A 'Fortnite' Rocket Launch Seems Imminent to Reshape the Game for Season 5
Something huge could happen over the weekend.
The action-packed (if somewhat vague) plot for Fortnite Season 4 included meteors, impact craters, and tons of superheroes and supervillains. Now, Epic Games is teasing something new: an impending rocket launch started by the villain known as “The Visitor,” one that players might be able to control to cause destruction across the map in the lead-up to Season 5.
On Sunday, Fortnite data-miners @TwoEpicBuddies tweeted that the rocket launch would be an in-game event of sorts during which players could launch the rocket themselves. They also shared that it was scheduled for 1 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday. TV screens across the Battle Royale island also began showing a countdown to Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern, but only on the Nintendo Switch version of the game. When the countdown finished … nothing happened.
But at some point around Tuesday morning, a new counter began in some instances of the game. Redditor AnarchyDT posted about a new countdown in the base on what looks like either the PC version or Xbox One version.
AnarchyDT posted an image of a countdown in their game of 'Fortnite: Battle Royale'.
Players can safely assume that something could happen almost a full four days from Tuesday morning, which could indicate that the rocket launch might happen in Fortnite on Saturday, June 23. (It’s tough to know exactly when this image was captured, and the timer seemingly doesn’t occur in all instances of the game.)
On iOS mobile versions of Fortnite, for instance, the hologram is active but the countdown is not:
There is an active control panel at the base of the rocket in the supervillain lair in 'Fortnite: Battle Royale'.
If the Nintendo Switch countdown was connected to some kind of rocket launch, then that’s seemingly been delayed by Epic Games for an unknown reason. Fortnite: Battle Royale is still technically an early access game and not a full, polished version of the experience. So maybe the delay was caused by some kind of bug?
Conflicting reports say that television screens across the Fortnite: Battle Royale island are all broadcasting either a countdown or a skull symbol, which we’ve all accepted as the de facto logo for the villainous organization that Omega, Omen, and the Visitor are all part of.
The lair housing the rocket actually looks like that very skull symbol when you stand west of it and look east towards it. Because these are the same television sets that broadcast a countdown across several Fortnite platforms, it seemed like they were all connected.
The supervillain lair just east of Snobby Shores looks like a skull and has a huge rocket inside it.
For the time being, we can’t possibly know what’s going on with this supposed rocket launch, but it’s likely that the countdown could trigger some sort of event that reshapes the island just in time for Season 5 to kick off on or around July 9.
