to-play.”
Although most Fortnite fans enjoy playing the battle royale version of the game, Save the World is still a popular mode that’s “grown consistently” since it was released in July 2017.
In order to incentivize playing Save the World, Epic will give out the Brainiac Jonesy and Skull Ranger Ramirez characters for free to any new or old founders who log in and play during the upcoming Fortnitemares event. And starting this week, Epic plans to hold 50-percent off sales for the Standard, Deluxe, Super Deluxe, and Limited Founder’s packs in Save the World.
Epic also intends to make several front-end UI improvements and implement an updated Hero System in Save the World. This could explain why Epic has decided to delay the free-to-play launch of Save the World beyond 2018.
