It's hard to avoid the hype around Fortnite at the moment, especially after Drake played a game live on Twitch and broke streaming records. To be honest, I don't understand the hype nor see the appeal of Fortnite: Battle Royale. Maybe I am just out of touch, maybe I am too old.
The battle royale/PVP/survival genre was popularised by PlayerUnknown's Battle Grounds or PUBG as the cool kids refer to it, as well as the controversial H1Z1 and a few other similar games in the royale genre.
this is what a standard game of Fortnite looks like. Image from pixabay
What Epic Games did was take a popular genre, throw in the arcade appearance of Overwatch, with a sprinkling of Minecraft sandbox building mechanics on top of the existing Fortnite game. Fortnite itself is not a new game, Battle Royale is just an official extension of Epic's original game Fortnite.
And it's not like I haven't tried "getting into Fortnite", the hype around the game is infectious. But there is something demotivating about a game that makes you wait for 100 players (sometimes it can take 10 minutes), then puts you on some cargo plane and then you choose when to jump to the ground.
In the first 30 seconds of the game, at least 10-15 people die. This is due to the fact others can jump out before you do and wait for players to drop into their area and then shoot them. Or sometimes people land in unfortunate spots like trees and don't realise if you fall from a great height you will die.
As the game progresses, some kind of dome/storm closes in around you. Every few minutes the gameplay area shrinks, forcing any remaining players to move into a smaller space and soon enough you are down to a handful of players. Only one player can be victorious.
If you have ever seen The Hunger Games, it's essentially that in a game, except without the tributes and asristocats with weird hairstyles and casual attitude towards barely adults killing each other in a booby trapped jungle.
Fortnite: Battle Royale puts you constantly on edge, the fear that if you die all of that waiting to find a game and surviving was for nothing. Like a drug addict high on methamphetamine paranoid, the FBI has tapped your phones and is about to knock your door down.
And then, BOOM! You get shot and die by a 14-year-old kid, sent back to the menu screen like it never happened, forced to do it all over again and find another game. Playing Fortnite: Battle Royale is a grind, you currently get nothing out of it, there is nothing keeping around because it's a casual game.
I played a few games on PC and downloaded it onto my Nintendo Switch, but the lustre of the game wore off after just a couple of games. What is the appeal of this game, am I missing something? How is this fun?
Speaking of The Hunger Games, if someone were to make an online game that was more akin to the movies where you ran through a jungle, had water and hazards in the world itself (like killer bees), people could sponsor you with gifts, crossbows and whatnot, now that would be a fun game. Maybe Epic should add that into Fortnite: Battle Royale and I would play it again.