This week, Epic Games rolled out a new series of quests (formerly known as challenges) in Fortnite called Cipher Quests. These are only available in-game for a limited amount of time (until Friday, March 10 when the event ends), but they’ve reignited a spark deep in my heart. A deep, burning passion for Fortnite challenges of seasons — and Chapters — past.
You see, a good few chapters ago, back when Fortnite’s lore was in its very primitive stages and collaborations were a mere possibility, the weekly challenges we got felt truly exciting. We had secret battle stars to track down via coordinates hidden in a loading screen. There were challenges requiring us to track down specific collectibles across the map, time trials to complete, and flaming hoops to jump through. They really leaned into what makes Fortnite well… Fortnite. Its zany, eccentric, and tongue-in-cheek approach to the Battle Royale genre.
Alas, at some point a few Chapters ago, Epic opted to huddle all of these fun challenges together and shove them in a dark closet, never to see the light of day again. Nowadays we get cookie-cutter quests that involve consuming specific items, dealing damage with certain weapons, or racking up air time in a land vehicle. Very rarely do we get a challenge that truly has you putting on your detective hat and trench coat and tracking down cheeky gnomes or deciphering coordinates. Up until now, that is.
You see, Fortnite’s Cipher Quests come in two flavors — Unencrypted and Encrypted. The former is, sadly, more generic tosh we’ve seen time and time again by this point: Spend Bars, Get Eliminations, Damage Opponents with the Infantry Rifle or Six Shooter, Gain Shields… you get the idea. They’re not really all that inspiring.
The Encrypted quests, though, are an entirely different type of gravy. Simply put, you’re given half of a quest objective followed by a string of numbers that you need to decipher. The code that these challenges are partly comprised of was initially teased by a Fortnite tweet that was eventually solved by none other than everyone’s favorite existential-crisis-inducing language model, ChatGPT.
While it’s not taken too long for the Fortnite community to figure out exactly how the cipher works — it’s not quite a straight translation of 1=A, 26=Z, etc. — it has at least added some intrigue and mystery to the mundane mechanic we’ve grown accustomed to over the past few Chapters.
While using the Fortnite Cipher has been fun to use and determine what we have to do, the actual objectives themselves haven’t been all that inspiring. The first required you to interact with a table in a certain location (Inspect the Wall Beneath the Eastern Building), another tasked us with using a spray in a specific location and another was interacting with a computer (Decrypt the Signal Beneath the Snowbank). None of which are exactly the wild treasure hunts we used to embark on, but hey, it at least feels like Epic’s trying something a little bit new, and we can’t be mad at that.
Deep down, I know the days of hunting down secret Battle Stars are long behind us. I know I’ll probably never emote at Forbidden Dance Sign locations, or locate and dig up gnomes thanks to their rather eerie giggling again. After all, the simple challenges we’ve got now have come about for a reason. To keep the masses who want to grind out the Battle Pass as fast as possible happy, with minimal obstruction to ensuring they get their money’s worth. But surely, there’s a middle ground to be found between dull and repetitive quest types, and collect-a-thons, and overly complicated or cryptic quests that will allow everyone to be happy.
These Cipher Quests, no matter how fleeting the event may be, do give me some hope for the future of Fortnite’s quest system. With Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 2 due to arrive next week, there’s hope that we may see a change to weekly quests. C’mon Epic, bring the gnomes back, at the very least!
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