I’m sorry, did you think the day’s festivities were over? Epic apparently has more than just turning Tomato Town into Tomato Temple in store for today, as a global event just happened in the game that players are buzzing about as we speak.
The sky rift has been getting smaller and smaller in recent weeks, but today it’s turned a pink-ish purple, and at about 5:03 PM ET, it just made a loud boom and shout out lightning into the desert part of the map.
Like the rocket launch, this was a global event that could be felt in every game, across every mode, on every platform around the same time. My gaming Twitter just lit up like it was a real-life earthquake or something.
Here’s a video of the strike in action if you missed it initially like I did:
Every seemed to be reporting that it hit somewhere in Paradise Palms, but I did some investigating of my own and found exactly where it struck the map.
That would be a mesa near the lake campsite, one that you can’t get to except by building up to it or landing on it. There’s a rock there (with a chest) surrounded by an orderly arrangement of cacti.
As you can see from the photo, this is the spot where the lightning struck, as you can see the charred blackness from the hit. I don’t believe it actually hit something that was standing there (I don’t think this was a stone head location, as best I can recall), and it just hit the dirt.
I tried standing in it, dancing in it, but nothing seems to trigger any sort of effect. It’s just a lightning strike. My guess is that this will not be the only lightning strike, but I’ve been in the game for about an hour in Playground just waiting for another one, and nothing else has happened yet.
What does this mean? I have no idea. But we have a few clues.
This week’s loading screen showed a bunch of Enforcers emerging from the Motel rift in a way that does not seem especially welcoming. There are leaked files about some sort of upcoming event only called “The Cube,” which may have something to do with the crazy rift behavior we are seeing now.
Epic knows they have to do something crazy to top what they did with the rocket launch, and now we’re seeing unplanned, unscheduled global events like the lightning strike, which are presumably leading up to something big. I feel like we’re back in season 3 telling people to “watch the skies,” but in this case, that’s appropriate advice.
Have you seen any more lighting strikes? Let me know on Twitter.
Update (8:23 ET): The lightning strikes seem to be happening every hour at about four past the hour. There have been three so far. I’m not sure where the other two struck yet, but I’m investigating.
Update 2 (8:28 ET): Uh, I found something. This seems like a countdown using fried cacti as a a mechanism. What is it counting down to? Maybe there were only two, or my map didn’t update with a third. In any case, we may know in about six more hours, once we run out of cacti.
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