Fortnite Season 5 Is Still A Grind

Fortnite's Season 5 has restructured the battle royale's challenge system. Weekly challenges are still here--but everything has been renamed a to match the new NPC system. So while things might look different on the surface, the underlying grind that players have complained about in the past remains.

Last season had players grinding to level 225 in order to unlock special silver, gold, and rainbow versions of characters like Iron Man and Wolverine. They had punch cards, weekly, daily, XP coins, and other special challenges to help them grind through it. Season 5 has the same grind, with special skin variants unlocked after level 100, but there are no more XP coins or punchcards to help players unlock everything.

While XP coins have vanished from the battle royale, Epic Games has added a replacement for punchcards. They are now called rare quests and are listed with a blue background in the challenge menu. All quests aren't listed in the menu so some players have created a complete list to help others finish everything before the end of the season.

"There we go, thank you. Was it that hard to let us track our progress on more than 3 challenges, Epic?" said Redditor riventitan, referencing how the challenges do not show up in the menu unless you reach eighty percent completion. Players automatically earn progress on every rare challenge, but they wonder why Epic is making it more difficult to keep track of what you need to do to earn experience.

Some players have also complained that these new rare challenges are harder than previous punchcards. It's difficult to kill 100 other players with a pickaxe, get 1,000 kills with a pistol, or 1,000 kills at distances greater than 150 meters. But they'll need to complete all these challenges and play a ton in order to make it to level 225.

Some players have gone a different route when leveling up their battle pass. They've opted to purchase 100 tiers for over $100 or use a common exploit to level up while they aren't playing. Players can still earn thousands of experience points every 15 minutes by letting their character idle in the games' Creative mode. Epic Games has said it is fixing that exploit--but it still works at the time of this writing.

Some limited-time modes, like Tilted Taxis, also grant a large amount of experience per match. But none of these remain playable for long as Epic Games rotates the available modes regularly.

Battle pass skins serve as bragging rights for many players, especially at a time when people are forced to stay at home due to the pandemic. Players are determined to unlock everything available to them--even if it takes hours upon hours of grinding and hundreds of dollars. Many just wish that such extremes weren't necessary to do so.