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Fortnite is arguably one of the biggest games of the decade. In its almost eight year lifespan, “Battle Royale” has accumulated over 650 million registered players.
Unlike other major titles in gaming Fortnite is 100% free to play, with no limits to what you can do even if you don’t spend any money.
Fortnite began development in 2011 as a survival game under the name “Fortnite: Save The World,” and was originally a paid game.
In 2017, “Fortnite: Battle Royale” was released as a free game with one distinct feature that separated it from other shooters: instead of finding cover, you could build it.
Fortnite was a simple game in its early days; you would cue up with a couple of friends and fight to be the last team remaining. Outfits were original, Limited Game modes were different from the main game, no two weapons were the same and everyone was relatively at the same skill level.
In my opinion, Fortnite had its peak in early chapter two, when collabs were rare and well made.
Before then, collabs were usually from big movies, tv shows, popular creators who played the game and other video games. Now, we get almost everyone.
During Chapter two Remix, Eminem, Ice Spice, Juice WRLD and Snoop Dogg, who had previously sued Epic Games (the developer of Fortnite) for an emote they added, did collabs. All of them were added as outfits during the same time.
The item shop often has more cosmetics from collabs than it has original content. Many times these aren’t even new collabs, they’re often minimally changed versions of previously released outfits. Shaq and Snoop Dogg, for example, both got three separate skins that had to be purchased individually.
Fortnite also unknowingly created a huge market for accounts with rare items, with some going for thousands of dollars. However, Fortnite has made it very clear they do not support the selling and purchasing of accounts by permanently banning any account that was purchased.
Fortnite’s original simplicity can be easily shown by its OG gamemode, as the game is 100% skill based. No matter what weapon a player picks up, they have a similar chance to win.
However, Fortnite OG lacks one very important feature: skill based matchmaking.
Skill based matchmaking looks at your stats and matches you up with similarly skilled players. However this feature also has one negative side effect: it can easily be exploited.
In chapter two, when the ability to go beyond level 100 in the battle pass to unlock extra rewards was added, people would make a second account on platforms like mobile or the Nintendo Switch that have naturally lower skilled players.
Players would join the party of these second accounts, join a match, then make the second account leave so it wouldn’t count as a win and keep its stats low.
Players could then repeat this process and continuously play in matches with players at significantly lower skill levels, basically guaranteeing them a win and an easy way to level up their main account.
Fortnite currently stands as a mere shadow of what it once was. Although Fortnite’s player count continues upwards, it has lost what made it an interesting game.