Yesterday, after 1410 days (or 3 years and 10 months) the Grim Medicine cosmetic set—along with the famous Plague Doctor skin—has arrived fortress‘S in-game store, allowing players to make purchases for the first time since the start of the covid-19 pandemic. And many believe that it was the pandemic that kept plague-themed items and costumes out of the game for such a long time.
I doubt I need to explain fortress with you, but just to keep everyone on the same page: Epic’s fortress is a free-to-play battle royale PVP shooter available on almost every modern platform out there. It supports cross-play on all of them and over the past few years has been one of the most popular games in the world as it continues to expand and include more characters from other franchises, like Star Wars, Seven Dragon Balls, and street fighter.
But fortress also have a lot of original skins and cosmetic items, like Peely and the Plague Doctor mentioned earlier. But until yesterday, these plague-related items haven’t appeared in the game since. March 1, 2019, making them extremely rare, as the only people who can use them are the people who bought them back when they were last in stock. Meanwhile, most other skins pop up again and again in the store every few weeks or months.
Fans have theorized that the Grim Medicine cosmetic set has been blacklisted by Epic and discontinued due to pandemic caused by covid-19. This makes sense, as including those skins during the height of a deadly pandemic that has killed more than 6 million people worldwide as of January 2023 would be a bad look.
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The working theory is that the skin popped up in the store on March 1, 2019. Then before it could appear again in the store, covid-19 was detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and eventually spread around the world, officially becoming a pandemic according to World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. It’s not without reason that Epic saw this and decided to pull plague-themed items from the store’s rotation to avoid any controversy.
The thing is, Epic has never officially confirmed this theory at any point. Kotaku contacted about the skin and the long time it took for it to appear, but received no response from the company. However, even if Epic hasn’t officially confirmed the reason why Grim Potion items have been missing for nearly four years, the covid-19 theory doesn’t seem plausible to me. And whatever the reason, many players were excited to see it return, even if only to joke about its long absence. Or to show that covid-19 is still a thing in 2023yes, and it’s still dangerous and deadly.
“One of my friends IMMEDIATELY put money into the game when he received this message. He’s been waiting since the last time it was in the store,” one person tweeted. “GET GOOOO! I finally have PLAGUE!!! I’ve wanted him for 2 years,” another player tweeted as saw the news of the return of the plague Doctor arrive fortress. Of course, there are other players who find it funny that everyone is so excited about the skin, and others already own it and are now sad to see their rare skin become popular again.
Personally, I’m not excited about the Death Medicine skins because I don’t really like the way they look. And besides, I just love buying the most cursed and bizarre skins in fortresslike Mr. Meeseeks from Rick and Morty.
