The Devourer of Worlds
Event Time: December 1st, 2020
Description: The Devourer of Worlds was our season end event for Chapter 2 Season 4. It was a Marvel Crossover event where players had to work together to fight of Galactus and save the Fortnite island. Overall the event was a massive spectacle complete with a Galactus attack, a save by Ironman, and a trench run where players flew their own Battle Bus while jamming out to a brand new AC/DC track. The event ended with the grand defeat of Galactus, and then immediately went into Chapter 2 Season 5 downtime.
Execution: The Devourer of Worlds was another collaborative event were we partnered with Marvel. We had a bit more runaway on this event, and as such tried to push the limit of what we could do with it. This was another large scale event, and we expected our CCU count to reach a record high. The event was going to be a culmination of Chapter 2 Season 4 as a whole, tying in all the introduced Marvel story elements and carrying players directly into Chapter 2 Season 5. As such, I had a supporting analyst on this event. I developed all of our overall testing strategies for the event and drove all testing asks for both internal and external testing teams.
This event presented a lot of the usual challenges we had seen with previous events. It was a very large scale event with a present third party stakeholder. We also had to endure extended work from home as the Covid-19 pandemic continued. A new challenge with this event was transitioning players directly into Chapter 2 Season 5 downtime. Immediately upon the event conclusion, we showed players a countdown screen to when we would be launching the next season. This created a testing need were players could get into the game itself without accessing any feature other than the countdown timer.
This event also featured two new features. Internally, we unveiled a new chat feature called Houseparty, and had to ensure that this mode was functional for launch. This presented testing challenge as we had to make sure the player wasn’t able to access anything on the game in downtime, but could access Houseparty. Additionally, we worked with AC/DC for this event, as a new track was featured during the event. Having two separate external stakeholders presented challenge as we needed to ensure all testing asks were managed with NDA and leak prevention in mind.
Overall, our team was able to execute all necessary tests to ensure the overall quality of the play experience, the event leadup, and the post event downtime. The event was a huge success, and a record breaking experience. 15.3 million people experienced the event, and the record for concurrent twitch viewers on a single content creator was also broken.
