Fortnite’s in-game rifts are growing, and the fan theories are getting intense

Saturday’s rocket launch in Fortnite has opened a series of rifts, or maybe portals, around the game’s map. We’re not quite sure what this is all leading to, but the tears in the game’s reality are getting bigger.

Let’s take a look at the evidence, and then let’s start digging through the theories about what’s going on. This is what the sky looked like right after the rocket pierced the sky. It was quite the show, and you can watch the entire video at the bottom of this post:

Epic Games via Polygon

Pretty cool, right? This is what the rift looks like today, with a teeny tiny player jumping in for scale. The effect is spreading, and that could be very good, or very bad, news for the players of the game.

Epic Games via Polygon

A player on Reddit has a much more scientific comparison of the rift’s size:

Discount_Pringles/Reddit

There are also rifts that seem to be growing on the map itself. Here’s one near Lonely Lodge:

Epic Games via Polygon

One strange detail I’ve noticed: The rifts on the map itself don’t seem to show up in the replay tool. Maybe they’re vampires, and the virtual camera is considered a sort of mirror? I can only assume that’s the correct reason for what’s going on.

There are some theories. The “Hardboiled” set of skins and items was released today, and all the characters look like classic private detectives. Epic Games also tweeted this:

One of the shops from Retail Row was changed to a detective agency. And the trailer for the Playground Mode, which seems to have been taken down after the mode itself was delayed, shows a number of scenes from different time periods. The justification seems to be that characters in the world of Fortnite are shooting a movie — and you can see the sets all around the map — but that doesn’t mean we won’t be traveling through time.

We know the rocket launch has something to do with the Visitor, the skin you get from completing the Blockbuster challenge. What if someone thought that the best way to shoot a movie was to actually travel through time, but the science went very wrong? Another Reddit fan thinks that it’s very possible that the Visitor hijacked a movie prop to create the rocket. But it’s clear that all of these events are leading up to season five, whatever the theme is going to be.

But yeah, it’s probably going to be time travel. Fight me in the comments.