What a ridiculous letdown. Especially after all the build-up. Last season’s end with Fracture was lame but at least there was things to DO and some story stuff happened.
Let’s start with the build-up. As is standard, there was a special event at a specific time, in this case 1p, my time, CST (all times CST). I logged in a half hour early, which was the suggested lead time from Epic, and was greeted with a queue wait, of 90 minutes.
I let it go, thinking maybe it would jump ahead faster, but nope. 1 pm came and went. Eventually, I did get in. The news splash banner said there were additional runs, due to demand, at 4 pm and 10 pm. So I decided I could kill some time and wait for 4 pm. I did a Team Rumble match, then loaded up a Deathrun to try to get a couple more last-minute levels, to unlock the Golden Peely/Whip skin. I only needed like 2 levels.
Around 3 pm, and 2/3rds of the way through a 400-level Deathrun, I was randomly booted out of the game. When I reloaded, I was greeted by another queue. Another, 90 minute queue. You see the math problem here? I sat in that queue and walked away to do some other things, and well, I missed the 4pm event. I think a lot of people did, because around this time, the game went completely offline. It was offline, for hours. I pretty much decided not to bother with the 10 pm event, and it’s likely just being another 90-minute queue.
I was upstairs messing on my laptop, and decided to remote to my other PC, and, I was able to log in. This was, maybe 8 or 8:30pm. I loaded another deathrun that dropped a slow drip of XP, just to make my account look less idle, and decided to give the 10pm event a go. Around 9:30 I went back down to my PC. Unfortunately, as, I think, a side effect of the Remote Desktop, the interface and fame were sluggish. I killed the process and reloaded, again, hoping for no queues. Fortunately, there was none.
I decided on a skin, and decided to go with Arianna Grande since the event had this Eminem theme promoting it. Plus I think Arianna was the star of a previous end-of-season event (before I started playing). It seemed like a good fit. Finally, I was in a lobby, which meant hanging around the empty map with some other players for a bit, centered around the rocket at the center of the map. Everyone was mostly just running around building random things and emoting. There wasn’t a ton to do since you couldn’t break anything or gather mats. I even tried running to the edges of the map. Even trying to destroy gas pumps, they would just, flame up and not explode. Jumping off the map just saw you instantly teleported back to the center to glide down again.
Eventually, the countdown completed and the rocket was launched. You couldn’t actually interact with the rocket at all, in fact, once it launched, you couldn’t interact with much of anything. Your character is launched way into the sky and just hovers for a bit, while, something(??? I don’t know what) attacks the meteor and then the rocket comes back and basically, the island explodes… again…
This leads to an on rails tour of a Fortnite LEGO world, which was kind of leaked and known about. Which leads to a short race in Rocket Racing, which was leaked and known about and I’m not sure how much actual control there was from the player actually happening. Next up was the most interactive bit, when the players drop onto a stage and Eminem appears, as Lose Yourself starts up. Finally, some good stuff!
But there wasn’t really much, good stuff. You play a bit of Lose Yourself in a little mini rhythm game, and then the stage is destroyed by a giant Kaiju sized Eminem. He goes walks circles around you on a small floating stage raping some song I didn’t recognize, while occasionally destroying buildings.
And… that was it.
I went in expecting an Eminem Soundwave Series level. Instead it was a ten minute advertisement for the new modes coming soon. It literally could have been a YouTube video. All that waiting and hype for something incredibly lame.
