Home » , » Technical Difficulties Take Center Stage at ‘Fortnite’s’ Star Wars Event

Technical Difficulties Take Center Stage at ‘Fortnite’s’ Star Wars Event

No comments

Last week, we wrote about Fortnite’s special Star Wars event, where the game would premiere an exclusive clip from The Rise of Skywalker. The event took place as scheduled this Saturday, but when I attempted to join a match to cover it, I instead joined thousands of others in staring at a forever-buffering log-in screen. This, for me, was the event (until I gave up and just watched a livestream).

Festivities kicked off at 1:30, when the virtual doors officially opened. But when I attempted to sign it at around 1:10, I already faced issues. I was able to fiddle with my settings for maybe ten minutes (sorry, zoomers, but I’m more of an Overwatch fan), before my client eventually crashed around 1:20. Panicking, I tried to log back in through the game client a few times, each time being greeted with a “login failed” message. Soon after, the game wouldn’t even open for me, before the Epic Games Launcher itself stopped working a few tries later (what if I wanted to play Control?).

I wasn’t the only one facing issues, with other hopeful attendees taking to Twitter to complain.

With the 2:00 start time approaching, I gave up on trying to get into a game, and instead turned on Twitch’s official stream of the event, which randomly jumped between different Fortnite streamers. Here, chat joked about common login failure messages, like “502 Bad Gateway,” while one of the featured streamers wondered if the extra traffic was coming from Star Wars fans who don’t normally play Fortnite (guilty). Others were worried they wouldn’t receive the event’s special TIE Whisper glider if they couldn’t attend.

At 2:00, game journalist Geoff Keighley’s voice boomed from the Fortnite map’s sky in the stream I was watching, telling fans that they were delaying the event by 10 minutes to try to give more people a chance to log-in, and assuring players that they wouldn’t need to attend the event to get the glider, just update the game. Keighley had briefly spoken with Abrams at Thursday’s The Game Awards to tease the event, and it seems he was our emcee for the afternoon. He also advised us to watch a streamer if we couldn’t log-in (ok…don’t know how I would have heard that if I weren’t already watching a stream, though).

At 2:10, after multiple failed last-ditch efforts to get into a match, a fleet of star destroyers warped into a darkened sky on the stream I was watching, as a squadron of TIE fighters engaged in combat with the Millenium Falcon. As the Falcon landed on Risky Reel’s stage, a stormtrooper who I could swear was voiced by Ben Schwartz (BB-8, Jean-Ralphio from Parks and Rec, Sonic in the cursed new live-action movie) exited to warm-up the crowd with Geoff’s hologram presenter avatar, before a Fortnite-ified J.J. Abrams joined them a few minutes later.

J.J. made a few brief quips about how his avatar was thinner than he had ever been in real-life, before Geoff pranked him by shooting back about how “anything is possible in a virtual world” and temporarily changing J.J.’s avatar into the default female skin for the game. J.J. did a shocked emote, and said “Dreams come true, my friends,” the one joke to get a laugh out of me the whole afternoon (my DMs are open any time if you want to talk, J.J.).

What followed was pretty standard Good Morning America-style banter, with Geoff urging the audience to guess what the movie clip they were about to see was focused on, and the clip finally showing on the big screen. Keighley and Abrams promised something beyond a typical press tour stop at The Game Awards, but for my money, it wasn’t too different from the “They fly now” clip that hit the media a few weeks earlier.

In this one-minute excerpt from the film, Rey, Poe, and Finn infiltrate what seems to be a star destroyer (but could have been yet another superweapon…), before Rey mind tricks a few stormtrooper guards to let them pass. Poe jokes about whether or not Rey has ever done that to Finn or himself before. That’s it. Well, I guess C-3PO was there for a second at the beginning.

As the screen went black, J.J. and Keighley asked audiences to emote, as they joined in with dances of their own. Abrams then wasted no time in leaving the event, but he did at least have the courtesy to Naturo run away, bless his manners.

Keighley then asked audiences their favorite lightsaber color, before another TIE fighter squadron interrupted the event, and his hologram dissipated. Schwartz’ Stormtrooper took off in the Millennium Falcon, before time slowed and a mysterious voice (*cough* Sheev Palpatine *cough*) spoke about the “work of generations” being complete and the “day of the Sith!”

Players were then left to their own devices as they were each given a lightsaber in the color they voted for and proceeded to whack the hell out of each other.

Personally, as somebody who doesn’t play Fortnite, I was underwhelmed. The clip was inconsequential, and the banter was, as J.J. admitted to Schwartz live on-stage, “a little annoying.” But for Fortnite fans, this joined Avengers in giving them yet another licensed toy to play with. If they could log-in.

On the plus side, assuming lightsabers stay in the game, Fortnite will join the ranks of Jedi Knight II and Jedi Academy as an online multiplayer Jedi battle arena, which should prove a treat for fans of both Star Wars and battle royale games. For me, though, I’ll just have to see the movie this weekend.

Watch the full Fortnite Star Wars event below, and be sure to update your game for that TIE Whisper glider…assuming you can now:



from Geek.com https://ift.tt/2PqJiuJ
via IFTTT

Related Posts:

0 comments:

Post a Comment