Marvel villain Thanos might be making his long-awaited return to Fortnite Battle Royale soon, just in time for the release of Avengers: Endgame, indicated by new data mined game files from the v8.30 update.
The April 10 Fortnite update wasn’t exactly celebrated by players, as many of the issues they hoped to see fixed were not, but for data miners, it was the another opportunity to see what the could find deep in the game files.
As with every successive Fortnite update, these data miners look for clues about upcoming content, game modes, cosmetic items and more – and one such data miner appears to have stumbled upon the return of Thanos.
Is Thanos coming back to Fortnite for Avengers: Endgame?
Following the release of Infinity War, in April 2018, Fortnite developers Epic Games partnered up with the Russo brothers to bring the main villain, Thanos, directly into the game.
Given his own separate mode, Thanos could be ‘played’ by one player on the map at a time, simply by finding his ‘Infinity Gauntlet’ on the map. However, the mode was only available for a limited time, and hasn’t been seen, or heard about, since.
With the next, and final, entry in the current Avengers story releasing soon, Fortnite fans speculated that the Purple villain could make a return, but this line of code from the game files following the v8.30 update may in fact be the confirmation that Thanos is indeed coming back to the battle royale game.
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The game file is a new ‘death feed’ message, which is used on screen when a player is killed. For example, other death feed include ‘got knocked out by a fall’ or ‘knocked themself out’.
‘Yielded to the POWER of Thanos’ would be the death message used when a player is taken out by Thanos, presumably, and it is intriguing that is has been added to the game now, of all times.
New Kill Feed messages (1st image) and new Death Feed messages (2nd image)
“unleashed an inferno on” sounds interesting…#fortnite pic.twitter.com/ROZnzTfLXo
— Skin-Tracker (@SkinTrackerCom) April 10, 2019
Avengers: Endgame releases in cinemas on April 26, exactly a year after the release of Infinity War. Of course, this is just a game file, and it could be purely coincidental – but the timing is too perfect not to spark some speculation.
It’s true that Fortnite has received some negative feedback on other ‘overpowered’ items being put in the game (namely with Infinity Blade), but as long as Thanos is placed in a separate LTM (limited time mode), then fans would surely love to have him back – maybe this time with a hero or two as well…