Well that was . . . interesting. Fortnite’s first live-event for Season 8 just wrapped up, and it was not a smashing success. For many fans, the event didn’t work as planned–an unfortunate first for Epic Games.
Fortunately, it went off without a hitch for yours truly and I have video of the live-event below as well as a bunch of screenshots from myself and Paul Tassi. First, I’ll describe what I saw.
The event itself was kind of bizarre, truth be told. It kicked off as a big team LTM with 32 vs 32 teams and a match goal of 200, so if you finished the match just as the live-event was starting, well too bad for you. A big countdown timer hung in the air above Loot Lake:
The big metal structure in Loot Lake wasn’t a flying saucer, after all (sadly). Turns out it was just a vault, and once opened during the event, you could fall down into it and fly into a low-gravity cavern below.
Here’s the vault opening:
This is what it looked like in the vault:
These tall, rectangular pillars near the giant blue orb had images of vaulted items on them, though I didn’t realize the Grappler had been vaulted to begin with. You could swing your pick-axe at the item you wanted to “vote” for to come out of the vault.
For some reason Fortnite fans thought the Tommy Gun was the best weapon to unvault, which is crazy. The Tactical SMG is way better in almost every single way. But no, fans have spoken and we get a completely redundant assault rifle instead. Hooray.
When the voting was over, the orb shot everyone back up into the map. The sky had darkened and smoke from the volcano made the sun a burnt orange. It looked pretty cool. The volcano itself was just about to erupt:
Once it began erupting, huge balls of fire started spouting out. One hit just south of the volcano. Another hit Polar Peak leaving a big crack in it:
Several of these magma missiles crashed into Tilted Towers, leveling Fortnite’s largest urban area:
Tilted has seen better days:
You can watch the whole thing in the below video. Start to finish it’s just around six minutes long.
This wasn’t my favorite Fortnite event. It pales in comparison to something like the Marshmello concert, and just wasn’t as fun as watching the rocket go off even though it was way more involved. It was also planned ahead of time with an LTM, so there wasn’t the same magic as sort of stumbling on this crazy thing happening in the game. I did like that everyone was up in the sky to watch it happen, however, as the view was much better than down on the ground somewhere and you could follow what was happening.
What did you think of the live event? Were you even able to participate? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.
