Surprisingly, Fortnite is not just a battle royale giant or a creative streamer hub—it is a game that also has a story. You are not the only one if you have ever thought about what is actually going on at the island. The lore has engaged the audience for years, but at the same time, it has confused a lot of people. What has been slowly unfolding has been quite a ride as well; people who find it confusing have also been entertained by it.
Even before 2019, Fortnite’s world was loaded with possibilities. The end of Chapter 1–with its meteor that broke the sky and the mysterious fall into the dark–was that kind of a pop culture event, even people who had never played the game got hooked. Watching the island die from hour to hour made people emotionally connected, and it looked like Epic Games was creating a world with characters that return and follow the rules.
However, subsequently, that promise was abandoned. The plot of Fortnite has always been flexible, but lately, the lack of a clear plan has become the main thing that can be seen. Sometimes the story is the main thing that drives the action, for example, Chapter 3: Season 2, when the resistance theme was the strongest and at the core. At other times, it is only a faint presence in the background–such as Chapter 3: Season 3, when the story was almost non-existent. The changes in tone can be quite shocking. One season, you are fighting a reality-eating chrome monster, the next you are taking part in summer parties. For gamers who are looking for a stable, developing lore, this situation can be very frustrating.
Things got even more complicated when Fortnite began to unload the major parts of its storyline into comics. The Point Zero and Zero War series that were created jointly with Marvel and DC revealed a lot of the secrets–like the secrets of the secret bunkers and the endings of the massive live events. Is the thing? Not everyone could access them. Those who refused to buy the comics or weren’t able to get them in their countries stayed in the dark, and many of them had to turn to YouTube lore explainers in order to keep up. That move away from the in-game method of telling stories caused the story to be very disjointed, and a large number of the fans didn’t know what was going on.
At the same time, crossovers that seemed at first fresh and great have also been part of the mess. It is fascinating to watch Spider-Man or Batman coming to the island, and at times, those characters can be connected to the lore logically. However, most of the time, they just blur. The Seven, a group that was once enigmatic and intriguing, lost some of that when The Foundation turned out to be based on–and provided the voice for–Dwayne Johnson. The next moment, the border between Fortnite’s world and real-world popularity was almost like a glove that didn’t fit. Put on the pieces of Ariana Grande skins, LeBron James skins, or The Rock skins as Black Ada, and the universe becomes more and more incoherent. It is one thing for actors to lend their voice to characters; quite another for them to be the characters in a literal sense.
Moreover, there are the retcons. In the past, fans would come up with infinite theories that The Paradigm and The Singularity were the same, as all the clues and designs seemed to match perfectly. But later, the Zero War comics sort of reluctantly defined them as two different things, thus invalidating fans’ years of speculation. These kinds of retcons turn even the biggest lore fans into people who are unsure of what to consider as true canon.
Also, repetition has become a problem. The Fortnite story has been caught in a predictable cycle in its loop: the island is threatened by something, the map changes, and the heroes join forces to stop it. Huge trailers are made for every new season, but if you look at it closely, the storyline is always the same. For the long-time fans, it has started to feel like déjà vu.
It is not such that the Fortnite storyline is no more. There are limitless options for a universe, and the people surely want to see the lore being more deeply explored. However, until Epic Games succeeds in weaving these stories into something coherent and noteworthy, the narrative will keep being like a patchwork rather than a grand one. At the moment, the lore is as hard to catch and as maddening as ever.