Fortnite
Without question, one of the coolest gaming “moments” of the year is the introduction to Fortnite Chapter 2, where after a cinematic cutscene, you are thrown straight into a match in a seamless transition. You sail down to a map that is blank, covered in shadow and question marks, and you’re meant to discover all the new areas for yourself. I did it yesterday and it took about 2 hours of non-stop forfeits and re-dropping to find all the zones.
But something weird kept happening as I did so. This is a brand new map that looks very little like the old Fortnite map, other than in general, being an island. And yet I kept discovering old zones from the original Fortnite map.
So far I’ve found:
- Salty Springs
- Pleasant Park
- Retail Row, all back as named zones
- Risky Reels, now an unnamed Landmark near the middle of the map
- Weeping Woods, which seems like a direct modification of Wailing Woods
- Frenzy Farm, a clear reference to Anarchy Acres
Salty, Pleasant, Retail and Frenzy Farm are all kind of where their old counterparts used to be (Weeping Woods is very much not, on the opposite side of the map). There are also vaguely similar geographical features like the river that comes in from the north side of the map, splitting it, and a big lake with a big island, obviously where both resemble the old Loot Lake to some extent.
Fortnite
What’s going on? I thought this was a new map?
So, here’s what I think is happening here. This isn’t a new map, not really. This is a parallel universe version of the original Fortnite map, one that we were transported to after the events of The End that closed down Season X (and the entire game).
We know that The Visitor was able to travel back through space and time, hence him opening rifts to bring things in from the future like Neo Tilted and Mega Mall, and the past like Tilted Town and Tomato Temple and Viking Village. But I also think there’s a cross-dimensional aspect here.
During The End event, we saw the rocket launch as expected, but what was not expected was the revelation of a whole bunch of other rockets too, darting in and out rifts, finally with dozens hammering the spot near the meteor which ended the old map. My theory is that there were dozens, hundreds or even an infinite number of rocket launches taking place across countless parallel Fortnite islands. And once this was all over? We were thrown into one of the new ones, Fortnite Map X, to borrow from DC comics.
Fortnite
This also works with the battle pass theme of the season. Every skin this season has both a normal “good” version of the skin, and then an alter ego “bad” version of the skin. I do not think the idea is that these skins are turning to a life of crime, I think they are meant to be parallel earth dopplegangers of each other, similar to how we saw Brite Bomber and Cube-corrupted Brite Bomber a while back. This furthers the alternate dimension theory.
The end result is that we have a map that is both old and new. A Fortnite map where maybe a different set of disasters afflicted other than volcanos and icebergs and meteors, which is why some of the old areas remain, but there are fundamental changes to the geography plus a bunch of new areas that simply didn’t exist in the old map. And then some that are hybrids between the two like Weeping Woods and Frenzy Farm.
Anyway, I find all of this very interesting, and I am curious to see where things go next in Chapter 2 using this as the base.
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