Fortnite

number one victory royale yeah fortnite we bout to get down (get down!)

I’ll admit it: I was a Fortnite hater for the longest time. When the game first introduced its battle royale mode in late 2017, I read it as a cynical knockoff of the progenitor of the genre (or maybe just the game that popularized it), Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. Add in the younger demographic that the game seemed to appeal to and I just kind of wrote it off as Baby’s First Shooting Game. However, due to my interest in Epic’s lawsuits against Apple and Google as well as the introduction of Rick from Rick and Morty into the game (I know, the show’s fanbase is very cringe and the show itself is also sometimes very cringe, but I need to get the Rick skin! You have to be level 90 and I’m currently sitting at level 36. We’ll get there!), I’ve recently devoted a good amount of time to Fortnite. Well, the game is really good! Quite good, actually. Let’s talk about it!

The core gameplay loop of Fortnite is really dynamic and constantly engaging. Cool. What does that mean? Well, there’s always something to do, and that something is generally split into one of two categories: searching for supplies to prepare for battle or actually engaging in battle. The first part of this loop, the actual searching for things, is really fun not because it’s this action packed affair, quite the contrary. Searching for supplies is fun because it requires you to make tens, if not hundreds of tiny micro-decisions over the course of a match.

What part of the map should I drop to? Which building should I go in? Should I trade my shotgun for some healing supplies? Should I trade my healing supplies for a shotgun? Should I trade my shotgun for a different shotgun, healing supplies for slightly different healing supplies? Each of these questions comes with much consideration and there often isn’t a definitively correct conclusion to come to. For example, that shotgun question. Why would I trade a shotgun for a slightly different shotgun? Well, there are many flavors of weapon in Fortnite. Firstly, there are different types of guns in every weapon class. Shotguns, for example, are mainly comprised of pump and tactical shotguns. The pump has a relatively high damage rate but a slow firing rate, while the tactical is lower in its damage output but higher in its fire rate. Secondly, for every weapon there are five different tiers, each denoted by a different color, with each proximate tier increasing in both damage output and rarity. So, circling back to my shotgun dilemma, let’s say I currently have a mid-tier tactical shotgun and I stumble across a higher tier pump. Do I swap the two and risk the pump’s slower firing rate, which requires more accuracy, in favor of the higher damage output, or do I stick with my trusty tactical, which is more forgiving of my admittedly poor aim? This is not an easy question, but it’s this type of conundrum that makes scavenging fun. Fortnite does not ask easy questions, it asks engaging ones.

Scavenging. Awesome. What about fighting other players though? Fortnite is, after all, a shooter, one that aims to crown one winner in a pack of a hundred, so its shooting needs to be fun to facilitate the long matches that result from such a large pool of players. Well, good thing the shooting is just that: fun! I have to think that this is somewhat (if not entirely) related to the pedigree of Fortnite’s developer, Epic, who previously worked on the gold standard of third-person shooters in Gears of War. Headshots, especially from a distance, feel great to pull off and it’s always great to get the drop on somebody with a shotgun (if you can’t tell by now given half of this piece has been me gushing about Fortnite’s shotguns, I really like Fortnite’s shotguns).

The way these two loops interact, however, is what gives Fortnite its allure. Battle serves as a sort of expenditure of scavenged resources, and sometimes the cost of an encounter can be great. A particularly heated exchange might exhaust all the ammunition from your guns and require you to tap all your healing resources to recover. However, if you play smart, sneaking up on other players instead of alerting them to your presence, giving them the opportunity to duck in and out of cover, you can circumvent much of this resource expenditure. All this to say: if you play well in battle, your time scavenging will be made much easier. If you slip up though, you can make up for it by finding the right resources in the time between encounters. It’s a really cool interplay!

I also want to give a quick shoutout to the audio design on display here. I don’t exactly know how, but for some reason other players’ footsteps always alert me to their presence and directionality with a high degree of accuracy. Also, on the scavenging side, there are chests littered all over the map that exude this really magestic hum which also alerts you to their presence. In an interesting combination of mechanics, one of my favorite things to do is find a chest, not open it so that the magestic hum persists, and wait for another player to be drawn to that hum so I can take them out. Classic Fortnite move!

So, that’s Fortnite! It’s a really good game that I imagine I’ll be spending a lot more time with. Give it a chance if you haven’t already!