Opening weekend box office numbers are here, and things aren't looking great for Supergirl. It only grossed $38 million, which is very close to Joker: Folie à Deux's opening weekend take. Meanwhile, Toy Story 5 continues to reign supreme at the box office.
Brandon Sanderson is one of the world’s most successful and prolific fantasy authors. Since the early aughts, he’s published numerous books, novellas and short stories, among them, the Mistborn seriesandThe Stormlight Archives. And after Robert Jordan’s death in 2007, he stepped in to complete the 14-book The Wheel of Time. Needless to say, Sanderson is an expert on fantasy and also one of the genre’s biggest fans. He’s also a bit of a scholar on J.R.R. Tolkien.
In Stars Reach, rain falls. Water pools. Rivers carve paths through terrain. Lakes freeze in winter. Trees propagate. Forests burn. Cave ceilings collapse due to overmining. Every cubic meter of every planet has temperature, humidity, geology, and hundreds of material properties. Koster proudly explained how players can melt stone into lava, cool it into new rock formations, or accidentally create ecological disasters. I had a pretty simple question, devoid of judgment: Why?
In a recent appearance on the Human Can Opener podcast, Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer talked about how the studio approached balance in Fallout: New Vegas, particularly with skill checks in dialogue and making sure different character builds got unique, cool reactivity throughout the game.
"Some people think I'm preoccupied with balance," said Sawyer. "I want people to build characters and have a good time with them. You have to think a little bit, but I don't like it when players have a character concept that they build, and it's like 'Oh, you just built a fundamentally bad character.'"
After Troika closed and before the likes of Owlcat, ZA/UM, and Larian really took off, Obsidian was practically peerless when it came to this sort of design in RPGs. Much love to BioWare, but it would typically just rely on a persuasion skill to win conversations and avoid fights.
Obsidian's always been great at letting you deploy odd skills in dialogue and the world, like recruiting a new sheriff for Primm with Science, Barter, or Speech in New Vegas. This also extends to combat: Sawyer cited New Vegas' removal of the Big Guns skill and divvying the relevant weapons into Guns, Energy Weapons, and Explosives as an example of design supporting build diversity.
"I don't want people to have to invest in the skill, and then [we] try to support it throughout the game," said Sawyer, referring to the steady flow of relevant big guns a separate Big Guns skill would have required. "Or worse, not support it throughout the game, which is kinda how Fallout 1 worked. If you tag Big Guns in Fallout 1, you're not gonna see a big gun until The Hub—good luck!"
As for skill checks, Sawyer said that he endeavors to make sure a given RPG's skills are always "useful in a really meaningful and unique way." He argued that designers have to build trust with players in this regard—I flashed back to all the times I've sat before a character creation screen and wondered "Is this a game where persuasion matters at all? Will I be punished for wanting to be a sneaky rogue?"
Sawyer pointed to how former Obsidian designer Eric Fenstermaker, who built the starting town of Goodsprings, ensured New Vegas made a good first impression to build that trust. Sawyer didn't cite specific examples, but I thought of how, in the quest Ghost Town Gunfight, a player's Sneak, Explosives, Barter, Speech, and Medicine can all be used to influence how things play out.
"We just wanted to set up the player to believe, however you built your character, it's not gonna be the same experience, but we're not gonna let you down," said Sawyer. "We're not gonna leave you out to dry and not give you something to be excited about.'
The developer caveated that "it's not about perfect balance," and went on to describe one of the practical measures Obsidian takes to ensure each skill gets sufficient play throughout a game. "We have an informal job on the design team called 'Karma Police,'" said Sawyer. "At a few points during development, we'll ask a designer to go through all the scripts—usually in dialogue, but also everywhere in the game—and see 'How often is Guns being checked? How often is Charisma being checked? How often is Barter being checked?
"It's not about 'perfect.' Let's say there's 40 [checks] in Medicine, and there's like, 28 in Science. Great! Get in the ballpark. You don't want to go huge stretches of the game and be like, 'Man, I invested in this skill and it never comes up.'"
Sawyer also touched on one of the great tensions in designing videogame RPGs versus tabletop ones: This sort of reactivity and accommodation is something a game master can do on the fly, rather than having to anticipate player needs years in advance. He recalled a college friend who "bent over backwards" to work with one of Sawyer's RPG characters, an architecture specialist.
"I think that what good DMs and good game designers do is, in RPGs, they want you to feel like, 'Yeah man, I did a Survival run and I got all these cool interactions,'" Sawyer concluded. "We just want players to have that experience."
One of the most contentious topics in the Fortnite community is the one surrounding its many exclusive cosmetics that may never be available to obtain ever again. As it stands now, folks have been fighting about this for years, with a lot of players arguing that it's only right that new players get a chance at those classic battle pass skins like Drift or Peely. But this is actually a legal question, rather than something we could put to a vote, so these discussions rarely get anywhere near the heart of the matter.
At issue is Fortnite's FOMO-based system of microtransactions. In the first few years of Fortnite, Epic leaned hard on exclusivity as a motivating tool. The idea was that if you saw a player using a skin that you like but can't have, it would encourage you to grind out future battle passes and pick up anything you think is cool from the shop as soon as possible. But once it became clear that Fortnite might be around for decades, Epic realized that it's not so good to have ultra-famous characters like Darth Vader permanently locked behind an old battle pass that can never be purchased again.
These days, Fortnite almost never releases any new exclusives. Every free or promotional item now comes with a disclaimer that it could pop up in the item shop later, and battle pass items from Chapter 5 Season 4 (pictured above) and on can now hit the shop 18 months after the season ends, and the first of these landed in the item shop together on June 28: Gwenpool, Peelverine, Mysterio, Captain Jones, and War Machine. You can feel confident that any new cosmetic that pops up these days will eventually hit the shop, unless it says so very clearly on the item page.
It's a very different situation than it used to be. There are tons of items from older passes, as well as lots of other old cosmetics, that remain stuck in exclusivity hell, and many other cosmetics whose status is ambiguous and hard to gauge. Thanks to Epic's hard pivot away from exclusivity the last couple of years, and the natural cycling in and out of players, they've created an environment where it can be hard to figure out what old skins are actually exclusive and which ones aren't, because nobody's really been keeping track as we went. At least not accurately.
But that's what this article is ultimately about--sorting out which Fortnite cosmetics actually are exclusive, and which ones are not. Below, we'll break it all down as best we can--but keep in mind that Epic's lawyers may be the only ones who really have the answers here. But since they aren't going to be sharing that info with us, this piece is the next best thing. Let's dive in.
Skins that are permanently exclusive and will not return
Any battle pass skin from Chapter 1 Season 2 through Chapter 5 Season 3
Everything in this era is truly exclusive. This is because Epic promoted the passes as the only way to ever get the included items. The battle pass FAQ used to say this during Chapter 2 Season 7: "Rewards from a Battle Pass can only be earned in that season, and will not be available in later seasons." The back half of that sentence--"will not be available in later seasons"--is not ambiguous at all. So if Epic were to sell items from one of those old passes, that quote would suddenly become false, and that would, in turn, open the company to litigation and fines. Very few old battle pass skins could hypothetically sell well enough to be worth the potential price. There are 222 skins that fall into this category, which represents just 8% of all Fortnite skins.
Epic's blog post announcing the first Winterfest claimed that the free cosmetics from the Winterfest lodge would be "exclusive to this year’s Winterfest!" This was the only Winterfest where they described the rewards that way.
Anything in the shop that was marketed as "exclusive."
The Fortnite Championship Series-themed Major Glory and The Champion were each sold in the item shop as a "time-limited exclusive," which is pretty clear. Likewise, The Paradigm skin and its accompanying emote were promoted on Twitter with this claim: "These exclusive items are only available for a limited time." And, in 2024 when The Paradigm mistakenly returned to the shop for two hours, Epic confirmed its status as a permanent exclusive.
Partial exclusives or grey areas
Skins in this category probably can return, but due to the use of certain wording in their promotions, they might remain exclusive to the method through which they were previously available. In some cases, that makes them essentially exclusive, if not literally--since you probably can't play Fortnite on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 these days anyway. But most of the skins here don't face that sort of obstacle, and those could come back any time.
Even so, players often think of the skins in this category as being exclusive. It makes sense--no skin in this category has ever appeared in the item shop or become available again any other way. But, technically, anything here could come back at any time--but the circumstances required to do so may not be worth the effort.
Monthly Crew skins
Epic has consistently stated that the monthly skins you receive for subscribing to Fortnite Crew can come back at any time, though they've also referred to these skins as being Crew exclusives--the Fortnite storefront on the Epic Games Store mentions that one of the perks of a Crew subscription is an "always-new Outfit Bundle that only Fortnite Crew members can get" every month. No Fortnite Crew skin has ever come back after rotating out at the end of its month, but that doesn't mean they can't. But if any of them did come back, you would almost certainly need to be subscribed to Fortnite Crew to get them.
Like the Crew packs, these packs are stated to be exclusive to PlayStation Plus members. So it's the same story as it is with the Crew skins, essentially--they would likely only be able to return for PS+ subscribers.
There have been a number of skins over the years that required you to play Fortnite on a specific model of phone or tablet. In more recent years, Epic has tended to include language specifying that these sorts of promotional items can be sold in the item shop after the promotion ends. But some early examples--like Galaxy for 2018 Samsung tablets, Ikonik for Samsung S10 phones, and Honor Guard for the 2019 Honor 20 phone--were promoted as being exclusive to specific phone models that are now at or beyond the end of their lifespans, most of a decade later.
From Chapter 3 Season 1 until Chapter 5 Season 4, Fortnite offered a "Level Up Quest Pack" during the last month of each season that would include a skin and its accompanying accessories. By then collecting the pack's time-gated level-up tokens during rounds of Battle Royale, owners would unlock a very different and unique bonus style. These skins were not referred to as "exclusives," but the cool bonus styles were specifically stated to only be available to unlock through the end of the season. So it's likely Epic could bring back the base styles for these skins, but perhaps without the time-gated bonus styles--and without the bonus styles, those skins are a lot less enticing. It's probably not a coincidence that Epic stopped making these the very same season they ended exclusivity for new battle passes.
The skins included in both Twitch Prime packs were advertised on Twitter as being exclusive, but it's conceivable they could be offered again for Amazon Prime members or as a Twitch drop.
Any skin not listed in the previous categories is not an exclusive and could return to the item shop at any time.
The vast majority of skins fall into this category--more than 2,000 of them, in fact. Here are the categories of skins that always have a chance of popping up in the item shop, and examples of each type. This includes some skins we previously believed were exclusive.
Most FNCS skins
Epic recently brought back two older FNCS skins, Dummy Supreme and Championship Aura, which were thought to be exclusives because they had a tag that said "Limited Time!" on their shop pages. Until then, no FNCS skin with that tag had ever returned, while the ones released more recently without that tag return every season. We suspect the distinction between these two skins (and several other FNCS skins) is that they were not otherwise promoted as exclusives. We just inferred that these ones would be, because of that tag, and because the first two FNCS skins Epic released, The Champion and Major Glory, actually were exclusive.
Console bundle skins, like Royale Bomber on PS4 and Wildcat on Switch, have likewise long been considered exclusives, but none of them were ever really advertised as such. With the Royale Bomber skin, for example, Epic told Polygon in 2018 that the PS4 console bundle was "the only way you can get the ‘Royale Bomber’ at this time," which specifically confirmed that it was not exclusive, and the skin was later offered in a controller bundle as well.
However, none of these skins have ever been sold in the item shop, and the codes for these items sell for a lot of money on the secondary market. While Epic doesn't make any money directly from those purchases, the people buying them almost certainly spend a lot of money in Fortnite, too. And it would probably alienate those folks if Epic took a skin they'd spent hundreds of real-world dollars to get and sold it in the shop for 1,200 V-bucks. So this is a bit of an uncertain category.
Music pass (aside from Ultraviolet Billie), OG pass, and Lego pass items
They can be sold any time after the pass ends without any waiting period, though Epic has not been in any hurry to get most of these items into the item shop--only three music pass skins and one Lego pass skin have shown up so far.
That's everything there is to know about the suddenly more confusing world of Fortnite Item Shop exclusivity rules. There's a lot that is left in a gray area, but a lot else that's not so unclear. In fact, it's often quite clear that Epic is giving itself permission to be less restrictive when it comes to selling--and reselling--skins in the game.
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