[新闻资讯][230909]Fortnite Leak May Explain Why The Game's Story Makes No Sense Right Now

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fortnite-leak-may-explain-why-the-games-story-makes-no-sense-right-now/1100-6517589/

Donald Mustard, the chief creative officer at Epic and main architect of the Fortnite Battle Royale storyline, is retiring. It's a fascinating time for a change like this for Fortnite--the storyline in Battle Royale has been in shambles for more than a year, and it's only gotten worse with every new season in Chapter 4.

I'm not saying that's Mustard's fault. It seems unlikely that the storyline we've seen play out this year. Instead, as with most video games, the story has taken a backseat to many other concerns. When Epic changes its plans for something, the writers have to roll with it--even if it isn't possible to do so while keeping it coherent. While Fortnite's Marvel-esque story wasn't overly coherent in a good year, in the past you could at least track the big picture from season to season. Not anymore.

Now Playing: Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 4 LAST RESORT Gameplay Trailer

Epic is so tight-lipped about, well, everything, that we don't have a lot of hard info about the various ways that Epic has pivoted off its plans--technically, we don't really have any firm proof that it pivoted at all.

But a new Fortnite leak might give us a big clue: It indicates that the current season, Last Resort, with its new map locations and heist activities, may have been intended for Chapter 4 Season 2 way back in March of this year. This is firmly in rumor territory, but this is the sort of thing that, if true, would help explain why the overall Fortnite story has been broken down for so long.

The details here, which were datamined rather than coming from an insider source at Epic or some other studio working on the game, say some of the files related to the major new locations in Last Resort are marked as "s24," meaning they belong to Season 24 of Fortnite. The problem? This current season, Chapter 4 Season 4, is Season 26.

This isn't hard evidence that Chapter 4 Season 2 was definitely supposed to be heist season, but it does make a lot of sense. Each season in Chapter 4 has been self-contained, not directly following up on what happened immediately before, even though what happened immediately before was usually a tease for what was coming next.

Let's go back to Chapter 4 Season 1. That season, dubbed Oathbound, involved a character named The Ageless--he was the boss who roamed The Citadel, and a snapshot of the founder of the Imagined Order--and another, Rift Warden Stellan, setting up some kind of portal at the behest of an entity called the Shapeless Man. The AI A.M.I.E. was very concerned about this portal, which could connect to other realities, and she wanted to use it to save The Scientist--one of the members of the the Seven who was eaten by Chrome at the start of Chapter 3 Season 4. After A.M.I.E.'s questline ended, Stellan claimed somebody had changed the coordinates in the portal and locked them, and that something bad was probably going to come out of it.

Separate from that, we got the Most Wanted event at the end of Season 1. That event had some plot: We were helping a criminal faction called the Most Wanted steal stuff from vaults belonging to a rival group called the Cold Blooded. It's impossible not to draw a line from this event to the heist-centric Last Resort. But we'll circle back to that.

Cut to Season 2. Mega City fell out of the rift in the sky even though it landed on the opposite end of the island from where the rift was, and the Japan biome joined the island. Neither A.M.I.E. nor Stellan, nor the Most Wanted or Cold Blooded, have been referenced at all since then. There was a single reference to The Ageless in Season 3, but nothing illuminating in the least. The only reference to the Seven since Season 1 is a calendar in Eclipsed Estates that shows each member's symbol.

In Season 2, the plot involved helping a bunch of Mega City crime syndicates--not the Most Wanted or Cold Blooded--get along with each other in order to defeat the threat of a creepy guy named Triarch Nox and his Unseen syndicate, who's trying to wreak havoc on the island for reasons that are never revealed. During the last month of the season, earthquakes began to regularly rock the island, and once Season 3 began, a huge section of the island collapsed and revealed a dense jungle underneath.

Apparently Slone, a long-absent villain in the plot, had been stuck down there performing archeological research to learn about some ancient and powerful people who used to live on the island before leaving for space. But this whole thing with the syndicates hasn't been mentioned since, and those characters haven't been relevant at all.

And now we've arrived at the actual heist season. There's a time-traveling vampire named Kado Thorne who's been stealing stuff from the island's past, and as players, we've been tasked with breaking into his vaults to steal them back. Slone hasn't been referenced this season yet. The Cold Blooded and Most Wanted aren't around--having a vampire as the leader of the Cold Blooded would have made too much sense, I guess.

Do you get the picture yet? Each season this chapter has essentially been a standalone story that has little or nothing to do with whatever just happened, with each new season just going in what feels like a random new direction that doesn't make much sense. These don't feel like anthological tales, but rather a disjointed attempt to stitch together the game's long-standing serialized plot amid a year that, for reasons we don't know publicly, has apparently seen a lot of shuffling within Fortnite. The idea that Epic somehow swapped out a planned season for a completely different one is very appealing in that context: It's an easy thing to blame for the story falling apart, certainly.

There are reasons to buy it. The Cold Blooded, as mentioned, would make a good name for a syndicate of vampires. But the big one is probably just that Kado Thorne's house is in the place where the portal was in Season 1, whereas all the new map attractions added in Season 2 were on the far end of the island from it. So while we have nothing that confirms any of this, we do have a lot of lingering evidence to suggest it's true, even if we may never know why the seasons got moved around.

Regardless of what the specific cause of the problem is, the problem itself remains: Fortnite's story is completely out of control, and no longer tracks from season to season. And now Donald Mustard, aka the guy in charge of this aspect of Fortnite, is on the way out the door. I have no idea what happens from here.

机翻：
Epic公司的首席创意官、《堡垒之夜》大逃杀剧情的主要设计师Donald Mustard正在退休。对于《堡垒之夜》来说，这是一个变革的有趣时刻--大逃杀的剧情已经混乱了一年多，而且在第四章的每个新赛季中，情况只是变得更糟。

我并不是说这是Mustard的错。我们今年看到的剧情似乎不太可能。相反，像大多数视频游戏一样，故事已经被许多其他问题所忽视。当Epic改变其计划时，编剧必须接受--即使在保持连贯性的同时无法做到这一点。虽然《堡垒之夜》的漫威式故事在好年份里并不过于连贯，但在过去，你至少可以从赛季到赛季追踪大局。现在不再是这样了。

现在播放：《堡垒之夜》第四章第四季《最后的避难所》游戏预告片

Epic对所有事情都保持沉默，我们没有很多关于Epic以各种方式改变其计划的确切信息--从技术上讲，我们真的没有任何证据证明它确实改变了计划。

但是一个新的《堡垒之夜》泄露可能会给我们一个重要线索：它表明当前赛季，《最后的避难所》，以及其新地图位置和抢劫活动，可能早在今年三月的第四章第二季就已经计划好了。这完全属于传闻领域，但如果这是真的，那么这将有助于解释为什么《堡垒之夜》的整体故事已经破裂了这么长时间。

这里的细节是由数据挖掘得出的，而不是来自Epic或其他正在开发游戏的工作室的内部消息来源，它们表示与《最后避难所》中主要新地点相关的一些文件被标记为“s24”，意味着它们属于《堡垒之夜》的第24季。问题是？当前赛季，第四章第四季，是第26季。

这并不是证明第四章第二季肯定应该是抢劫季节的确凿证据，但它确实非常有道理。第四章中的每个赛季都是自包含的，并没有直接跟进之前发生的事情，尽管之前发生的事情通常是对即将发生的事情的预告。

让我们回到第四章第一季。那个赛季被称为《誓约》，涉及到一个名叫无年龄者（The Ageless）的角色--他是在城堡（The Citadel）游荡的老板，并且是想象秩序（Imagined Order）创始人的快照--和另一个名叫裂缝守卫斯特兰（Rift Warden Stellan）在一个被称为无形男子（Shapeless Man）实体指示下设置了某种门户。AI A.M.I.E.对这个门户非常关心，这个门户可以连接到其他现实，并且她想用它来拯救科学家--他是在第三章第四季开始时被Chrome吃掉的七人成员之一。在A.M.I.E.'s任务线结束后，Stellan声称有人改变了门户中的坐标并锁定了它们，可能会有一些坏事从中出来。

与此同时，我们在第一季末得到了最想要的事件。那个事件有一些情节：我们正在帮助一个名叫最想要的犯罪派系从一个名叫冷血的竞争对手的金库中偷东西。不可能不从这个事件画一条线到以抢劫为中心的最后避难所。但我们会回到这个问题。

切到第二季。尽管它降落在岛的另一端，离裂缝很远，但巨城还是从天空中的裂缝中掉下来，日本生物群也加入了岛屿。自那时以来，A.M.I.E.、Stellan、最想要或冷血都没有被提及过。在第三季中有一次提到无年龄者，但没有任何启示。自第一季以来，关于七人的唯一参考是在日食庄园中的一个日历，上面显示了每个成员的符号。

在第二季，剧情涉及帮助一群巨城的犯罪集团--不是最想要或冷血--为了打败一个名叫Triarch Nox的恐怖家伙和他的无形集团，他们试图在岛上制造混乱，原因从未揭示。在赛季的最后一个月，地震开始定期震撼岛屿，一旦第三季开始，岛屿的一大片区域塌陷，下面露出了密集的丛林。

显然，剧情中长期缺席的反派Slone一直被困在那里进行考古研究，以了解一些在离开太空之前曾经生活在岛上的古老而强大的人。但是这整个与集团的事情自那时以来就没有被提及过，那些角色也完全没有相关性。

现在我们已经到达了实际的抢劫季节。有一个名叫Kado Thorne的穿越时空的吸血鬼一直在从岛屿的过去偷东西，作为玩家，我们被委托闯入他的金库把它们偷回来。这个赛季还没有提到Slone。冷血和最想要都不在--我猜有一个吸血鬼作为冷血的领导者太有道理了。

你明白了吗？这一章中的每个赛季基本上都是一个独立的故事，与刚刚发生的事情几乎没有或完全没有关系，每个新赛季都只是以一种感觉像是随机新方向前进，这并没有多大意义。这些不像是故事集式的故事，而更像是在一年中尝试将游戏长期连续的剧情拼接在一起，原因我们公开不知道，《堡垒之夜》显然经历了很多洗牌。Epic以某种方式换掉了一个计划好的赛季，换成了一个完全不同的赛季，在这种情况下非常吸引人：这是一个很容易归咎于故事破裂的事情，当然。

有理由相信它。如前所述，冷血会成为吸血鬼集团的好名字。但最大的可能就是Kado Thorne的房子就在第一季门户所在的地方，而第二季增加的所有新地图景点都在离它很远的岛屿另一端。所以虽然我们没有任何证实这一切的东西，但我们确实有很多持久的证据表明这是真实的，即使我们可能永远不知道为什么赛季被移动了。

无论问题的具体原因是什么，问题本身仍然存在：《堡垒之夜》的故事完全失控了，并且不再从赛季到赛季跟踪。现在，《堡垒之夜》这方面负责人Donald Mustard也即将离职。我不知道接下来会发生什么。