A Battle Royale game with an amazing narrative isn’t something anyone expected.
Somewhere along the line Fortnite stopped being a simple online multiplayer game and started to become a living narrative fueled by excellent game developers and a thriving, somehow healthy, online community. Epic Games knew they had a gem on their hands. Not really sure even they knew how shiny of a gem it was, but they knew that Fortnite would be special. Just not the Fortnite we all think of.
Fortnite’s single player game mode, Save the World, was the baby that Epic worked on for years. The Battle Royale mode was seemingly just something that was thrown in as a free to play add-on. Obviously they had plans for the Battle Royale mode, I’m just not sure the plans were actually what has come to fruition.
With how quickly Fortnite BR took off Epic obviously pivoted. They shut down Paragon and brought those developers over to the Fortnite BR side of things. They pretty obviously pivoted to a more aggressive and more community based feedback environment and patch schedule. Epic’s developers actually take feedback really well and seem to actively consider how the community will react to things they do to the game.
They’ve gotten so good at patching the game that in the last couple months the patches haven’t had much negative impact in terms of bugs either. They’ve gone from having problems with pretty much every patch with both game performance and server optimization problems, to being incredibly clean with each update.
Where Fornite changed the game for multiplayer games is somewhere in Season 3. Things went from a simple week by week patch schedule, which was already fun and exciting purely because of the changes Epic was making, to a living narrative both crafted by Epic’s creativity and the Fortnite Community’s imagination.
Starting in Season 3 random sounds and changes to the Fortnite map started to hint towards something big happening at the end of Season 3, leading into Season 4. There were teasers, data mining, conspiracy theories, and more. Somehow, most of it was just generally positive and fun. Something that is very rare to have consistently in a video game community.
It ended up leading to a video from Fortnite and drastic map changes. A pretty cool payoff for a neat teaser structure that Fortnite planned out leading into Season 4. In my mind, that was the peak they could pull off in a multiplayer game. Everyone was talking about their game and what changes they would make in a patch. I didn’t think there was any topping that.
Then came the rocket launch.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ePTyNeMUM[/embed]
Frankly, I’m not sure if there’s ever been a moment in gaming history that was this cool. There have been individual releases that were awesome and individual add-ons that have wowed people. However, the Fortnite Rocket Launch was amazing.
It began with a countdown clock that appeared on all of the TVs in the game. Then it was confirmed across social media channels that at 1:30 ET on a Saturday there would be a one-time live event in Fortnite.
Naturally everyone got excited. I personally didn’t think they could pull it off. I thought there would be server problems and no one would actually be able to get into a match to watch said event. As it turns out, the event was amazing. It spawned some amazing community moments, a truce to not fire during the rocket, someone breaking the truce and as a result breaking the solo kills record, and more.
It was a legitimate milestone in gaming and how a community can come around a game for something cool. This game has brought together some friends and I since last August when we started playing. I really thought the stage of my life where me and some friends played video games together was over, and Fortnite totally squashed that. It’s been a blast to have those friendships come into gaming again.
Fortnite as a whole has done that on a much larger scale. The rocket launch was a culmination of that community engagement and an amazing lead-in to Season 5.
The crack in the sky that the rocket created has been slowly expanding, and there items in Fortnite map that have been disappearing day by day through random portals. Then the items are appearing in the real world.
[embed]https://twitter.com/selashiloni/status/1015261416024993792[/embed]
They’re hitting strides I didn’t think were possible in a video game. Weaving narrative and anticipation into a multiplayer game. I’m enamored with how Epic Games have been handling the success of their game and I’ll be waiting with baited breath for the changes that are most certainly on the way.
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