Fortnite players who happened to boot up the game this afternoon were treated to a cataclysmic showdown between a giant robot and a terrifyingly large monster. The result was a kaiju-inspired battle reminiscent of Pacific Rim and with clear nods to Voltron and other mecha cartoons and anime. It was exhilarating to watch live, even though I watched it on my iPhone screen, rather than the PlayStation 4 I typically play on.

The battle started at a distance, with the robot firing missiles at its foe before closing the gap with a tackle that sent both flying across the map. Players who had been watching the build up to the event were able to buy one of two emotes, a pro-monster and a pro-robot one, while Epic also designed an in-game skin of the pink, cat-themed robot. This time around, Epic gave everyone an unlimited-use jetpack to catch the action from whatever angle they liked. Weapons were disabled, so trolls couldn’t spoil the fun for other players.

Once the battle became a close-quarters bout, the monster ripped off the robot’s arm and seemed on the verge of winning. But drawing source from some element of the island’s power — we’ve seen it before with the rocket that created a massive rift in the sky and past events that have transported players to another realm — the robot drew out a sword buried beneath the ground. (It was coyly hidden beneath the statue in Neo Tilted, with the statue itself forming the hilt of the blade.)

The robot put it through the monster’s skull, and then blasted off into the sky, leaving behind the skeleton of the creature with the sword stuck through it. It’s now a fixture of the map in all game modes.

Screenshot by Nick Statt / The Verge

What used to be a season-ending affair that would kick off a new three-month season has turned into a constant flow of big and small changes that take place almost every week, which typically culminate in a massive gathering like the one we watched today. Epic has also moved on from having events singularly focused on one object or action, like a rocket launch, and is now pulling off substantial changes to the map in the midst of active play, so players experiencing a live event can find themselves parachuting back down onto a completely changed environment, no update required. We saw that today as the monster’s skeleton and the robot’s sword became a part of the map that you can now fly over and fight on.

Fortnite’s live events are at the cutting edge of online multiplayer gaming experiences

But the sheer technical sophistication on display in these events leads me to believe there is a lot more Epic has planned, not just for Fortnite but also future games that build technology using the company’s Unreal developer tools. It’s not hard to imagine the amazing experiences a massively multiplayer online game could offer with this type of backend infrastructure, and the types of gameplay enabled when simulated, immersive worlds at the scale of Fortnite’s island can be changed and manipulated in real time without requiring you stop the software and install an update.

With the advent of cloud gaming on the horizon, it’s an exciting time to see where this time of fusion of in-game storytelling with live see-it-once events could yield in just a few years time. And, of course, Fortnite helping build that future, one mecha-monster battle at a time.

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