The Long Game
Progress reports on the games we just can’t quit, featuring the ultimate comeback kid Fortnite
H indsight’s great, isn’t it. In E308, Fortnite was a co-operative PVE game and nothing else, and we were unconvinced. “The blueprint is lacking something,” we wrote. “Some secret ingredient to lift the game above its mingled inspirations.” Elsewhere we cast doubt on “how Fortnite will captivate younger souls who’ve grown up in an industry saturated with realtime construction toolsets”. Whoops. Fast-forward a year, and Fortnite is the hottest game on the planet.
In fairness, Epic’s plans to pivot its muddled Early Access game to the hottest genre on the planet wasn’t publicly known at the time. Even after its surprise release, Fortnite‘ s battle-royale mode was ignored by just about everyone – save for the legal team at PUBG Corp. It seemed cheeky, even desperate, a Hail Mary for a struggling game by a past-its-best developer.
Again: whoops. Fortnite is a phenomenon in a way that even Minecraft didn’t manage, its appeal spreading far beyond the bedroom and school playground. Accessibility helps, certainly – it is free to play and was available at launch on console and PC, before spreading to mobile. But a game doesn’t reach these dizzy heights by simply being there. In a battle-royale context, Fortnite’s blend of building and shooting feels like something close to genius, changing the dynamics of the multiplayer shooter entirely. Lines of sight can be created or closed off, flanking routes designed on the fly. Yes, it borrows from PUBG the innate thrill of picking your spot on a map and seeking out randomly placed loot, alone or in a squad. But that lacking
Fortnite blueprint is, in this setting, its secret sauce. And as the weeks fly past and the updates roll in, we come to understand why the PUBG legal bods were so worried. No one knows a game engine quite like the people that made it, and to compare the speed at which Epic and PUBG Corp iterate on their games is far from flattering to Brendan Greene’s South Korean team. It’s not just about speed, however, but attitude. The developer’s decision to iterate on a single map has likely set a new genre standard. Epic is big enough to admit when it’s made a mistake, and has no qualms about tweaking, or even removing, new weapons within weeks of them being added.
That speed of development may reflect an understanding that this position of world-beating dominance cannot possibly be sustained. PUBG looked all-conquering for a while, after all, until Fortnite came along. Yet whatever happens, its legacy is assured; of a struggling game that was rebuilt at lightning speed, and became the envy of the industry.