Fortnite is unrecognisable

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I imagine that at some point in your life, someday, you have played Fortnite, haven't you? It's okay to admit that, we've all been there; heck, the game didn't become the biggest in the world by being a gaming anomaly, and a high-quality free-game is hard to resist before the sweaty crowd descends upon it. (I mostly just assumed that crowd were always part of 'Call of Duty: Warzone' which is why I never played that) I'd even go so far as to say I had some fun playing that game in the thirty or forty games of it that I played before I grew bored with the formula, and the constant disappointment of losing, and moved back to more familiar pastures. So maybe I just didn't have what it takes to be a great Battle Royale player, I didn't have the perseverance and desire to prove myself. Typically, with games of this genre, I'd just work my way towards one victory and consider myself done with that Battle Royale entirely, and do it early in the game's lifecycle too so that it isn't too hard of a victory to win. (Yeah, I'm a bit of a coward) But we've all come to, and probably left Fortnite, for one reason or the other over the years; but I'm here to ask you, have you ever considered going back?

I say that because if you bit the bullet and hit that 'reinstall' button, you might be greeted to a longer download time than you suspected, which may just have piqued your curiosity to know exactly what has changed in the game of the youth. Firstly, I'm sure you're aware that games of this calibre live and die on their commitment to constant forward momentum, always adding updates and skins and things that keep players coming back and spending money. That is their life force and without it these games squander and are put-out-to-pasture. So as the kings of this genre, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Fortnite is hit with so many updates that even if you first played Fortnite one year ago or two, the face of what the game looks like now is probably nothing like what you had in memory. But even then, even understanding how this is a genre prone to constant unerring change, I posit that the Fortnite of today is utterly unrecognisable to the layman; and why that's amazing.

The first time I took a look back at this game was actually fairly recently, it was in response to that Ariana Grande digital concert which as far as I am aware is the second concert of it's type to touch this platform. (With the Travis Scott concert being the first) And of course in the light of the fact this has a predecessor it makes sense, but then when you expand a little beyond that you realise that nothing actually makes sense whatsoever. This is a Battle Royale game (or the Battle Royale addendum onto a base game which no one plays) where the heart of the gameplay loop is murdering everyone else in the map until you are the only one left standing, right? I mean, that's the very heart and soul of this genre and what it represents. So where does a concert fit into that vision? An audio-visual experience where you follow a 'Shadow of the Colossus' style rendering of Ariana Grande as she sings her way through psychedelic popping clouds and dream-like pink castles- what happened to the Battle Royale?

In truth it's pretty bare-faced; the Battle Royale element of this game has been swept away as the main focus of the studio. Not to say that isn't what their game still ostensibly is, that's something Epic have been unable to get away from, but it isn't the endgoal that Epic Games are shooting for. They've let it been known before, in investor calls, but it should be apparent from all of these special events anyway; Fortnite is a multimedia social world being built to be the future face of the internet. You know when you look upon the Matrix or 'The Oasis' and you wonder what a new digital world for humanity would look like in the real world? Fortnite is the answer, or so the Epic games imaginaries would have you believe. They want to make themselves a platform which combines all aspects of media smashed into one and they're doing it ingeniously by putting all the most popular iterations of popular media together and watching their dominance grow from that.

It started with the Marvel crossovers, okay that's not actually how it started, but Epic really set it's plan in motion through that crossover. The hugely successful team-up with the biggest movie franchise in the world that extended so far that Fortnite actually scored a cameo in Endgame. (I still can't believe that happened, what a trip) But even further than that, Fortnite stepped up to the plate in a time where the hugely successful Marvel franchise had no face on the video-game industry and created a limited-time mode for fans to come and play as Thanos, or beat him up as the Avengers. Talk about a brand boost! Piggybacking off 10 years of Disney franchise building to set yourself up as the official tie-in game, and you can bet that was sure to turn the heads of other huge entertainment properties who wanted that level of notoriety. They turned themselves from the underdog into the topcat with one simple collaboration; were only we all so lucky.

But what about the Fortnite of today? What does it look like in the years since? Well honestly the game feels nothing like a Battle Royale should, or at least a focused one. Firstly, there's a giant UFO floating over the map now, there are NPCs all across the map that fire at everyone and are usually tied to challenge modes. There are challenge instruments chucked haphazardly across the environment, with the most recent being phone boxes that people with the Clark Kent skin can use to turn into Superman. And most importantly there are skins from just about every franchise imaginable intersecting in a manner that would never have been even conceivable ten years ago. Batman and Captain America; the Mandalorian and Kratos; Deadpool and- Free Guy? The new Ryan Reynolds movie where he's just a guy in a blue suit? That made it into the game as a skin? Well actually they added the shirtless buff version of Ryan Reynolds from that movie, but it's still an example of how Fortnite has managed to cement itself as a staple of higher level marketing methods; an incredibly privileged position to sit within.

Nowadays playing a game of Fortnite can be about winning the match, but it can just as easily be about doing your own challenge hunting against NPCs in your own corner of the map whilst everything else happens around you. It can be about logging into the playground mode in order to mess around with custom maps that almost seem like they're trying to emulate the free creativity of Minecraft, Roblox or Dreams. It can be about watching the premier of a new movie at the ingame drive-in theatre. It can basically be about socialising and treating this space as an interactive social media metaspace; except one in which you happen to be stuck in a death arena with a bubble that shrinks forever on you. Does that makes sense to you? Because I'm still struggling to get to terms with it, but considering the vast proliferation of Fortnite that might just be another symptom of me getting old and losing that finger on the pulse of the popular. (If I ever had that finger to being with. I've always been pretty square in truth)

Many years ago I remember dreaming of, what in my mind, would be the greatest fighting game of all time. It would be a collaboration of all the properties imaginable, a free-for-all frenzy across a 3D map space with Street Fighter versus the cast of DC comics versus Dragonball versus Mortal Kombat versus Marvel versus Ubisoft properties. Just everything and everyone ripping into each other with wanton abandon. It was obviously a juvenile dream and even then I was stuck between picking how balancing could possible work when someone like Ezio Auditore went up against Marvel's Jack of Hearts and Goku. But even on a base level the idea would never work because licence holders would never play ball like that. Except I was wrong, because Fortnite has managed to become the exception to that rule and raked in the bucks because of it. (Now if only we had the world's most insane fighting game developers on the Epic Games staff my dream might have actually had a fighting chance.) Fortnite, for better or worse, has the potential to change the media landscape irrevocably, and I think we're just on the cusp of that potential. We're still in those early stages of the chess match as Epic position their key pieces on the board. The only thing I'm still trying to figure out is whether their ultimate plan will be a step up from the apocalyptic pissing match which makes our current social media spectrum, or something inconceivably more depraved. (Knowing our luck, I'm leaning towards the latter.)