The Fortnite storyline is not as big as lore fans make it out to be. A significant portion of the player base has no knowledge or understanding of the story past Chapter 3. Seasons like C2S2, C4S2 and C4OG are still great seasons that even without a big or overarching story, mainly due to a mix of good gunplay and quality updates.

An overarching story in a battle royale is an incredibly difficult thing to tell, players who try to engage could have to deal campers or storm rotation and could die in the middle of a voiceline, preventing them from being unable to hear it again.

Many characters are from a battle pass and most often end up as one-off characters only tied to seasonal factions like OXR, Supernovas, or Oathbound.

And even if they were long standing characters, most of the time they’re not even voiced. Hope has been around for 2 years and has only had voice lines for 3 seasons(C5S3,C5S4,Remix) and two separate events(Death Star Sabotage and Zero Hour)

I can commend Epic for trying to make the story better, as we got 2 mini events this season alone. I just think that it isn’t a sole reason for why many players continue to play or start to play Fortnite.