Fortnite's Season 7 finale event could be the game's most important yet

Fortnite Season 7 is nearing its end, and Epic has announced its plans to send things off with a bang. The Operation: Sky Fire event is set to begin September 12 at 4 p.m. Eastern, as the Imagined Order squares off with an alien faction known as the Last Reality. But, in promoting the festivities, Epic has offered up a few specific details about the event that makes us believe Battle Royale as we know it might be about to change in pretty significant ways.

The lack of replays could be explosive

While the Fortnite faithful mostly doesn’t know what the Season 7 event will contain, teasers have given fans plenty to infer about it. As those who’ve played through Season 7 will likely know, the latest Battle Pass has mostly focused on the Last Reality slowly taking over various points of interest on the Battle Royale map. Fearing pressure from this ongoing threat, Agent Slone and the Imagined Order have asked players to embark on a series of Legendary Quests for the sake of research.

As we see from the above teaser image, it appears Slone intends to use some sort of bomb-wielding jetpack to strike a specific spot on the mothership. Once the event time arrives, the presumption is that squads of up to 16 players will use these decked-out Back Blings to fly into the ship, attach them to a target area while fighting off a bunch of aliens, and then escape just in time before the explosions ensue. Of course, it’s possible a few key spots on the map may be wrecked in the process as the ship goes down.

For those who’ve experienced a Fortnite live event in the past this scenario sounds like pretty standard fare, but what’s a little different about this particular occurrence compared to most others is that Epic has confirmed there will be absolutely no replays for those who’d like to run through Operation: Sky Fire at a different time. As one of Fortnite’s few one-time-only affairs, the implication is that something pretty big is about to happen. As fortune would have it, leaks also suggest significant changes could be waiting in the wings.

Kevin the Cube’s return has been foretold

Back in mid-July, Fortnite leaks made headlines with hints of an Ariana Grande concert, Naruto content in Season 8, and much more. Now that the nostalgia-drenched Ariana Grande concert has come and gone, the general assumption is that other parts of this leak are also correct. Among the predictions is the return of Kevin the Cube by the end of Season 7, which makes sense for a few reasons.

For one, the return of a beloved character seems appropriate given the slideshow of key events Epic focused on during the concert. What better way to get players hyped for Kevin’s return than a walk down memory lane? And, with Season 7 nearly over, one has to guess his return is imminent. In fact, Operation: Sky Fire seems like the last good opportunity to make it happen.

Kevin’s involvement, however, has gigantic implications in terms of lore. He is, after all, the steward of the Zero Point, the massive energy source that powers and controls the entirety of the Fortnite island. Is it possible that Kevin and the Zero Point could be responsible for powering the mothership? And, if that’s true, what happens if Slone and her followers destroy said ship?

Could we be looking at another black hole that disrupts everything and potentially introduces an entirely new chapter to the story? It’s certainly a possibility.

There were about 718 days in Chapter 1, and, if the current schedule holds, there are about 698 days in what currently exists in Chapter 2. That’s a close enough span of time that we could be looking at Chapter 3-caliber reveal. It would also explain why Sky Fire can only happen once: because, once the dust settles, almost everything we know may have been destroyed. Kevin the Cube is powerful enough to be the catalyst for that kind of shift.

Remember that leaked RPG?

In addition to the arrival of a traditional new map, Epic has also inadvertently teased that fundamental changes could be coming to other parts of Fortnite in the future.

In the middle of August, data-miners surfaced a series of images that suggested some sort of RPG mode, codenamed Saturn, was currently in its testing phases.

If Chapter 3 is imminent, as the length of time between chapters might suggest, the debut of this new mode could serve as an interesting way to kick off the platform’s next major evolution. We’ve seen Fortnite expand into a variety of genres by leveraging tools from Creative mode, but transforming a portion of the game into a full-blown RPG would mark a truly monumental turn of events. These leaks imply work on this idea is in steady development, so could the finished product be released in just a few days? We’ll have to wait and see.

Still, talk of an unrepeatable event presumably involving Kevin the Cube is certainly enough to make us wonder. There hasn’t been much talk about Fortnite Chapter 3 as of late, but it could be just a few days away.