The ‘Fortnite’ Star Wars Event Was Bad, But Not Because Of Server Issues

Fortnite

Epic

I have never missed a live Fortnite event, but I almost did yesterday. The ability to log into the game was broken on many platforms through the entirety of the Star Wars event, and I just managed to scoot in at the last possible second on PS4 to witness the event firsthand. After rocket launches, volcano eruptions and monster fights, I wasn’t going to miss this one.

And yet I wasn’t wild about the final product. To me, this was possibly Fortnite’s worst event so far, despite being its most technically impressive.

The event began with a TIE chase of the Millennium Falcon in-game, and then a presentation of a new Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker scene by host Geoff Keighley, a Stormtrooper voiced by Ben Schwartz (Sonic/Jean-Ralphio) and JJ Abrams, the director, who actually got his own skin for this event. They showed the scene, which was less of a scene and more of a partial clip of half a scene, and then opened a box which gave everyone lightsabers to fight with and then it put them into the game itself after that.

This event just felt…weird to me.

Epic has been hyping this up like no other in-game event before it. Promoted tweets in my feed, a special plug at the Game Awards. There were claims made that this is the future of interactive entertainment and the game’s biggest event in history, but in the end it was all in the service of…being a giant ad?

Fortnite

Epic

Past Fortnite events have been cooler to me because they were about something significant happening in the game itself. All of them were incredibly memorable, and will stick with me for a while. The rocket launch, the Cube explosion, the volcano eruption, the monster fight, and perhaps most significantly, the total annihilation of the Fortnite map as it was sucked into a black hole which literally killed the game for a few days.

Fortnite has done some crazily impressive live events in the past, but even the “branded” ones like the Marshmello concert felt more fun than this one, which was…just a whole lot of hype for a clip of footage that was 10% as good as any actual trailer for the film that you can watch on YouTube with two clicks. I felt like the clip was actually the worst part of the event, and that this all would have been much better if they skipped the clip and JJ Abrams and Geoff Keighley and simply had the dogfight and lightsaber battles without this being such a blatant ad disguised as a “can’t miss event” in the game.

Epic is building something in Fortnite, something bigger than the biggest game in the world. They are building a virtual universe where we experience events as a collective player population unlike anything else in the industry, and yet I worry when I see events like this that it will become less about cool community things and more about corporate partnerships and brand synergy. This has been a season devoid of any new or meaningful developments on the map for months, and the first major event we get is a giant ad for a movie that is going to make a billion dollars at the box office regardless of its marketing. That seems wrong to me.

Fortnite

Epic

I fully respect how technically complex this was. The ability for Keighley and Abrams to present a clip like this live across every Fortnite server at once to millions of players is a truly impressive feat that we have simply not seen before. So on that level, I appreciate it. But it feels a bit like man walking on the moon and planting a giant flag on the surface with the Coca Cola logo.

Something just felt somewhat icky regarding how much Epic promoted this event and how they literally shut down the most played game on the planet for an hour just to show a forty second clip of a megacorp’s megamovie franchise. Different than branded skins or back blings, different than anything they’ve done before this. If this is the future of marketing, I’m not sure I want to see what comes next.

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