The Fortnite and Fall Guys Crossover Has Just Begun

This week has already been one of Fortnite’s most eventful weeks ever, between the Paradigm item shop blunder and the battle pass exclusivity changes . And there’s more excitement on the way. We’ve got a big timer on the battle royale map counting down to something on Saturday, followed later this evening by a big presentation about the future of Disney’s Fortnite partnerships from D23. With everything going on, it could be easy to forget that Fall Guys finally entered the Fortnite ecosystem this week.

And to be fair, this is just the beginning of Fall Guys integration into Fortnite. It would be more accurate to say that you can play Fall Guys-style minigames in Fortnite, at least for now. The most notable aspect of this is the temporary Fall Guys obstacle course in the sky above Classy Courts in the battle royale map. You drop down near the Courts, interact with the bean statue, and play through a Fall Guys course for loot.

But you’re racing against the clock, not other players—the faster you get through it, the better your loot will be when you return to the island. Having other players around does give you some classic Fall Guys shenanigans, but it’s not the same head-to-head competition against other humans that the real Fall Guys offers.

Likewise, the creative maps put together by Fall Guys developers at Mediatonic are approximations of Fall Guys games reimagined in a Fortnite way. Tumbly Towers, for example, is just another creative map where you climb a large tower, only this time with traditional bean physics. The Fortnite version of Hex-a-Gone is a reimagined version of the minigame where platforms respawn after a few seconds (you get points based on how many platforms you make disappear by walking on them), to make the rounds longer and allow you to join them mid-match.

All these things are to like Fall Guys, but it’s hardly a replacement for the real thing without the game show structure. While I suspect Fall Guys will eventually be fully integrated into Fortnite, Epic and Mediatonic are going to have to overcome a few hurdles. And these hurdles are, frankly, significant enough that it could be a while before it all comes together.

The first problem is that these creative islands aren’t going to make it. It seems like the current UEFN tools can’t support the game’s multi-round structure. Fall Guys needs to be a full-fledged extra mode on par with Fortnite Festival, Lego Fortnite, and Rocket Racing, and that’s going to take time. Since Epic tends to keep its maps close to home, there’s not enough information to speculate on a timeline, but we can hope it saves it for the launch of Chapter 6, which is supposedly coming in December.

The fact that the first part of the Fall Guys rollout in Fortnite was delayed multiple times before actually happening (it was actually supposed to launch much earlier in the summer) may not be the best sign that a full integration will happen in the coming months.

The other issue is what to do with Fall Guys cosmetics. At the moment, there’s nothing transferable between Fall Guys and Fortnite, and if you play in a Fall Guys map within Fortnite, it simply changes the skin you’re wearing to a bean person. But Fall Guys has a huge number of its own cosmetics, and transferring those isn’t a simple prospect since Fall Guys cosmetics don’t work like Fortnite’s.

In Fall Guys, you choose your pants, shirt, hat, and more separately, while Fortnite uses head-to-toe skins that define your entire appearance. Fall Guys in Fortnite would need its own section in the locker to customize your bean. Some collaboration cosmetics, like Godzilla, will likely have to sit out in this process, but as Epic has done with its dripfeed of Rocket League’s cross-game cosmetics, there’s no need to port everything at once.

Despite the obstacles, it now seems inevitable that Fall Guys will eventually end up as a Fortnite game-within-a-game. There are so many different types of passes in the game now that throwing the Fall Guys Season Pass into the mix probably wouldn’t be that much of a problem, and Epic and Mediatonic have absolutely nailed the gameplay feel of Fall Guys. The foundation is there and ready to rock. Now we just need the rest. Fingers crossed it doesn’t take too long.