By Arts & Entertainment Editor Sawyer Pollitt
This past October, the popular battle royal video game, Fortnite went offline beginning on Sunday October 13th and continuing for several days. This temporary absence of Fortnite caused pre-teens, videogame journalists, and anyone else who cared to go into a collective panic during their wait for the game to return.
During the downtime, players were met with a swirling black hole in place of the usual menu screen that would allow them to enter the 100 player servers. This screen persisted but clues began to spring up from the swirling void of cosmic indifference. A series of numbers began to emerge, these numbers were in-fact coordinates that led intrepid players to a google-maps screen of a mass of crabs – effectively playing a joke on the people who were watching the steam of the black hole so intently.
Strange happenings weren’t only confined to the in-game world of Fortnite, the twitter account for the game also deleted all content and no comment on the event was made by Epic Games, the developers of the game. Fortnite star Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, also leaked a hint as to what may have been happening. The hint consisted of a short video of tacos, subsequently sending fans into a further hunt as to what this newest trail of breadcrumbs might mean.
Luckily for the devoted masses of Fortnite players, this upset was only temporary and was in fact a harbinger of positive, upward change for the series. The black hole that sucked the entire world of Fortnite into it was actually the catalyst that would bring about Fortnite: Chapter 2, the continuation of the progressively updated world of Fortnite.
Epic Games, the developers of Fortnite, instead of continuing the game into its eleventh season, opted rather to begin again with a brand-new map in a sort of karmic cycle of rebirth that ousted the old setting of the game and brought in a new fresh canvas, ready to be transformed into a landscape of competitive gameplay.
This rebirth was brought with an event concluding season ten that showcased the old map of Fortnite Island being sucked into a black hole after a missile strike tore a hole in the sky. This finally brought to an end the questions surrounding the tears in space that began to crop up around the map in earlier seasons of the game.
Even though this occurred almost a month ago, there are still questions surrounding what this new chapter will bring in the future. A battle pass trailer was released once the game was playable, and running, but aside from the content presented within, nothing else is known about chapter two.
Only time will tell what new content chapter two will bring, will it be improved gameplay and balance patches? Maybe. Will it bring new skins, dances, and memes? Most definitely. There is one thing that is certain, Fortnite isn’t going anywhere. Epic Games who brings in tens of millions of dollars from the Fortnite IP, can afford to take risks with this franchise, such as shutting down their biggest cash cow and keeping players waiting in anticipation for days.
