Credit: Epic Games
Week 8 Battle Pass challenges are live in Fortnite: Battle Royale, and there's a bit of a curveball thrown into things this week. An earlier leak suggested that Epic was going to ask us to visit some Taco Shops, but the developer appears to have swapped that one out in favor of something with a little more funk to it. There are now dance floors peppering the game, and you've got to go and dance on three of them. You'll notice them right away thanks to the flashing lights and disco music, but they're spread out all over the map. Here are three you can go to -- we'll add more as they're found, but these three should complete the challenge. Check the map below:
Credit: Epic Games
In text form, these are:
In the smaller, Eastern building in Flush Factory.
At the Haunted House West of Pleasant Park.
In the RV Park East of Retail Row.
We'll add more if they're discovered, but I'm actually not seeing too many more around the web right now. That wouldn't surprise me: part of the fun of these challenges is the ability to have strange little nonviolent interactions with people that would otherwise be blasting you with a shotgun. Given that, it would make sense that Epic would want to concentrate players as much as possible to raise the chances of getting a fun, funky dance party going. As usual, however, things can go south pretty quickly. Another one of the challenges this week asks you to get damage with explosive weapons, and hurling a grenade onto a crowded dance floor would get that done in a pinch.
When you do find the dance floors, the hardest thing will be choosing a dance to properly express yourself: I'm using "Take the L," for the very good reason that I have it unlocked.
We're currently also running the 50 vs. 50 limited time mode, which is a great time to complete non-combat challenges of all stripes -- things are a lot easier when at least 50 people on the map aren't trying to take you down. We're coming into the endgame with this Battle Pass, so if you're behind on challenges, now is the time to get cracking before Season 3 makes way for Season 4 at the end of the month. That Reaper skin is too good to give up.
Credit: Epic Games
Week 8 challenges are live in Fortnite: Battle Royale, though some extended technical issues mean you might have some trouble completing them until later. As usual, we've got some non-combat challenges in addition to the usual suite of looting and shooting, giving those of us with terrible aim a chance to collect some Battle Pass stars and get a little bit closer to that John Wick Reaper skin. As usual, feel free to figure these out on your own if you feel like you've got a good working knowledge of the map. If you'd rather go a bit quicker, read on for a map of where you can search between three boats.
The other non-combat challenge this week asks you to find Taco Shops -- look here for a map of those.
Three boats isn't the hardest one to guess, I'll grant you that. It means that we're talking about Loot Lake, the only body of water on the map likely to have boats on it -- Moisty Mire would be possible, I suppose, but there aren't any there. And considering there's very little land to work with when it comes to Loot Lake -- it's a Lake -- our search field is thankfully limited. You'll want to drop onto the little island in the middle, which you can see on the map below:
Credit: Epic Games
From there, you're going to want to be on the southern edge, which you should be able to drop onto pretty easily no matter where your bus is because the Lake is pretty close to the center of the map. Just float on down to the dock at the very bottom to collect your reward: the crest is right there at the edge of the water:
Credit: Epic Games
And that's it. I'm not generally a frequent visitor to Loot Lake -- the long, open distances between shores encourage the sort of sniper battles that I rarely do well in, and the central location means that it's busy enough that someone's bound to be there to outclass me. As usual, however, the non-combat challenge brings a fresh infusion of unarmed treasure hunters who aren't expecting much more than to complete the challenge and die. This would dovetail pretty well with the Assault Rifle challenge: grab a weapon and pick them off as they make their way off the island.
Update 2 (4 p.m. ET): Epic Games’ status page says that all systems are now fully operational. The games’ online servers are now back up.
“Login and game service issues have been resolved and we’ve returned to a healthy state,” Epic Games wrote.
Update (1:43 p.m. ET): It looks like the servers should be fixed soon, according to Epic Games, although the developer isn’t being more specific than that.
“Services should begin to recover over the next couple of hours,” Epic Games’ status page currently states. “Due to issues with our account system, players on PS4 will be unable to login for an additional period of time. We’re sorry for the extended downtime. We’ll update you in an hour.”
The original story about the server downtime is below.
Original story: The servers for Fortnite are currently offline, and there’s no estimate for when they’ll be back up.
“Login is currently blocked across all Epic endpoints, including games, websites, and the Epic Games Launcher,” Epic Games said last night. “This is due to a database failure which we are working to resolve as quickly as possible. In a measure towards resolution, matchmaking will be blocked for a short period. Thank you for your patience!”
There was then a degradation of matchmaking to handle account service issues, and Epic later stated that the problems were getting better.
“We’ll be undergoing emergency downtime to deploy major upgrades to our database systems,” the company later announced. The database upgrade process is still ongoing at the time of this writing, and the game “remains in downtime,” as of Epic Games’ most recent status update.
We’ve reached out to Epic Games for any clarity on what exactly happened and when we can expect the game to return.
For now, the game is down for everyone, not just you, and there’s no clear timeline for when the servers will come back.
