The NFL is coming to Fortnite this Friday, November 9 at 7 p.m. Eastern. As reported by USA Today , the hugely popular battle royale game has partnered up with the NFL to let players represent their favorite team while building, shooting, and claiming those victory royales.
Epic Games says, “Each Outfit can be swapped to any of the thirty-two NFL teams, plus an additional unique Fortnite team.” Basically, players won’t need to purchase a new outfit for each NFL team, but rather, they’ll be able to switch to a new team between matches if they should so choose.
The NFL uniforms will be available for both male and female characters, something which Rachel Hoagland, the NFL’s vice president and head of gaming and eSports, is quite excited about.
“That is actually very exciting for us, with the avatars being available as females and being able to have females in NFL uniforms for the first time,” she said.
What’s more, players will be able to choose any jersey number between zero and 99 to represent their favorites while on the battlefield. However, names will not be included on the back of the jersey, which is understandable, as that would require a lot more work on Epic’s part.
We are gearing up for something big. #FortniteNFL ?? ??
NFL-themed @FortniteGame outfits available in-game November 9 7pm ET https://t.co/2emN0qneA7
— NFL (@NFL) November 5, 2018
Jerseys are well and good, but it wouldn’t be a new Fortnite item set without all the other gadgets and goodies. With these NFL items, there will also be gliders, emotes, and resource harvesters that resemble goal posts. There will even be a referee costume available for players who like to enforce the rules.
As of this writing, Epic Games has not revealed pricing information for the NFL gear, so we’ll have to wait for the release to find out exactly how many V-bucks this will cost players. However, skins normally sell for 1,200 to 1,500 V-bucks, which breaks down to between $12 and $15, and we’d expect these to fall into a similar range.
Get an update on current development efforts for Fortnite Mobile in our November State of Dev! https://t.co/6ehPAFnwl0 pic.twitter.com/BWYFVleeXZ
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) November 2, 2018
For Epic Games, this was an easy opportunity to jump on. “We have so many football fans at Epic and we know a lot of the game’s fans share that same enthusiasm,” said Mark Rein, co-founder of Epic Games. “Allowing our players to represent their favorite teams in the game was too cool of an opportunity for us to pass up, and we couldn’t be happier with how they turned out!”
This isn’t the first time Epic has teamed up an outside entity with Fortnite , but it is the first time it has partnered on outfits inside the game.