I’ve been working in video games long enough to remember when Fortnite was first released. Long before it became the behemoth of popular culture it is today, it was doomed to be nothing more than a forgettable survival game with a🦂 cute aesthetic.
Revealed at the 2011 VGAs a few years before they were rebrandꦐed into The Game Awards, the 🍌 featured a crew of scavengers destroying an abandoned building so they can pilfer resources from the wreckage, which are then used to construct their own cool defences complete with reinforced walls and deadly booby traps. As night falls, hordes of the undead begin moving in and dominating the frame. The player’s job is to hold them back and survive the night, only to emerge in the early hours to do it all over again.
For a long time, this was what Fortnite seemed destined to be. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Epic Games was putting together a survival game where gathering resources and wave-based combat were the core focus, many elements of which were repurposed into the battle royale we know today. Even now, the crafting system and character models remain, albeit remodelled and reworked with t🌌he help ♏of a larger budget and abiding by the wishes of millions. Fortnite was never meant to be anything more, and in the months before and after its underwhelming vanilla release, it wasn’t.
Save The World launched into early access in July 2017, six years after its ini꧒tial reveal. To say it was middlingly received would be an understatement. It struggled to attract players to its comical aesthꩲetic and largely derivative gameplay which, despite having more layers than something like Gears of War or Plants Vs Zombies, didn’t offer nearly enough charm to keep us invested. I was thrown a review code and asked to do early guide coverage while still in university, and made my way through the first few levels to learn mechanics and defend my sensitive behind from armies of the undead. The gunplay felt fine, the building was cool, but when you broke it all down, there just wasn’t enough to it. With its early access off to a rocky start, I saw the writing on Fortnite’s wall mere days after its debut.
Then 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds came along and ch🌌anged games forever. Born out of DayZ and Arma mods, the early access shooter dropped 100 players onto an island as we gathered weapons and tried to survive until only one of us was left standing. It established a sense of tension and comp🍒etition that traditional multiplayer couldn’t capture, ushering in the new era that countless imitators big and small would try to ape in the years to come. One of the first was Fortnite, which happened to be in the right place at the right time to take over the world. It sure guaranteed far more success than trying to save it from generic zombies.
Fast-forward to September 2017 and Fortnite had pivoted into a free-to-play experience that took all of its base mechanics and assets but transitioned the action onto a massive island. It was primitive in the first few months, with mandatory building and a lack of progression that&rsq♍uo;d soon be overhauled by the debut of the battle pass. Looking back, the way Epic Games saw the success of PUBG and capitalised upon it was 𝔉quite shameless, but the game would soon prove itself as an innovative frontrunner with how it took the battle royale formula and quickly understood how it could be morphed into a live-service title that constantly iterated upon itself.
Without Fortnite, we probably wouldn't be living in a world where every other game is forced to have a battle pass. How would we even cope without it?
Not only was Fortnite free, it was on console and offered an alternative to PUBG that had dominated the zeitgeist despite being restricted to hardcore PC audiences. Now the vast majority of gamers play this thing, and it offered a comparable experience with basic means of entry. All it t𓄧ook was consistent updates and promotion to eventually eclipse its inspiration. At the time I thought it was lazy and shameless, but if you’re a witness to the original cookie crumbling to pieces, why not jot down the recipe and take it even further? Fortnite managed exactly that and in🥀corporated crossovers, promotions, and spent months and years building its own universe that could stand on its own. So much so that where it came from is a huge mystery to the majority of its audience.
It’s hard to imagine how the modern video game landscape would look without Fortnite. It ushered in the age of live-service games as we know it, encouraged every developer and publisher in the world to invest in seasonal updates and battle passes which kept players engaged for as l🍒ong as humanly possible. Similar forever games that wanted everything Fortnite managed to succeed while fundamentally misunderstanding its greatest strengths. Would we still be engaging with traditional MMOR🍨PGs and multiplayer shooters without all the extra bells and whistles we now take for granted, or would another trend appear to try and shake things up much like the battle royale genre did so effectively?
Save The World is still accessible within Fortnite today, and Epic Games s🥃pent a few years updating the mode and trying to promote it in vain, knowing that the majority of fans had no interest in it when battle royale was consistently fresh and exciting. I commend Epic for trying to keep it alive though, that a few members of its original team still believed in the vision that gave this project life in the first place, and how without it, the battle royale which continues to take over the world years later would cease to exist. It began life as a survival game with no chance of surviving in its current form, so it evolved into something incredible.
Survival Week at TheGamer is brought to you by Nightingale -
- Sponsored by
- 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nightingale
- Dates
- ꦉ February 12-18, 2024 ൲
- Genre
- Survivaꦓl, Survival Horror
- Franchise
- Minecraft
- Games
- Nightingale, Enshrouded, Palworld, DayZ, Valheim, ARK: Survival Evolved, Frostpunk, Pacific Drive, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Prꦫoject Zomboid
Welcome to the home of TheGamer's Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you'll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
