Fortnite only has one map, and it’s not very large when compared to the speed of the players and the number who drop in during every round. If something new pops up anywhere on the landscape, it will be found and discussed nearly instantly.
A hatch appeared during the second week of season four, and players are trying to figure out what it leads to.
WHY THIS IS A BIG DEAL
You can visit the hatch yourself, it’s in the upper right-hand corner of square I3 of the map. There’s not much to it, it’s just a hatch. There doesn’t seem to be a way to open it, and you may find other players there trying to figure out the mystery as well. They may or may not shoot at you as you look around.
There are markings on the back of the hatch, and no one has figured out what they mean yet. But it’s nearly a sure thing that they mean something.
The intriguing thing is that Epic Games doesn’t just drop random stuff into the game. The company doesn’t tell you to look at something unless there is something for you to see, and many of the game’s puzzles and mysteries aren’t advertised in any other way. If Fortnite’s fanbase often feels like a group of conspiracy theorists, you can chalk it up to the fact that the game is filled with conspiracies.
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And we know this stuff pays off; Epic set up a series of in-game events and hints that led to season four, and the speculation and fan-created events were part of the fun. A hint at the future works so well because players feel like they get to interact with the meta-story as it unfolds.
It’s hard to overthink this stuff, because the rabbit hole often goes so deep. And in this case it’s pretty much a literal rabbit hole. I used the camera in the replay tool to look into the window, and yes ... it goes deep. This isn’t just a hole in the ground, you can see how it opens up to a large chamber below, even if you can’t see where it goes from there. It’s hard to tell from a still image, but if you move the camera you can get a sense of the length from the top of the chute to the bottom of the floor.
It could be a hint that vehicles are coming. It could be a link to the various lairs that have been found around the map. It could be anything, and we don’t know if the mystery will be solved next week or two months from now when another new season begins.
For now it’s just a door, and a mystery, and that’s the most enjoyable thing about it. If we can’t do anything to open it, at least not yet, it’s fun to speculate about what it may be hiding. Fortnite is a fun game to play in general, but Epic Games has proven very willing to play back at us, and that’s how to you turn casual players into loyal fans.