Fortnite’s Cube Might Do Something Weird With the v5.3 Content Update Tomorrow

We don’t truly know where the Cube came from, and we don’t know where the Cube is going. But there is one thing that we can guess: it’s going to do something tomorrow. We’re getting our weekly content update for Fortnite: Battle Royale tomorrow, and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t come with some serious Cube antics, either right away or in the form of datamined files. Last week we saw the lackluster Tomato Town replaced with the much more interesting Tomato Temple, and it’s entirely possible we’ll see something similar today. Season 5 is kicking into high gear, and it’s anyone’s guess what happens next.

To back up for a second: Fortnite has a Cube. The Cube spawned in game after a day of portentous lighting strikes , the last of which summoned it in all its glory on an outcropping in the Southeastern desert. It’s purple and bouncy, with mysterious glyphs and an ambient shield-recharging effect. That was enough to send us all into a tizzy, but then the thing started moving. Slowly, to be sure, but moving. It turns end over end on a regular schedule, and nobody is entirely sure where it’s going. Or more importantly, what it’s going to do when it gets there.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that the Cube will reshape the map in some way, maybe by sort of detonating an area and replacing it with something else. But that’s what we saw with the rift at Tomato Town, and so it seems like the Cube might do something different. It’s also possible that the Cube’s time has yet to come, and that it has another week or two of travelling before it gets to doing whatever it is it’s going to do. Regardless, I’m going to guess that we’re going to get a major development tomorrow, whether that’s a new area unrelated to the Cube, some sort of Cube business, or something else entirely.

Fortnite’s Cube has been a ride so far, and it’s really showing Epic at the top of its game. Fortnite, as a single match-based PvP game, is pretty terribly at literal storytelling, something we saw a little bit of with the convoluted movie and superhero concepts of Season 4. What it absolutely excels at, however, is simplistic, representational storytelling: the more obtuse the better. The comet in Season 3 was a prime example of this, but the Cube is on a whole different level. Its bizarre inextricability is its whole point: a 2001-style monolith that dares you to guess just what on earth it’s going to get up to. That’s…