Friday 'Nite: Fortnite Season 2 May Awkwardly Launch Amid Real-Life War

gamespot.com:

Friday 'Nite is a weekly Fortnite column that takes a closer look at current events in the wide world of Fortnite, with a special emphasis on the game's plot, characters, and lore.

Fortnite Chapter 3, Season 2 is launching this weekend. Probably. Maybe. We'll see. While in-game signs point to this being the case, there's nothing typical about this upcoming new season, so much so that we can't confirm it's even really happening.

It's never been like this before for one of the biggest games in the world. Sure, two Fortnite seasons in 2020 were each extended by several weeks due to COVID, but those delays were communicated to players and press well in advance. Much of the world shut down in the early spring and summer months of the pandemic, and video games took a more public hit than many other industries as studios scrambled to adjust to at-home game dev. But today, a different struggle affects a small but specific set of games: Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

While the war's most devastating effects include human rights violations too numerous to count, we're also seeing how the conflict disrupts the lives of people not fighting in the war--or, in some cases, people not even near the conflict geographically.

Some studios in Ukraine have had to relocate developers and alert players to delays while their devs quite literally fight for their lives. Nintendo's Advance Wars 1 + 2: Re-Boot Camp has been delayed for what seems like obvious reasons--the game's depiction of military combat--despite the game's rather lighthearted tone, even if Nintendo is toothless to say that's really why the game was pushed back.

One can safely assume Activision, which was reportedly eager to reveal the next Call of Duty sooner than its usual