Fans and hopefuls have little reason for celebration today.
Fortnite: Save the World

In 2011, Fortnite: Save the World was revealed to the world during the Spike Video Game Awards. It was billed as a cooperative game akin to Minecraft meets Left 4 Dead, where you and some friends can get together and fend off a custom built base from hordes of baddies. It was unique for the fact that you had to harvest resources from around the map in order to build up your base, with different materials creating different and stronger walls and traps.

It was promised to be released as a free-to-play experience, but an Early Access release did happen for a premium price. As luck would have it, Epic soon after struck gold with their free-to-play battle royale mode that was built off of some of the core ideas found in Save the World. Resource gathering and structure building being two of the major ideas.

As the years went by, the promise from Epic was always that they were still working on Save the World and that when they were ready it would be released as a free-to-play component for Fortnite. It would have optional microtransactions, much like Fortnite: Battle Royale has.

When I say that "years went by," I mean it. I literally mean that it's been years of waiting for the F2P release. I was granted access to Fortnite: Save the World back in June of 2015. My friends were interested in playing the story mode once that mythical F2P release came about. The release date for which kept getting pushed back year after year after year by Epic.

Today, that dream is effectively dead. A new "State of Development" for the Save the World campaign tells us that Epic is effectively abandoning this story focused mode. Not only that, but they are not going to offer a free-to-play release at all despite promising one for years.

Today we’re bringing Save the World out of Early Access and have decided that it will remain a premium experience rather than going free-to-play. Development of new content will slow down after this official release, but the adventure doesn’t end here for Save the World.
Thanks for nothing, Epic. The fact that they said they are slowing down development is already raising more than a few eyebrows since they already drastically slowed down development on Save the World back when the Battle Royale was first released. To slow it down any more would just be a near complete stop on development, which sounds exactly like what is happening here.

Those that purchased into the Early Access release of Save the World will be bumped up to the next Founder's Pack level at no extra charge. Maybe that will take the sting away from fans and hopefuls that have been jerked around for the better part of a decade.