Plague, Scourge, and its complementary cosmetics make up the Grim Medicine Set in Fortnite: Battle Royale. Season 6 introduced Grim Medicine.
In Fortnite: Battle Royale, the Plague is an Epic Outfit that costs 1,500 V-Bucks to acquire from the Item Shop. Plague, which is a component of the Grim Medicine Set, was originally made available in Season 6.
It is more difficult for Item Shop skins to rotate and return as frequently in Fortnite due to the abundance of skins that can be purchased. Sometimes users simply don’t have enough V-Bucks at the correct time, and as a result they have to wait months for their preferred skins to return. But that’s all part of the pleasure; if it were always easy to buy any cosmetic item, browsing the Item Shop or earning V-Bucks through the Battle Pass just wouldn’t be as exciting.
For the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Grim Medicine cosmetic set—complete with the well-known Plague Doctor skin—returned to Fortnite’s in-game store yesterday, after being absent for 1,410 days (or 3 years and 10 months). And a lot of people think that the epidemic itself was what kept the plague-themed gear and skins out of the game for so long.
The skins were first made available in late 2018, and they were a regular and well-liked set that were sold every few months until the end of January 2020, when they were last seen. At the time, the early phases of the Covid epidemic were already dominating international news, thus I remember their spotlight in the item shop raising eyebrows.
The covid-19 epidemic, according to fan speculation, was the reason Epic blacklisted and discontinued the Grim Medicine cosmetic set. This makes sense because it would have looked horrible to include those skins at the height of the devastating pandemic, which as of January 2023 had claimed over 6 million lives globally.
Since the Item Shop is updated every day, it is impossible to predict how long certain skins will be accessible. Given that they are in the Feature section as opposed to the Daily section, they will probably remain on the Item Shop for a few days. Despite the fact that they hadn’t been available for almost three years, these skins weren’t as scarce as other of the earlier Fortnite Battle Pass skins, such Renegade Raider.
The pandemic has forced many developers, including those besides Epic, to adapt their practises. The designer of Pandemic requested that Steam remove the digital board game version entirely from the platform, while Hideo Kojima recently admitted that he had to rewrite the entire plot of the previously announced Death Stranding 2 out of concern that it would hit too hard for some people.
It was previously believed that the plague doctor skins were purposefully kept out of the item shop and inaccessible so that content creators could include them in sponsored item bundles.
The problem is that Epic has never, at any time, provided an official denial of this notion. We contacted the firm over the skin and the lengthy delay before it appeared, but received no response. The covid-19 explanation doesn’t seem implausible to me, even though Epic hasn’t formally acknowledged the cause of the Grim Medicine products going missing for almost four years. And whatever the reason, many gamers were happy to see it come back, even if only to poke fun of its protracted absence. Or to highlight the fact that COVID-19 is still an issue in 2023 and that it is still both lethal and harmful.
However, not everyone was won over. “This game is becoming worse by the day,” complained one critic, “they can’t get players to play so they bring back od skins only to entice gamers to come back that’s sad get better.” Another person bemoaned the fact that Kratos had yet to return.
Even though it might seem absurd, there is a market for uncommon Fortnite skins. There’s certainly someone out there wanting to purchase your account simply for Renegade Raider.
Other uncommon Fortnite skins include Rue, a woman with a crimson and black trench coat who some players believe has Nazi uniform-like qualities (only released twice, last seen three years ago). Rapper Travis Scott, whose 2021 Astroworld show resulted in the deaths of numerous concertgoers due to a crowd crush, has another skin that appears to be illegal (also last seen three years ago).