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Fortnite Landmarks Are Popping Up In The Real World Thanks to Rifts
The latest event in the extremely popular online game Fortnite is creating some strange incidents both in and out of the virtual world. It's all tied to an in-game event setting up the latest season of themed events for players, but this is easily the farthest developer Epic Games has gone to make things unique.
Fortnite is wrapping up the fourth season of its Battle Royale mode. The free-to-play add-on puts 100 players against each other in a last one standing shootout. This batch of content had a superhero theme. Earlier seasons were about medieval times and space, and the latest included a limited-time tie in that let one player become Avengers: Infinity War villain Thanos. The lead-in to season five featured a missile launch from a mad scientists' lab last weekend, which opened spatial rifts in the game world. And that's where things get weird.
Photographer Sela Shiloni was just minding his business in the California desert when he discovered something that shouldn't have been there. It was the friendly Durrr Burger mascot from the game, which disappeared in a rift-y flash on Wednesday. Nearby, Shiloni also found a police car and a sign, the latter of which read, "This site is unstable. Beware of possible effects." The notice isn't a game object, but it's a good heads-up for when a tongue-wagging burger mascot from a digital world suddenly appears in reality.
This dimensional displacement also doesn't seem to be one-way. An inexplicable anchor has shown up in Fortnite's map, and players aren't sure what to make of it. Some sleuths have examined the game files and identified it as a Viking Anchor, which has gamers thinking that Season 5 is going to be about either time travel or temporal displacement. Further examination has turned up currently unseen items like a Penny Farthing bike and an Old West poker table. It's unclear if anyone in the real world is missing a huge anchor, but if the time-travel speculation is true, some Norsemen had a heck of a time with their ship centuries ago.
Fortnite's fourth season launched with meteorites striking the world, and things haven't been the same since. Epic also used season four to introduce Gravity Crystals, which let players bounce around the map and avoid fall damage. This addition has been divisive, since players typically only like them when they're the ones who happen to be floating around like astronauts. It remains to be seen just how many new and potentially divisive features season five will produce, but a giant cheeseburger jumping between dimensions is certainly an odd way to begin things.
