Over the weekend, Epic Games held a special real-time event that may have been the biggest yet for its smash-hit Fortnite. A rocket long-rumored to launch finally soared into the sky, eventually creating an enormous crack that points to further consequences for battle royale players over the coming weeks and months.
In June, a countdown timer started to appear on television screens located throughout the Nintendo Switch version of Fortnite: Battle Royale before eventually making its way to other consoles and PC. The timer ended on Tuesday, June 19, but players were still convinced that something involving a rocket at Snobby Shores was on the way.
That moment finally arrived on Saturday, and it was a sight to behold. As you can see in the video above, Digital Trends’ Nate Barrett was on hand to witness the enormous rocket soar into the heavens.
Players set aside their differences and gathered around the rocket’s departure point, and warning horns sounded to alert unaware players of the imminent launch.
After soaring off into the sky in a haze of flame and smoke, the rocket produced a large red targeting laser in the sky and appeared to instantly transport between several different positions. Eventually, it burst back up into the air, disappeared, and left a huge crack in the sky — almost like a piece of glass had been smashed with a hammer.
Almost immediately after the event had concluded, the Fortnite players returned to blasting each other into oblivion as if nothing has occurred at all, but we’re almost positive we haven’t seen the last of this phenomenon. Whether the rocket’s behavior has anything to do with interdimensional travel, or possibly a darker understanding of the reality of battle royale play, remains to be seen, but these sorts of events have certainly kept players more engaged than standard last-man-standing matches would have. It appears the cracks have also begun to expand, as well, and appear to be consuming objects on the original map.
Fortnite: Battle Royale is now available for free on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch, and iOS, with an Android release coming this summer. Most versions of the game support cross-platform play, though the PlayStation 4 is still unable to connect to either the Xbox One or the Nintendo Switch.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.