A full recap of the Fortnite Chapter 3 ending event: Fracture

Now, we wait

Even if you don’t play Fortnite, odds are you’ve heard of the Chapter 3 ending event: Fracture. It took place earlier today, and in classic dramatic end-of-chapter fashion, a new island was forged.

Here’s what happened.

The Chapter 3 Fracture event kicked off at 4:10PM ET

Although the predetermined start time was 4:00PM ET, there’s a customary few-minute wait for events to actually kick off; which was also the case with Fracture. After queuing up, my party was warped to a very small island with a TV, which displayed a countdown ticker.

After the time was up, a cutscene emerged, which showcased The Herald (the big bad of this season) fighting a group of resistance members. Although it seemed like they were going to hold her at bay, she eventually prevailed after morphing into a gigantic goo T-1000 monster: and absorbed pretty much everything, the island included. Which uh, exploded.

Cue the actual event!

The island exploded, and a scavenger hunt to make a new one began

Paradigm checked in to let us know that “home [was] gone,” but our group of four was thrust into a medium-ish hub zone with more players, and were tasked with forming a new island. We did that through various tasks, not unlike a puzzle platformer or action adventure game.

Said tasks included:

• Finding Zero Point Fragments (orbs) around the hub, scavenger hunt style
• Completing quests, like finding matching objects throughout the environment
• Some puzzles/riddles, like locating objects that NPCs need, or finding/delivering other items of interest

A scoreboard was present for party members for a bit of friendly competition, and at certain intervals, more pieces of the hub were added on: augmenting the level with more platforms and challenges. After 35 minutes (at around 4:45PM ET) a cutscene queued up, signaling that the group hunt was complete, and that we had found enough fragments to create/restore the island.

Behold, the new island for the next chapter of Fornite

Here’s a shot of the new island from the end-of-the-event cutscene. Of course, we can’t actually explore it yet, as Fortnite‘s servers need to work some behind the scenes stuff beforehand. Expect the next season to kick off sometime in the early morning, US.

And that’s it! I really enjoyed playing Fractured with a group, and coming up with the solutions to the hub’s various puzzles on the fly. It definitely beats some of the more linear action-oriented end-of-chapter events thus far, and I’m hoping Epic builds on this idea the next time around. It felt like the makings of a Fornite single player game, really.

Chris Carter

Reviews Director, Co-EIC – Chris has been enjoying Destructoid avidly since 2008. He finally decided to take the next step, make an account, and start blogging in January of 2009. Now, he’s staff!