Zero crisis finale
Event Time: March 16th, 2021 to June 8th, 2021
Description: Zero Crisis Finale was our ongoing event for Chapter 2, Season 6. It was a single player narrative driven event that further contextualized the Zero Point, Agent Jonesy, and the relationship both share with the Fortnite island. Players were introduced to a new character called The Foundation, and had to use Jonesy’s portal device to close breakdowns in reality. The event ended with The Foundation sealing himself into the Zero Point to save the island. Players are able to experience Zero Crisis Finale at any point during Chapter 2, Season 6 when they first log in.
Execution: Zero Crisis Finale was a persistent single player story driven event delivered during Chapter 2 Season 6. This was our first instance of delivering a single player experience to our players in Fortnite BR, and since the event was persistent we approached the space differently than our previous events. We weren’t as concerned with CCU counts, but instead wanted to make sure the experience was organically presented to our players as they navigated through Chapter 2 Season 6 for the first time. For Zero Crisis Finale 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 very new set of challenges for us on the events team. Since the event was persistent as opposed to a single occurring experience, we had a heightened focus on the player flow. There were a lot of technical demands since the player would immediately experience Zero Crisis Finale after launching Chapter 2 Season 6 for the first time. Following this first playthrough, the event would no longer be accessible to the player. Given, we focused heavily on player flow testing, and ensuring the various states the player could end up in would still allow them to experience the start to finish first time player experience with Zero Crisis Finale included.
Since Zero Crisis Finale was our first experience developing a single player event, everything we worked on was relatively new to us in the events space. We still relied on our previous event experiences and what we learned while building them, but we didn’t really use Zero Crisis Finale as an opportunity to introduce new individual features. The entire event was effectively a new feature. We also worked with some celebrity talent for this event, as the Russo brothers were guest directors. We were also working with a new voice talent for a newly introduced character called The Foundation. Given this, our focus on security regarding external stakeholders was a familiar challenge we continued to execute during the dev of Zero Crisis Finale.
Overall, the event was really well received and players enjoyed the event tremendously. The event was so well loved that we enabled it for a limited time as a selectable playlist during the first week of the new season.
