Epic Games' hit battle royale Fortnite has become recognizable for its collaborations, and few events made that more apparent than the introduction of Dragon Ball's Kamehameha in Chapter 3 Season 3, "Vibin'." Plenty of clips circulated online as disparate characters like Halo's Master Chief, Rick and Morty's Rick Sanchez, and Alien's Xenomorph fought using the iconic anime technique. However, Epic also has consistent original storylines with characters like Bytes, whose long-form quest chain demonstrates why it may be better to keep similar events character-agnostic.
Chapter 3 Season 4, "Paradise," chronicles a new struggle for residents and visitors to the island as an entity named The Herald spreads a liquid chrome around major landmarks. As of this writing a character named The Paradigm, portrayed by Brie Larson, is attempting to find a way to stop the chrome threat as entire towns are lifted into the sky for fear of metallic corruption. The Bytes questline presents a sort of alternate perspective with one character who appears allied with the chrome threat, but its value as a storytelling tool is somewhat undermined by gameplay restrictions.
What Bytes Brings to Fortnite's Latest Seasonal Threat
Bytes is a somewhat androgynous character available through the Chapter 3 Season 4 Battle Pass, alongside Larson's aforementioned Paradigm, Gwen Stacy from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Meowscles' younger sister Meow Skulls. They're such a prominent character that Bytes can be seen alongside Paradigm and Spider-Gwen in the season's key art, and a few weeks after "Paradise" began there came a tab for Bytes Quests accessible to anyone who unlocked him.
Mechanically, Bytes Quests serve as another way to reinforce new features introduced for "Paradise." Tasks include phasing through a number of chrome walls in named locations, opening chrome chests, driving chrome vehicles a given distance, and inflicting other players using Chrome Splash bombs, among others. Any character can complete these tasks, but only one quest is available at a time. Once its requirements have been fulfilled, players must put on their Bytes skin and activate a specific television somewhere on the island to unlock the next step.
These conversations with a mysterious entity named The Nothing help the Bytes Quests stand out. The Nothing has been referenced a number of times before, with Fortnite's Fandom wiki page listing appearances in the original Fortnite: Save the World as well as the Batman/Fortnite: Foundation comic. This malevolent force apparently comes from The Last Reality, which was home of Chapter 2 Season 8 antagonist The Cube Queen, and now The Nothing is recruiting warriors like Bytes for its cause.
Where Bytes' Quest Structure Falls Short
More will undoubtedly come of Bytes' connection with The Nothing and its chrome threat, as those televised discussions reveal it has been leading folks down a dark path for "generations" with few survivors. At the end of the quest chain it tells Bytes, "Be always vigilant. When we have need of you, you will be summoned." As interesting as this growing conflict may become, what Fortnite asks of its players now is handled in a clunky way.
For one thing, the nature of a step-by-step quest chain means many players will become annoyed as they discover basic, somewhat tedious tasks like opening chrome chests could have already been completed if each mission was available simultaneously akin to Daily and Weekly quests. Forcing players to be Bytes for conversations with The Nothing also disincentivizes them from portraying other characters the rest of the time. If someone completes a Bytes quest as new additions like Ash Williams, Summer Smith, or Mr. Meeseeks, they run into a roadblock if trying to unlock the next step of the chain during a single match.
Add onto this the fact that television locations change each time players advance their Bytes Quests, and it's clear the system was built so that players would have to feed their "one more game" mentality rather than to present lore and additional permutations of The Nothing's Gift tool in an interesting way. This is par for the course in a battle royale built around keeping its player count high, but detracts from the experience as Bounty Boards are full of near-identical Bytes skins to pick out of a crowd. Hopefully future iterations of this idea take the pitfalls of character restrictions into account.
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