Think Fortnite is just a fun game where you drop into an island, find guns, and try to win over another 99 players? Well, it’s not quite that. Fortnite is a story-heavy game with tons of details, characters and plotlines. Or at least if you ask those particularly invested in Fortnite lore it is.

For most, Fortnite is a fairly casual game. Its many crossovers through Fortnite’s all seasons make it a bit hard to actually pin any story beyond the personal narrative for your quest in each game. If you want to try and get into the Fortnite storyline though, there is actually a lot to learn. Over all four Chapters to date, Epic has been developing a storyline that explains why we’re dropping into the island, other universes, and who all of the Fortnite characters are.

Source: GGrecon

Fortnite Lore

Fortnite lore has been running since roughly Season 3. It involved a group of Factions attempting to gain control of the Zero Point and effect ‘the Loop’. That’s the term in the Fortnite storyline that explains why we’re constantly rebooting into games, the gameplay loop. Rather than write it off as an in-game mechanic not to be considered in lore, Epic’s actually made the circular nature of gameplay into the story.

Lore roughly starts with the creation of the island by the Zero Point, essentially a Big Bang for Fortnite. The next major development is Geno discovering the Zero Point and creating the Imagined Order, or IO, to try and control the Zero Point to reshape reality. The IO uses the Zero Point to travel around different realities too, after Agent Jones first enters it. This is why Jonesy makes up such a large percentage of skins among any male or all female characters in Fortnite!

The next major concept for Fortnite lore is the loop. This is something the IO enforces on the island. It’s a 22-minute time loop that traps everyone on the island to prevent them from fighting back. Essentially, it’s the lore reasoning behind the circular games in Fortnite, including the storm. The IO’s experiments in dropping others into the Loop even explain how so many crossovers come into the game. At various points groups and figures have tried to stop them, including Jonsey.

While that’s the main plotline, the Fortnite lore has gone on a lot of different tangents over the years. There’s the Cubes, Cube Queen Ice King, and the Foundation with the Rock as its leader. There’s been a lot of lore and different storylines. That’s roughly the background behind the Fortnite games and its lore though. Along the way one island gets destroyed, and a new one is made, that island flips over to reveal a new Island, then gets smashed up and rearranged as another new one. Those end of Chapter events are flashy but it’s difficult to keep track of just how the island works when you consider the different ways, we’ve gotten new maps.

Does Fortnite Have a Coherent Storyline?

That’s the basics for Fortnite lore. It’s obviously not something you have to worry about for Fortnite esports, but the storyline does pop up fairly frequently in questlines and the end of Chapter events. The lore is definitely in the game, but does it actually matter for players?

It isn’t the biggest part of the game. You can basically ignore it if you want to. Epic also plays it a little loose and regularly just moves on without really addressing what happened before. If you want to really get deep into lore though, you’ll find the game actually does have some coherent storylines. Even on a character-to-character basis, like Midas dominating events for a while, getting killed off in a promotional video, and then coming back as a Zombie in the item shop.

One fun storyline that’s been going on for Chapters now is Peely’s lethally bad luck. He’s been made into a smoothy, dropped into lava, frozen in carbonite, killed by a Hadouken, abducted by aliens, crashed a truck, and flattened. Somewhere along the way, he became a secret agent too! If you want to pay attention, the different ways of storytelling in Fortnite can lead to loads of these fun little storylines over the seasons.