Fortnite Season 5: What We're Expecting From the Upcoming Season of Fortnite

Fortnite Season 5 is only a day away. Epic Games has confirmed that the season will be starting on July 12, with the heroically-themed Season 4 coming to a close. And fans have been looking everywhere for hints of what will be in the next season.

This fervor was created by Epic Games itself. Ahead of the launch of Season 4, the developer started to hint that things weren't a-okay. It started small, with the appearance of a small object in the game's skybox. A controller vibration spelled out an SOS signal and new objects around the map pointed to a celestial visitor. Then things grew, with small meteors striking structures and players around the map. And Season 4 literally kicked off with a bang: a comet struck Dusty Depot, not the expected target of Tilted Towers. The destruction turned the area in Dusty Divot and opened up the prison, freeing the supervillain Omega.

It was an interesting experiment in storytelling for Epic Games and it's one that the community has enjoyed. So with Fortnite Season 5 on the horizon, everyone is looking at the overt teasers and hidden easter eggs to see where the season might go. Here's what's hiding out there and what it might mean.

Fortnite Season 5: It All Comes Back to the Rifts

Alongside the story of the villain Omega, Fortnite slowly began to tease a rocket launch. The rocket itself was hidden in a secret mountain base near Snobby Shores. There were warnings on televisions around the map and then a countdown appeared near the rocket itself. When it launched on June 30, the rocket turned to hit Tilted Towers, only to disappear into a rift. It teleported around the map from rift to rift, until it left a permanent tear in the sky.

A day later, rifts were appearing elsewhere around the map and the crack in the sky actually got bigger. Then players started noticing a purple mist alongside the rifts, with certain landmarks around the map disappearing, like the Motel sign, the Durr Burger mascot, or the Uncle Pete's Pizza mascot. If you happened to log into a match at the right time, you could actually watch the landmarks wink out of existence.

Fortnite Season 5: In The Real World

Players didn't know where the landmarks were going until a photographer found the Durr Burger out in the Californian desert. This started an old school scavenger hunt. An "agent" at the location warned people about an anomaly and gave a card with a phone number. Poking at the phone number revealed a secret message that pointed to map coordinates somewhere in Paris, outside of a historical research center.

Real-life versions of Fortnite's llama pinatas began appearing in European cities. The first was spotted in London, England, but others appeared in Cologne, Germany; Barcelona, Spain; and Warsaw, Poland.

Fortnite Season 5: New Objects in Game

Things weren't just winking out of existence though. New objects and structures were appearing in-game as well, usually preceded by clouds of the strange mist. A ship's anchor appeared out of one portal on the side of a mountain. An Old West stagecoach appeared north of Moisty Mires. The most recent transplant is a set of misshapen bones, also near Moisty Mires.

There's also been other non-portal additions to to the map. Last week, Epic Games updated Fortnite with new hardboiled detective skins. There's also a few items, like the Magnifying Glass pickaxe, Detective kit backpack, and the new Drum Gun. Over in Retail Row, there's also a brand-new Detective Agency building, making up for the disappearing Bowling Alley sign.

Fortnite Season 5: Nearing Endgame

Then Epic Games decided to become more overt in their teases this week. Yesterday's tease on Twitter involved a mask, that many people believe to represent a Japanese kitsune yokai, or fox demon, a creature that can manipulate time and space in some stories. Today's teaser image is what looks to be a Viking Axe. And in the game's client, the first teased image was joined by the text "Worlds Collide".

It looks like Epic Games is probably going to make some drastic changes to the Battle Royale map for Season 5. Dusty Depot itself has gone from a crater, to a research station, and a near-forest over the course of Season 4, so Epic Games isn't afraid to change things up. Fans are speculating that the oddities and rifts will continue to grow until Season 5 launches, bringing a whole bunch of anachronistic elements to the map.

The Save the World side of Fortnite received the new desert-style map, Thunder Route 99. It's entirely possible that with those new map elements and the stagecoach, Epic Games could carve out an Old West section of the map. And if it's starts there, who's say that we won't see sections based on medieval Japan and the time of the Vikings? The studio has a ton of resources to bring to bear on changing up the map and these time travel-related changes would also open up the available costumes for Fortnite Battle Royale.

These rifts allow Epic Games to make the map's landmarks a bit more varied. Not only does that look good from a visual perspective, but it also allows for drastic map tweaks in terms of elevation and general movement. Essentially, Epic Games has found a way to couch level design changes inside of the rough story of Fortnite. It's pretty brilliant.

Either way, we have two days before Epic Games opens Fortnite Season 5 to the world. Are you ready?