Fortnite’s New Age-Restricted Skins And Cosmetics Are Truly Bizarre

If you log into your Fortnite locker today, you may seen a whole bunch of skins with a big “warning” sign slapped on them. This is part of a new, recently implemented system age-restricting certain cosmetics which can only be used in 10+ Creative maps.

What skins are being hit with this? And why? Going through the skins, there is one common thread among almost all of them. Any skin that innately has some sort of gun attached to it, usually something like a pistol in a holster, is restricted.

In my own collection, that includes Lara Croft, Black Widow, Cable, Domino, Doctor Doom, Sgt Jonesy, Bandolette, Doublecross and Agent Peely, a Banana with a gun on his ankle holster. Bandolette and Sgt. Jonesy literally only have ammo clips.

But wait! There’s more, as this applies to all cosmetics, not just skins. I cannot use the buzz saw blades that came with my Borderlands Psycho. Then, I have Daryl from the Walking Dead’s knives and “Dive Knives.” These are both literally just…two knives, but scythes, swords and axes are apparently just fine.

Then, sometimes it seems like things are just deemed “too scary.” My Bobo the Monkey back bling is banned. A spray that shows Midas looking mildly menacing is banned. It all seems very arbitrary.

There does not appear to be any component to this that takes into account the source material of a skins. There are skins from R-rated and MA-rated movies, TV shows or video games that are not banned because they don’t have guns or are not spooky enough. There also does not appear to be some sort of “too sexy” filter based on skins showing uh, skin. The famously curvy Chun-Li skin is also not banned, for instance.

The idea here is that there is a portion of Fortnite Creative that Epic wants to be “just for the kids” and that does not include things with even holstered guns or ammo clips. Or things that may be mildly scary. This, of course, is a game where 50% of the entire thing is a battle royale where players blast each other with every weapon under the sun, a mode that almost certainly kids 10 and under have played extensively, despite a T for Teen rating. One wonders if this is some sort of ESRB demand that Epic is following.

The end result is that it means you really, really have to examine what skin you’re about to buy (with your parents money) if you cannot use it in a bunch of maps. Epic is kind of full of weird decisions lately, and this is another one that seems like a truly odd thing to implement based on the arbitrary criteria used here.

Update: Fortnite has now issued a statement to say that these cosmetics will eventually be modified to be E-for-Everyone friendly in 2024 when used on those maps. Some of the cases mentioned above seem easier than others, but we’ll see:

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