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So I've been playing Fortnite for the past couple months.
No, come back. I swear I won't do it again.
Anyway, I've been enjoying my time with it to a degree, and I'm always surprised how little the game is mentioned around Fami (Likely because our userbase is over 13 years old and actually has a developed taste in videogames, to be fair). So today I'm going to correct that by giving everyone a deep dive into Fortnite, and why it might be worth trying for a bit at least.
Epic Games started developing Fortnite back in 2011, with the core idea of "What if Minecraft had guns??". Thought as a PVE shooter with building initially, the game struggled in development hell for a couple years, between surviving an engine change from UE3 to UE4; radically altering the art style, and generally having a bit of a lack of direction. The game would eventually release in Early Access in 2017.
However, at the time, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds had kickstarted the battle royale genre, and pulling massive numbers. So Epic quickly made a Battle Royale mode for Fortnite in a couple weeks, and released it as a free to play game, renaming the original concept to Fortnite: Save the World and selling it as an optional, "premium" game. This quickly developed Battle Royale mode rose to popularity incredibly fast, overtaking not only Save the World (Which I'm assuming was soul crushing for the people working on it for 6 years), but also most of the games in the genre.
Nowadays, thanks to Fortnite being the showcase for Unreal Engine, and Roblox popularizing the business model of outsourcing content creation to your underage customers, Fortnite sells itself as more of a platform with differentexperiences games you can play from the same client, all running on the same engine and sharing assets and other elements.
Fortnite: Battle Royale is what most people think of when we bring up the game. 100 players (It's actually more like, 60 players and 40 bots, let's be honest) drop onto an island from a flying bus called the Battle Bus, and spend the next 22 minutes trying to be the last person standing. To keep everyone moving, a circular wall called The Storm progressively gets smaller and moves around, surrounding the intended play area with the lava area in Metroid Other M a space where you lose HP constantly.
To survive, you need to seek out weapons (That come in different rarities depending on damage), different utility items, vehicles (That run out of fuel unless you remember to stop at the different gas stations in the map and refill the tank), food (You can actually hunt random cartoon animals for meat, loot vegetable boxes, or spend a couple minutes fishing and being a sitting target), materials to build different structures for defense and traversal, seek out world bosses and take them down for weapons and extra abilities... The appeal of the game is that there's by now a hilarious amount of things you can do, and remembering all of these options can save your life at some point during the 22 minute matches. Play variety is at display here, and two rounds will rarely feel similar.
Fortnite: Zero Build is... Battle Royale with the building disabled. That's it. It's likely the mode you'll permanently move into after trying Battle Royale and discovering it's not a shooter, but a game of who can build a tall reinforced tower in less time after sensing the presence of another player. To make up for the loss of survivability that removing building brings, all players have a regenerating overshield as a crutch.
Notice that even if you can't build directly, items that spawn buildings still exist.
Fortnite: Rocket Racing, developed by Psyonix, the Rocket League developers, after being assimilated into Epic; is a racing game with rocket cars that can jump, glide, stick to walls, drift, and pull off extreme tricks and airborne maneuvering. Despite being in a bit of a janky state at some points, this game is incredibly fun, with very open tracks that offer a lot of chances for creative shortcut taking. It also lets you use any car customizations you had unlocked in Rocket League, because why not.
Lego Fortnite is the game for people that saw Minecraft and thought "I want an actual Lego game like this". Embodying the four horsemen of the gaming apocalypse (Open World, Survival, Crafting, Early Access), Lego Fortnite has you spawn on a procedurally generated map, collect Lego materials, and build different Lego structures to have your new Lego friends live in. Fight monsters, explore dungeons, upgrade your tools, recruit companions, the whole experience.
Lego Fortnite is very fun, and it has a lot of multiplayer options that I wish were in other games (Like the possibility of giving your friends "keys" to your worlds, so they can play on them even when you're not online), but it's still a bit of a grind, with upgrades requiring a lot of materials, and a lot of travel around a world without any effective vehicles or fast travel systems. Also, despite the Lego branding, the building is still very much Fortnite based, being able to link together floors and walls into buildings, but not placing individual blocks (Though this is apparently coming At Some Point in The Future
)
There's also some parts for making vehicles and other machines, which are incredible for how much they'll make you appreciate Tears of the Kingdom and Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts for pulling off something similar a lot better.
Also most of your skins and cosmetics from the main Fortnite game get Lego versions in here. And they're very cute!
Fortnite Festival is a Fortnite branded Rock Band developed by Harmonix. That's it. You choose an instrument and one of the growing catalogue of songs in the game and jam away at it. It's exactly what it says in the box. And allegedly will be compatible with actual Rock Band instruments in the future, too.
Fortnite Creative is the fuck around mode. You get a small island and the ability to spawn absolutely every asset the game has, create simple trigger systems to add functionality, NPCs, weapons, vehicles, it's a baby version of an Unreal Engine editor, and it's incredibly powerful. And if at some points it becomes too small for you, you can easily move to using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite to create more elaborate maps and scenarios.
You can then share your creation, map, minigame or whatever you make in the Fortnite game browser, and have anyone play it. Expect to see a lot of clones of other popular games around, as well as a lot of "FREE XP FARM" maps.
You haven't explained anything about the monetization in the game.
There's a battle pass that covers a couple of the modes, with other modes having their own passes; there's some expensive overpriced skins that you're going to skip until you inevitably see one you love and sink money on and then replace with one you like better in a couple weeks; Save The World is still a separate purchase; and you have a premium subscription option that bundles battle passes and some extra cosmetics under a monthly fee.
It's free of gacha, instead using good old FOMO to squeeze money out of you. It's... well, not amazing. But also, everything is cosmetics, so it's not like you need to put money into it. I've been repeating that to myself every time I've bought something, too.
Okay, I'm a story focused gamer. Fortnite isn't for me, right?
Well. Likely no, no. The game has no plot per se, but there's a lot of lore and ambient storytelling happening, with big cutscenes and events between seasons to move a narrative that constantly feels like it's building towards something huge and rarely delivers. There's several two hour videos covering it all over the place, so I won't explain much here, just drop the fact Batman is canon in Fortnite, and Peter Griffin is a member of a secret society of villains.
Also Solid Snake and the TMNT helped fight said secret society? And now the greek pantheon of gods is involved somehow? And Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is an actual character in the game?
Does the game have good gunplay?
I'm gonna be honest, if you're aware of the concept of gunplay, you're probably above what Fortnite offers already.
I'm too old for Fortnite. Any tips to get into the game?
The game itself will recommend disabling voice chat on the first boot. Please do that. Otherwise, remember to default dance after killing someone, and no one will notice.
Any other thing I should know about the game?
The music legitimately slaps. Not like, the licensed tracks, the Fortnite originals have also slowly become actual bangers.
No, come back. I swear I won't do it again.
Anyway, I've been enjoying my time with it to a degree, and I'm always surprised how little the game is mentioned around Fami (Likely because our userbase is over 13 years old and actually has a developed taste in videogames, to be fair). So today I'm going to correct that by giving everyone a deep dive into Fortnite, and why it might be worth trying for a bit at least.
What is Fortnite?
Epic Games started developing Fortnite back in 2011, with the core idea of "What if Minecraft had guns??". Thought as a PVE shooter with building initially, the game struggled in development hell for a couple years, between surviving an engine change from UE3 to UE4; radically altering the art style, and generally having a bit of a lack of direction. The game would eventually release in Early Access in 2017.
However, at the time, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds had kickstarted the battle royale genre, and pulling massive numbers. So Epic quickly made a Battle Royale mode for Fortnite in a couple weeks, and released it as a free to play game, renaming the original concept to Fortnite: Save the World and selling it as an optional, "premium" game. This quickly developed Battle Royale mode rose to popularity incredibly fast, overtaking not only Save the World (Which I'm assuming was soul crushing for the people working on it for 6 years), but also most of the games in the genre.
Nowadays, thanks to Fortnite being the showcase for Unreal Engine, and Roblox popularizing the business model of outsourcing content creation to your underage customers, Fortnite sells itself as more of a platform with different
Okay but what are the actual games in here?
Fortnite: Battle Royale is what most people think of when we bring up the game. 100 players (It's actually more like, 60 players and 40 bots, let's be honest) drop onto an island from a flying bus called the Battle Bus, and spend the next 22 minutes trying to be the last person standing. To keep everyone moving, a circular wall called The Storm progressively gets smaller and moves around, surrounding the intended play area with
To survive, you need to seek out weapons (That come in different rarities depending on damage), different utility items, vehicles (That run out of fuel unless you remember to stop at the different gas stations in the map and refill the tank), food (You can actually hunt random cartoon animals for meat, loot vegetable boxes, or spend a couple minutes fishing and being a sitting target), materials to build different structures for defense and traversal, seek out world bosses and take them down for weapons and extra abilities... The appeal of the game is that there's by now a hilarious amount of things you can do, and remembering all of these options can save your life at some point during the 22 minute matches. Play variety is at display here, and two rounds will rarely feel similar.
Fortnite: Zero Build is... Battle Royale with the building disabled. That's it. It's likely the mode you'll permanently move into after trying Battle Royale and discovering it's not a shooter, but a game of who can build a tall reinforced tower in less time after sensing the presence of another player. To make up for the loss of survivability that removing building brings, all players have a regenerating overshield as a crutch.
Notice that even if you can't build directly, items that spawn buildings still exist.
Fortnite: Rocket Racing, developed by Psyonix, the Rocket League developers, after being assimilated into Epic; is a racing game with rocket cars that can jump, glide, stick to walls, drift, and pull off extreme tricks and airborne maneuvering. Despite being in a bit of a janky state at some points, this game is incredibly fun, with very open tracks that offer a lot of chances for creative shortcut taking. It also lets you use any car customizations you had unlocked in Rocket League, because why not.
Lego Fortnite is the game for people that saw Minecraft and thought "I want an actual Lego game like this". Embodying the four horsemen of the gaming apocalypse (Open World, Survival, Crafting, Early Access), Lego Fortnite has you spawn on a procedurally generated map, collect Lego materials, and build different Lego structures to have your new Lego friends live in. Fight monsters, explore dungeons, upgrade your tools, recruit companions, the whole experience.
Lego Fortnite is very fun, and it has a lot of multiplayer options that I wish were in other games (Like the possibility of giving your friends "keys" to your worlds, so they can play on them even when you're not online), but it's still a bit of a grind, with upgrades requiring a lot of materials, and a lot of travel around a world without any effective vehicles or fast travel systems. Also, despite the Lego branding, the building is still very much Fortnite based, being able to link together floors and walls into buildings, but not placing individual blocks (Though this is apparently coming At Some Point in The Future
)There's also some parts for making vehicles and other machines, which are incredible for how much they'll make you appreciate Tears of the Kingdom and Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts for pulling off something similar a lot better.
Also most of your skins and cosmetics from the main Fortnite game get Lego versions in here. And they're very cute!
Fortnite Festival is a Fortnite branded Rock Band developed by Harmonix. That's it. You choose an instrument and one of the growing catalogue of songs in the game and jam away at it. It's exactly what it says in the box. And allegedly will be compatible with actual Rock Band instruments in the future, too.
Fortnite Creative is the fuck around mode. You get a small island and the ability to spawn absolutely every asset the game has, create simple trigger systems to add functionality, NPCs, weapons, vehicles, it's a baby version of an Unreal Engine editor, and it's incredibly powerful. And if at some points it becomes too small for you, you can easily move to using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite to create more elaborate maps and scenarios.
You can then share your creation, map, minigame or whatever you make in the Fortnite game browser, and have anyone play it. Expect to see a lot of clones of other popular games around, as well as a lot of "FREE XP FARM" maps.
FAQ (Fortnite Asked Questions)
You haven't explained anything about the monetization in the game.
There's a battle pass that covers a couple of the modes, with other modes having their own passes; there's some expensive overpriced skins that you're going to skip until you inevitably see one you love and sink money on and then replace with one you like better in a couple weeks; Save The World is still a separate purchase; and you have a premium subscription option that bundles battle passes and some extra cosmetics under a monthly fee.
It's free of gacha, instead using good old FOMO to squeeze money out of you. It's... well, not amazing. But also, everything is cosmetics, so it's not like you need to put money into it. I've been repeating that to myself every time I've bought something, too.
Okay, I'm a story focused gamer. Fortnite isn't for me, right?
Well. Likely no, no. The game has no plot per se, but there's a lot of lore and ambient storytelling happening, with big cutscenes and events between seasons to move a narrative that constantly feels like it's building towards something huge and rarely delivers. There's several two hour videos covering it all over the place, so I won't explain much here, just drop the fact Batman is canon in Fortnite, and Peter Griffin is a member of a secret society of villains.
Also Solid Snake and the TMNT helped fight said secret society? And now the greek pantheon of gods is involved somehow? And Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is an actual character in the game?
Does the game have good gunplay?
I'm gonna be honest, if you're aware of the concept of gunplay, you're probably above what Fortnite offers already.
I'm too old for Fortnite. Any tips to get into the game?
The game itself will recommend disabling voice chat on the first boot. Please do that. Otherwise, remember to default dance after killing someone, and no one will notice.
Any other thing I should know about the game?
The music legitimately slaps. Not like, the licensed tracks, the Fortnite originals have also slowly become actual bangers.
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