There’s nothing more tiresome than someone saying THIS THING HAS COMPLETELY CHANGED THE GAME AND NOW NOTHING WILL EVER DISLODGE IT FROM THE TIPPITY-TOP OF THE PILE. Especially when that thing is a video game.
And we know that Fortnite has inspired a billion thinkpieces on how it now owns the minds and souls of our young people, but that’s true of basically every popular game. Remember when Grand Theft Auto III was going to destroy everything? Ah, it was a more innocent time…
Awww, how quaint!
But this time around might be different – not because of what Fortnite does, but the way it does it.
Games inspiring spinoffs aren’t new – World of Warcraft spun out of the original Warcraft game, while Portal was initially conceived as a mini game in the Half Life series – but the big difference with Fortnite is, as Matthew Ball pointed out in a great essay at Redef, is that it’s continued to morph since.
Most people know that what’s now the game was actually just a “battle Royale” mode added to the game a few months after release, but the developers Epic Games learned their lesson quickly: as players tried new tricks and techniques, the devs could actually see it happening and go “say, that gives me an idea…”
“…maybe some kind of a dance! Have we already done that a million times? Cool!”
And that’s the great strength of the game, more akin to mobile gaming than traditional PC or consoles.
Because it’s an online game they can get real time data on how people play it, and then use that information to cater to players preferences. When players reacted to a Halloween mode with zombies, that gave them important information about whether to start putting those sorts of tricks in the game mode, for example.
And thus Fortnite could be the first game to literally last forever, subtley finding new ways to appeal to players who might have tired of even the most sprawling narrative masterpiece.
After all, it’s not like Red Dead Redemption 2 can quickly write a patch to make the game focus more on fishing, with greater and more challenging fish to land in an increasingly swampy map.
Although we’d love to see that happen. Might we suggest “Marsh Madness”? No? Alright, fine.
Or maybe more horse-strangling minigames?