Epic had worked on a Fortnite spinoff mobile game called Fortnite World Explorers back in 2014. This interesting secret was unearthed by gaming archivist and enthusiast MrTalida, who shared it on X (formerly Twitter).
Fortnite World Explorers reportedly featured a tile-based combat system, a massive open-world map, and hosts of unique heroes and monsters for players to collect. According to MrTalida, Fortnite World Explorers was to have a home-based mechanism, wherein players would slowly expand their base to battle other players and expand their reach over the game’s map.
Shortly after MrTalida alleged the scrapped Fortnite spin-off game, another Twitter user, TR_Pox1016, chimed in with some more details about Epic Games’ supposed project. They compared the library of audio tracks with another one of Epic Games’ mobile game projects, Battle Breakers, only to find a lot of similarities.
Armed with this information, MrTalida claimed that Fortnite World Explorers was eventually transformed into Battle Breakers. Upon digging into the comments section of his aforementioned post, I found that MrTalida has had access to Fortnite World Explorers files “for a few years” now.
Battle Breakers was a hero collector RPG sci-fi adventure mobile title released by Epic Games in 2019. The game received a lukewarm reception, amassing a meager user rating of 2.2 on Metacritic. Many players complained about the game being ‘tedious, repetitive, and tiresome’. Owing to a lack of interest by players, Epic Games shut down Battle Breakers on Dec 30, 2022.
As someone who has played a lot of Fortnite and even tried his hands on the mobile game, I think Epic did the right thing by shelving the mobile game. They instead focused on their main IP, and we all know how that turned out.
