Look, I don't want to be the guy who cares way too much about Fortnite's overall storyline. But I play this game too much. Every season I do every quest and complete every piece of what passes for a story. Its version of a narrative throughline has never been particularly great, but it's nice to have a long-term framework so that seasons can flow from one to the next with some kind of obvious logic.

But as I complained about a couple months ago, Chapter 4 took Fortnite's story all the way off the rails, setting up threads and then following them up with something completely unrelated, in such a way that it seemed like a development calendar got rearranged. Despite that, this past season did seem to directly lead toward Fortnite OG, with the time machine at Frenzy Farm pointed at the start of Chapter 1, Season 5. But now that we're here, and there's no meaningful story content to speak of right now outside of some detail-free audio logs that Slone has left for Jones over the course of this season, I still feel confused.

Fortnite has a pretty standard procedure for when a new season drops--the absolute minimum has been to have a gameplay trailer that shows off new guns, gadgets, and mechanics, and a cinematic trailer that shows off the battle pass characters participating in the season's main story. For Chapter 4 Season 4, that meant showing Fish Thicc, Piper Pace and the rest of the good guy battle pass skins breaking into Kado Thorne's estate, where we could clearly see Thorn step out of a time machine.