Articles like this fall into one of two categories: either paid promotion by the author, or the author's unwitting corroboration of Epic's marketing with this game.
Since the beginning Fortnite has positioned itself as a social space, in itself this is not a problem. However, the ability to perform socially is monetized in an otherwise free game. This is emotional and social manipulation at it's finest, and contributes to why Fortnite honestly frightens me as someone who enjoys games.
The marketing for this game has been incredible. In-game events featuring real-life artists. Weekly events which push the dev team to the limits of crunch what has to be almost every day. It pervades any space relating to games. It's presence is unrelenting. It's designed from it's core to have as much mass appeal as possible and the barrier to entry is downloading Epic's launcher, so naturally it's popularity is off the charts.
It's the epitome of "designed by committee." It's soulless. It's success was bought and paid for by TenCent and I'm assuming the investment is at least doing okay, considering how much money they continue to pour into it.
I don't hate the game itself. It's aggressively "okay." Nothing mindblowing and certainly nothing meriting the response it's gotten. The response is almost entirely down to the marketing, and I don't like everything else about it. I don't like how it's shoved everywhere imaginable via advertising. I don't like the by-the-numbers merchandising. I don't like the fact that "default" is now used like a slur in schools for the kids whose parents won't buy them digital crap.
I just... I hate this. All of it. I don't know why to a great extent, it just bothers me.
It's a not-good commentary on you, not Fortnite and Epic, that you can't see past the cynical.
Fortnite is pushing boundaries for how to tell a story, it's creating a new kind of narrative, a new immersive way of writing that is worth seeing how it plays out. It's too young to know if it's any good, but it's distinct, and in something as old as storytelling, new things are insanely rare.
I've literally never played Fortnite, but it seems like a lot of people do, and if Epic can parlay that into something new, I'm very interested, even if I continue to only watch from the rafters.
I can see past the cynical fine. I've played it. It's alright, that's honestly my impression of it. The shooting mechanics feel a little loose, the framerate can jump around a bit, vehicle controls are wonky and change depending on the vehicle.
It's not bad, it's just aggressively okay. If this had a list price I doubt it would've been nearly the success it is. It's the upper echelon in quality for free-to-play.
I think you're looking for a more direct (verbal) story, and mistaking the absence of such as a fault of the game.
The point of the article, as I read it, was to describe how Fortnite uses its play area over time to build a lore, without words, and as a pretext of "battle royale" happens around it. The novelty here is how immersive the experience seems to be, from the author's perspective, which is something he doesn't believe has historically been possible with writing as we understand it currently.
> I think you're looking for a more direct (verbal) story
I'm really not. The "plot" involved in any multiplayer only shooter is at best, incidental to the game. It's almost never a selling point.
> The point of the article, as I read it, was to describe how Fortnite uses its play area over time to build a lore, without words, and as a pretext of "battle royale" happens around it. The novelty here is how immersive the experience seems to be, from the author's perspective, which is something he doesn't believe has historically been possible with writing as we understand it currently.
And I agree with all of that, my problem is that it's all centered around a game that I believe is fundamentally unworthy of that honor. A cynically produced product designed from the get-go to pry money from people's wallets, by way of manipulating their children. I find it inhumane and cruel especially to the kids who's parents aren't financially well-off enough to indulge them.
Games have a tremendous potential that I think is largely yet untapped, and it grosses me out that one of the first games with mass appeal to accomplish some of that is this... thing. This gross, manipulative, soulless little mediocre shooter.
It sounds like you're upset a game with mass appeal has mass appeal, because the very things you don't like about the game are what make it popular: you can play it on your phone, you can bling out your character with various skins (paid and unpaid), it appeals to the group of consumers with the largest amount of free time (and who set the trend for the gaming industry as a whole), etc.
That's how Fortnite got popular, and now it's using the spotlight it grabbed to innovate in the storytelling space, but all you want to talk about are the very things that end up being true about nearly every single AAA game released by any major studio in the past 5 years.
In other words, you sound grumpy, and you seemingly would rather take away the imperfect toy (and completely ignore its storytelling style) than see the incremental progress it's making as something of potential genuine literary value to be nurtured and grown.
You didn't mention the building. The building is what sets the gameplay apart and makes the game absolutely fantastic from a game design pov. (I say this as a professional game designer)
I disagree with this, Fortnite figured out how to deliver a video game in an agile way.
The techniques developed around building and combat are top-notch, the game manages to feel very challenging without being miserable to play. It might not be your cup of tea.
> I don’t like how it’s shoved everywhere imaginable via advertising
Not Epic’s fault. You can thank the tech industry for figuring out how to put ads on everything, I don’t see how this is Epic’s fault. Don’t shoot the messenger when your problem is with online ads.
> I don’t like the fact that “default” is now used like a slur
Again, Epic didn’t make those kids shitty. When I was a kid, it was all who had which Pokémon cards, the fact that the goods are digital now doesn’t make a difference. That behavior existed when I was a kid.
> Not Epic’s fault. You can thank the tech industry for figuring out how to put ads on everything, I don’t see how this is Epic’s fault. Don’t shoot the messenger when your problem is with online ads.
That's fair.
> Again, Epic didn’t make those kids shitty. When I was a kid, it was all who had which Pokémon cards, the fact that the goods are digital now doesn’t make a difference. That behavior existed when I was a kid.
I mean, Epic didn't make kids shitty, that's true. But they did explicitly create a situation where the ability to express yourself in their social space requires financial investment. Don't tell me that wasn't intentional.
But adults have money. Children do not, usually anyway. They either work chores or more likely, beg their parents, who may not be in a position to spend that money, and if their kids are playing free games, I'd say the likelihood is they aren't.
Selling crap to kids by way of their parents wallets is a time honored tradition in our society. Epic knew what they were doing. All the games like Fortnite do.
You don't remember all the gameboy accessories? The lighted screen especially was incredible back when a backlight wasn't built in. I was jealous of the kid who had the light, the printer, and tons of games.
If you think the kids who didn't have gameboys at all didn't get bullied because they weren't in the ecosystem, you'd be gravely mistaken.
True with the Gameboy, less so with the Pokemon cards. When you buy a pack, you're essentially pulling a slot machine lever. You hope to get one of those super rare cards (e.g. holographic Charizard).
Even if you weren't into collecting, it was difficult/more expensive to just buy the cards you needed for a good deck. You'd have to keep buying packs until you were able to build a deck you were happy with.
Probably the only thing that's changed is the immediacy and the scale: both of purchasing and of the social effects that come from the purchase.
I wish Nintendo gave away free to play Gameboys where you had to pay to get extra skins. I would have been happy to play Tetris with my default skin while all my friends with wealthier parents had custom levels and Tetris emotes.
> I mean, Epic didn't make kids shitty, that's true. But they did explicitly create a situation where the ability to express yourself in their social space requires financial investment. Don't tell me that wasn't intentional.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. They built a game and tried to make it as popular as possible, and succeeded. We should be upset that a capitalist entity requires money to participate? The craziest part about that argument is that the game is completely free to play. Are you saying that Epic built FN and monetized it specifically for kids to bully each other?
You are wrong, Epic has given away skins for free in the past, including letting people get an entire battle pass for free just by completing a bunch of in game challenges. You don't need to pay to stop being a "default".
I think service-based games have been the only ones to really mesh their production with an "agile" software development. Most traditional one-and-done games that "ship" usually have a more big-deadline schedule, even if deliverables are broken up into smaller sections.
I think Fortnite is the opposite, its designed by rapid iteration and prototyping. Epic had almost a decade to develop this game - and others - and iterate on them while they were financially supported by external investment and the success of Unreal Engine. It paid off when they finally found the right combination; skilled developers, excellent tech, accessible artstyle, free to play, battle royale, and construction. The only other studios that can really accomplish something like this are Blizzard and Valve.
Yeah, the idea that Fortnite is somehow "designed by committee" or less legitimate when Epic has spent the last 20 years iterating Unreal Tournament and Gears of War is ridiculous.
Epic knows how to make a hit game. Their games are almost always extremely well made and fun. Gears of War pretty much invented the cover mechanic in most modern shooters. To denigrate them just sounds out of touch, frankly.
I played Fortnite for a few hours because, hey, it's free, and it definitely has Unreal's genes with some building and last-man-standing techniques piled on top.
The difference in skill between me and the players who won was outstanding, just like it was back when I used to play UT after school. It's a solid game.
Like with most things in games, Gears of War popularized the cover mechanic but did not invent it. The cover system was inspired by KillSwitch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Switch_(video_game)), and there are earlier titles like Win Back that feature cover systems.
From the Wikipedia article...
In the design of Gears of War, lead developer Cliff Bleszinski of Epic Games credits Kill Switch's cover system as one of the influences they put into the game's design, as Kill Switch's lead designer Chris Esaki was employed by Epic Games and was involved in the development of Gears of War.
Fortnite started as a cooperative tower defence kind of game, it's still out there with a name I can't remember, but it was not a good game. AFAIK, the battle royale mode was someone's side project, thanks to PUBG being all the rage back then. The fact that fortnite even exists seems like dumb luck to me.
its very confusing when something super popular and profitable and very sell-outy and markety is also actually legitimately creative and cool. i think you might just be confused by that. try to be honest with yourself- if you played the game, and it was completely unheard of... you would probably be signing its praises.
I might be getting old. I hate Fornite as well. I tried it out, played a couple of hours, and my impression was "meh". It feels like a bunch of ripped off ideas from other games that do them better. And there's a problem with media that has mass appeal - it's the same with art or music. The more accessible the product, the more bland it's going to be. There really is nothing surprising in Fortnite.
It's because Fortnite is a soulless ripoff of GTA V and it has zero substance. The game is an empty void sprinkled with idiot celebrities who aren't discerning enough to understand that it's garbage. Fortnite at it's core is a game without a narrative, nothing subversive, no controversial elements, no meaning.
You missed out on the best part of Fortnite, the building. It's an incredibly unique, strategic, and skillful mechanic. No other competitive game has anything that is similar at all. I think they kind of came into it by accident but it's really quite incredible once you learn how the game works for high tier players.
> Articles like this fall into one of two categories: either paid promotion by the author, or the author's unwitting corroboration of Epic's marketing with this game.
> It's designed from it's core to have as much mass appeal as possible and the barrier to entry is downloading Epic's launcher, so naturally it's popularity is off the charts.
There's ten gazillion cynical, manipulative free-to-play games out there. None of them blew up like Fortnite. When it first launched, the gaming press was genuinely excited about it. It was the first really polished, professional entry in the (effectively) brand-new battle royale genre, finally pulling away from the jankiness and generic brown "realistic military" look of PUBG and its mod predecessors.
The game has become inextricable from the social phenomenon, at this point. It was mostly luck and good timing that pushed into into mega-success territory. But it was never bad or even mediocre.
Edit: Basically I'm saying that it's pretty silly to assume that just because you don't like something, anyone who does like it must be either an idiot or a shill.
I am always surprised at how much hate and disdain I feel when I tell people I enjoy Fortnite. This comes both from people who play a lot of video games, and from those who don't play at all. Somehow, it's become "cool", or maybe even the "default", to hate on Fortnite.
I am always surprised at how much hate and disdain I feel when I tell people I enjoy Comic Sans MS. This comes both from people who type a lot, and from those who don't type at all. Somehow, it's become "cool", or maybe even the "default", to hate on Comic Sans MS.
It's the usual refrain: "How dare you like this [popular thing] I've never done and have no interest in." Usually followed by: "People like you are the reason [other thing] is gone."
I'm not sure it's tribalism that causes folks to respond this way, per se, but it has some elements of it. I suspect all hobbies and pursuits in life deal with such negative reactions - it's certainly a thing in all the hobbies I've had. (Who knew model railroading was such a warzone?)
Best thing a person can do is shrug and move on from the haters. Be glad you found something you enjoy that doesn't involve tearing other people down.
It can be very obnoxious having a child on your team who doesn't care about working together. They also have a tendency to have to abandon games at random times, when I played destiny there were raids that could take a few hours, especially with people inexperienced with that raid, and my group decided to stop taking kids because pretty often they would get called off by mom and you'd have to start the whole process over again.
I've probably been guilty of that on more than one occasion and can explain 2.5 reasons why.
1) Battle royales suck. The entire genre. I grew up on arena shooters - your Quakes, your Unreal Tournaments, and so on. Getting booted all the way back out to the lobby to go through deployment again because of a single death isn't fun. It's making me replay the most boring aspect of the game. Call me when there's a popular one of these which has multiple lives or some other mechanic that ensures a single mistake doesn't result in ~5 minutes of being unable to play the game. I don't have the time or the patience for this.
2) Fortnite's success killed two games I was really interested in - Paragon, a gorgeous third person MOBA, and a reboot of Unreal Tournament.
Those first two are very concrete and have nothing to do with tribalism. The last one is a bit murkier:
2.5) Fortnite seems to be aggressively marketed towards children, which means its players are probably disproportionately children. Minecraft had this problem too, but it had a single player mode and private servers which allowed you to sidestep it.
That one probably carries the whiff of "kids these days", but when you consider that the game is going to be designed to cater to the average player...
> Call me when there's a popular one of these which has multiple lives or some other mechanic that ensures a single mistake doesn't result in ~5 minutes of being unable to play the game. I don't have the time or the patience for this.
Fortnite has numerous other game modes than solo BR where this would be the case. At it's most basic level you can play duos, trios or squads where you are "knocked" but can be revived by a teammate, or "rebooted" if you get knocked and eliminated. There are even more varied game modes that are even more arena-like: 50v50s where you immediately respawn with the same loot for example. I have no stats but I'd guess that these alternate modes are more popular than the main BR modes.
In response to your 1) may I recommend Counter Strike's Danger Zone mode? It has multiple respawns as long as your partner is still alive, and you can respawn anywhere you want on the map.
No clue if it's still in development but I recall a FPS where successfully hitting an enemy increased your size and decreased theirs. If you got a headshot, your head is now bigger and your opponent is now smaller. It seemed like a goofy way to level the playing field. That giant guy running around is probably at the top of the leaderboards right now. May have just been a gamejam project but looked neat.
I see a lot of gimmicky multiplayer games that sound fun and quirky but don't seem like they'd have any staying power. Like Cult of the Wind, that third-person deathmatch shooter where everyone is running around with their arms out pretending to be airplanes, and you can't shoot your (invisible) guns unless you're moving fast enough because that's not how airplanes work.
I love weird gimmicky indie games, so I thought I'd love Cult of the Wind, but...there really wasn't much there. And I realized an ultra-niche single-player game can find cult success, but an ultra-niche multiplayer-only game will probably never have enough people online at once to keep going, and sink without a ripple.
But people keep making them, so some of them must be succeeding, right?
There needs to be a mario party of niche shooters so that you can play them for a few minutes, then switch to a different mode. Otherwise the playerbase dwindles
You must be a really bitter person if you hate a game and denounce people who play it just because you happen to dislike the genre. I personally love Battle Royales and the fact that you only have one life makes it so much more exciting. Saying that it's objectively "not fun" is simply false.
He is talking about why he doesn't like fortnite and discussing the kind of FPSs he prefers in a conversation about why some people don't like Fortnite. He isn't saying other people are wrong for liking Fortnite and certainly not denouncing those people. Ironically the only person being critical of anyone's opinions here is yourself.
No, he says that he's guilty of what the comment he replied to is describing. That is, "how much hate and disdain I feel when I tell people I enjoy Fortnite". That's the context of his comment, not why he doesn't enjoy Fortnite in general.
But that still doesn't explicitly state anyone is denouncing anyone else. People will often vocalise a disdain for a product without denouncing other people who use said product.
Ok, maybe you're right but I read "how much hate and disdain I feel" as if he was getting denounced. Could be wrong of course and then my comment was unfound. With that said, I also don't understand how you can hate a game just because you don't like the genre.
It very easy to strongly dislike a game. In fact I've even felt angry if I'm playing a game which doesn't feel fair. Most games are designed to stimulate an emotive response because if they didn't then most people might find them rather dull. Unfortunately sometimes that response can be negative (how many times have you read about people throwing their controllers across the room in rage?). The key is identifying negative responses and stopping. If a particularly game is known for annoying me then I'd of course stop playing it and describe it as something I legitimately hate. That strikes me as an appropriate use of the term "hate".
I waited anxiously for Fortnite since it was first teased in 2011. I was hyped in 2017 when it finally released. Paid full price which I almost never do but I waited so long for it.
It was fun until you hit what felt like a brick wall in progression. If I recall it got super grindy really quick. People hated it but the company got lucky by saving it by adding BR mode. Things quickly started to become free and the game is a completely different game than what I bought.
For me it's not that I hate people that play it. It's sort of like waiting in a long line to go to an amusement park you've been dying to go to. You pay to get in and it's terrible. Then they immediately open the gates and let everyone for free and change it to a water park. I'm just annoyed by the entire experience.
I'm a big fan of some FPSs but mostly the arena type ones. Quake, UT, CS. I'm not fussed if it's team based, CTP or whatever but it has to be something with a level playing field (by that I mean everyone has access to the same weapons, etc) and respawns. Needless to say, I couldn't get into Fortnite.
For when I want a long term profile, weapons that carry over between raids etc, then I'd invest that time into an RPG.
edit: it's worth adding that I have no issue with unique avatars in FPS. I just don't think it's fair being spawned 5 meters from someone with a customised minigun when the best pick up you can get on that level is a handgun.
Maybe I was just hopelessly bad at it then. Or played a few terrible maps? I didn't give Fortnite an extensive play (primarily because I didn't enjoy the few games I did play) but it definitely didn't have the same feel as the kind of FPSs I normally play -- games that I'm normally pretty good at too.
fortnite (and all other battle royale games) drop every player in with nothing or almost nothing, it's purely random which weapons you find after arriving, although this can be influenced by learning where weapons are likely to be, and how to check multiple spots the fastest to increase your chances of getting them.
I don't like fortnite at all though, everything feels exceptionally random (bullet spread, damage, weapons, kill zone, you name it, it's got a couple RNG calls), the build mechanic feels more like a crutch for not knowing how to play around cover unless you really put effort into learning it, and even then it's basically "build 3 walls quickly" or "destroy a wall to shoot through it" type "skill".
It just never grabbed me, I played a few casual rounds and did reasonably well (top 5-10 twice in my first 5 games, with a few kills at least on average, no wins or top 3s though) but it felt like I got lucky, either catching enemies out and getting their good guns, or killing people who could barely aim, then dying to someone sitting in a shelter on a cliff with a one-shot kill sniper that they picked up at the beginning of the game.
If I want the BR experience I'll play Apex, if I want a wacky kids game where you can only "heavily influence" what essentially feels like a ball of randomness, I'll play Mario Party.
For whatever it's worth, Fortnite has taught my son that there are many ways in which you can target self-improvement. This has spilled over to sports and education.
These virtual worlds are fun to explore. I hope there will be a game or experience (ideally in VR) where we can experience the inside of an O'Neill cylinder.
It's interesting perhaps, but not particularly new. MMOs have provided existing examples of such things. Final Fantasy XIV had an in-game apocalypse (storyline and all) to mark the end of the troubled 1.0 version of the game, which was remade as “2.0”, very much not the same game.
I dislike fortnite mainly for its aesthetic. It feels like... social media. Highly commercial, attention demanding, fleeting, etc.
Yes I know many other games fit that model, especially things like popular shooters, but fortnite seems to have perfected it. Miyamoto’s big moment was figuring out people liked being someone else (Mario). Fortnite feels like a place where you are defined by others. And it feels gross to me.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadSince the beginning Fortnite has positioned itself as a social space, in itself this is not a problem. However, the ability to perform socially is monetized in an otherwise free game. This is emotional and social manipulation at it's finest, and contributes to why Fortnite honestly frightens me as someone who enjoys games.
The marketing for this game has been incredible. In-game events featuring real-life artists. Weekly events which push the dev team to the limits of crunch what has to be almost every day. It pervades any space relating to games. It's presence is unrelenting. It's designed from it's core to have as much mass appeal as possible and the barrier to entry is downloading Epic's launcher, so naturally it's popularity is off the charts.
It's the epitome of "designed by committee." It's soulless. It's success was bought and paid for by TenCent and I'm assuming the investment is at least doing okay, considering how much money they continue to pour into it.
I don't hate the game itself. It's aggressively "okay." Nothing mindblowing and certainly nothing meriting the response it's gotten. The response is almost entirely down to the marketing, and I don't like everything else about it. I don't like how it's shoved everywhere imaginable via advertising. I don't like the by-the-numbers merchandising. I don't like the fact that "default" is now used like a slur in schools for the kids whose parents won't buy them digital crap.
I just... I hate this. All of it. I don't know why to a great extent, it just bothers me.
Fortnite is pushing boundaries for how to tell a story, it's creating a new kind of narrative, a new immersive way of writing that is worth seeing how it plays out. It's too young to know if it's any good, but it's distinct, and in something as old as storytelling, new things are insanely rare.
I've literally never played Fortnite, but it seems like a lot of people do, and if Epic can parlay that into something new, I'm very interested, even if I continue to only watch from the rafters.
It's not bad, it's just aggressively okay. If this had a list price I doubt it would've been nearly the success it is. It's the upper echelon in quality for free-to-play.
The point of the article, as I read it, was to describe how Fortnite uses its play area over time to build a lore, without words, and as a pretext of "battle royale" happens around it. The novelty here is how immersive the experience seems to be, from the author's perspective, which is something he doesn't believe has historically been possible with writing as we understand it currently.
I'm really not. The "plot" involved in any multiplayer only shooter is at best, incidental to the game. It's almost never a selling point.
> The point of the article, as I read it, was to describe how Fortnite uses its play area over time to build a lore, without words, and as a pretext of "battle royale" happens around it. The novelty here is how immersive the experience seems to be, from the author's perspective, which is something he doesn't believe has historically been possible with writing as we understand it currently.
And I agree with all of that, my problem is that it's all centered around a game that I believe is fundamentally unworthy of that honor. A cynically produced product designed from the get-go to pry money from people's wallets, by way of manipulating their children. I find it inhumane and cruel especially to the kids who's parents aren't financially well-off enough to indulge them.
Games have a tremendous potential that I think is largely yet untapped, and it grosses me out that one of the first games with mass appeal to accomplish some of that is this... thing. This gross, manipulative, soulless little mediocre shooter.
That's how Fortnite got popular, and now it's using the spotlight it grabbed to innovate in the storytelling space, but all you want to talk about are the very things that end up being true about nearly every single AAA game released by any major studio in the past 5 years.
In other words, you sound grumpy, and you seemingly would rather take away the imperfect toy (and completely ignore its storytelling style) than see the incremental progress it's making as something of potential genuine literary value to be nurtured and grown.
I disagree with this, Fortnite figured out how to deliver a video game in an agile way.
The techniques developed around building and combat are top-notch, the game manages to feel very challenging without being miserable to play. It might not be your cup of tea.
> I don’t like how it’s shoved everywhere imaginable via advertising
Not Epic’s fault. You can thank the tech industry for figuring out how to put ads on everything, I don’t see how this is Epic’s fault. Don’t shoot the messenger when your problem is with online ads.
> I don’t like the fact that “default” is now used like a slur
Again, Epic didn’t make those kids shitty. When I was a kid, it was all who had which Pokémon cards, the fact that the goods are digital now doesn’t make a difference. That behavior existed when I was a kid.
That's fair.
> Again, Epic didn’t make those kids shitty. When I was a kid, it was all who had which Pokémon cards, the fact that the goods are digital now doesn’t make a difference. That behavior existed when I was a kid.
I mean, Epic didn't make kids shitty, that's true. But they did explicitly create a situation where the ability to express yourself in their social space requires financial investment. Don't tell me that wasn't intentional.
Thankfully adults don't judge each other by the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, etc. /s
Selling crap to kids by way of their parents wallets is a time honored tradition in our society. Epic knew what they were doing. All the games like Fortnite do.
If you think the kids who didn't have gameboys at all didn't get bullied because they weren't in the ecosystem, you'd be gravely mistaken.
Even if you weren't into collecting, it was difficult/more expensive to just buy the cards you needed for a good deck. You'd have to keep buying packs until you were able to build a deck you were happy with.
Probably the only thing that's changed is the immediacy and the scale: both of purchasing and of the social effects that come from the purchase.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. They built a game and tried to make it as popular as possible, and succeeded. We should be upset that a capitalist entity requires money to participate? The craziest part about that argument is that the game is completely free to play. Are you saying that Epic built FN and monetized it specifically for kids to bully each other?
Epic knows how to make a hit game. Their games are almost always extremely well made and fun. Gears of War pretty much invented the cover mechanic in most modern shooters. To denigrate them just sounds out of touch, frankly.
I played Fortnite for a few hours because, hey, it's free, and it definitely has Unreal's genes with some building and last-man-standing techniques piled on top.
The difference in skill between me and the players who won was outstanding, just like it was back when I used to play UT after school. It's a solid game.
From the Wikipedia article...
In the design of Gears of War, lead developer Cliff Bleszinski of Epic Games credits Kill Switch's cover system as one of the influences they put into the game's design, as Kill Switch's lead designer Chris Esaki was employed by Epic Games and was involved in the development of Gears of War.
What? It started a base building tower defense. I'm not a fan but this is way off, it's not like GTA in any way.
And you don't need story to have great gameplay. If you shoehorned a story into something like Rocket League it would actually be hilarious.
I can't imagine how you'd come to that conclusion unless you think GTAV invented "multiplayer on a big map."
> It's designed from it's core to have as much mass appeal as possible and the barrier to entry is downloading Epic's launcher, so naturally it's popularity is off the charts.
There's ten gazillion cynical, manipulative free-to-play games out there. None of them blew up like Fortnite. When it first launched, the gaming press was genuinely excited about it. It was the first really polished, professional entry in the (effectively) brand-new battle royale genre, finally pulling away from the jankiness and generic brown "realistic military" look of PUBG and its mod predecessors.
The game has become inextricable from the social phenomenon, at this point. It was mostly luck and good timing that pushed into into mega-success territory. But it was never bad or even mediocre.
Edit: Basically I'm saying that it's pretty silly to assume that just because you don't like something, anyone who does like it must be either an idiot or a shill.
I am always surprised at how much hate and disdain I feel when I tell people I enjoy Comic Sans MS. This comes both from people who type a lot, and from those who don't type at all. Somehow, it's become "cool", or maybe even the "default", to hate on Comic Sans MS.
I'm not sure it's tribalism that causes folks to respond this way, per se, but it has some elements of it. I suspect all hobbies and pursuits in life deal with such negative reactions - it's certainly a thing in all the hobbies I've had. (Who knew model railroading was such a warzone?)
Best thing a person can do is shrug and move on from the haters. Be glad you found something you enjoy that doesn't involve tearing other people down.
1) Battle royales suck. The entire genre. I grew up on arena shooters - your Quakes, your Unreal Tournaments, and so on. Getting booted all the way back out to the lobby to go through deployment again because of a single death isn't fun. It's making me replay the most boring aspect of the game. Call me when there's a popular one of these which has multiple lives or some other mechanic that ensures a single mistake doesn't result in ~5 minutes of being unable to play the game. I don't have the time or the patience for this.
2) Fortnite's success killed two games I was really interested in - Paragon, a gorgeous third person MOBA, and a reboot of Unreal Tournament.
Those first two are very concrete and have nothing to do with tribalism. The last one is a bit murkier:
2.5) Fortnite seems to be aggressively marketed towards children, which means its players are probably disproportionately children. Minecraft had this problem too, but it had a single player mode and private servers which allowed you to sidestep it.
That one probably carries the whiff of "kids these days", but when you consider that the game is going to be designed to cater to the average player...
Fortnite has numerous other game modes than solo BR where this would be the case. At it's most basic level you can play duos, trios or squads where you are "knocked" but can be revived by a teammate, or "rebooted" if you get knocked and eliminated. There are even more varied game modes that are even more arena-like: 50v50s where you immediately respawn with the same loot for example. I have no stats but I'd guess that these alternate modes are more popular than the main BR modes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBZ3POXEvRE
Cute, but seems more like a gimmick you might see on a dead Quake server than something you can base a game around.
I love weird gimmicky indie games, so I thought I'd love Cult of the Wind, but...there really wasn't much there. And I realized an ultra-niche single-player game can find cult success, but an ultra-niche multiplayer-only game will probably never have enough people online at once to keep going, and sink without a ripple.
But people keep making them, so some of them must be succeeding, right?
(I'd like to point out that you can setup games with your friends where you don't get booted out for dying.)
It was fun until you hit what felt like a brick wall in progression. If I recall it got super grindy really quick. People hated it but the company got lucky by saving it by adding BR mode. Things quickly started to become free and the game is a completely different game than what I bought.
For me it's not that I hate people that play it. It's sort of like waiting in a long line to go to an amusement park you've been dying to go to. You pay to get in and it's terrible. Then they immediately open the gates and let everyone for free and change it to a water park. I'm just annoyed by the entire experience.
For when I want a long term profile, weapons that carry over between raids etc, then I'd invest that time into an RPG.
edit: it's worth adding that I have no issue with unique avatars in FPS. I just don't think it's fair being spawned 5 meters from someone with a customised minigun when the best pick up you can get on that level is a handgun.
There is no such thing in Fortnite.
I don't like fortnite at all though, everything feels exceptionally random (bullet spread, damage, weapons, kill zone, you name it, it's got a couple RNG calls), the build mechanic feels more like a crutch for not knowing how to play around cover unless you really put effort into learning it, and even then it's basically "build 3 walls quickly" or "destroy a wall to shoot through it" type "skill".
It just never grabbed me, I played a few casual rounds and did reasonably well (top 5-10 twice in my first 5 games, with a few kills at least on average, no wins or top 3s though) but it felt like I got lucky, either catching enemies out and getting their good guns, or killing people who could barely aim, then dying to someone sitting in a shelter on a cliff with a one-shot kill sniper that they picked up at the beginning of the game.
If I want the BR experience I'll play Apex, if I want a wacky kids game where you can only "heavily influence" what essentially feels like a ball of randomness, I'll play Mario Party.
Yes I know many other games fit that model, especially things like popular shooters, but fortnite seems to have perfected it. Miyamoto’s big moment was figuring out people liked being someone else (Mario). Fortnite feels like a place where you are defined by others. And it feels gross to me.