Fortnite Pastoral
desert.glass
desert.glass
I am always surprised at how much hate and disdain I feel when I tell people I enjoy Comic Sans MS. This comes both from people who type a lot, and from those who don't type at all. Somehow, it's become "cool", or maybe even the "default", to hate on Comic Sans MS.
I'm not sure it's tribalism that causes folks to respond this way, per se, but it has some elements of it. I suspect all hobbies and pursuits in life deal with such negative reactions - it's certainly a thing in all the hobbies I've had. (Who knew model railroading was such a warzone?)
Best thing a person can do is shrug and move on from the haters. Be glad you found something you enjoy that doesn't involve tearing other people down.
1) Battle royales suck. The entire genre. I grew up on arena shooters - your Quakes, your Unreal Tournaments, and so on. Getting booted all the way back out to the lobby to go through deployment again because of a single death isn't fun. It's making me replay the most boring aspect of the game. Call me when there's a popular one of these which has multiple lives or some other mechanic that ensures a single mistake doesn't result in ~5 minutes of being unable to play the game. I don't have the time or the patience for this.
2) Fortnite's success killed two games I was really interested in - Paragon, a gorgeous third person MOBA, and a reboot of Unreal Tournament.
Those first two are very concrete and have nothing to do with tribalism. The last one is a bit murkier:
2.5) Fortnite seems to be aggressively marketed towards children, which means its players are probably disproportionately children. Minecraft had this problem too, but it had a single player mode and private servers which allowed you to sidestep it.
That one probably carries the whiff of "kids these days", but when you consider that the game is going to be designed to cater to the average player...
Fortnite has numerous other game modes than solo BR where this would be the case. At it's most basic level you can play duos, trios or squads where you are "knocked" but can be revived by a teammate, or "rebooted" if you get knocked and eliminated. There are even more varied game modes that are even more arena-like: 50v50s where you immediately respawn with the same loot for example. I have no stats but I'd guess that these alternate modes are more popular than the main BR modes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBZ3POXEvRE
Cute, but seems more like a gimmick you might see on a dead Quake server than something you can base a game around.
I love weird gimmicky indie games, so I thought I'd love Cult of the Wind, but...there really wasn't much there. And I realized an ultra-niche single-player game can find cult success, but an ultra-niche multiplayer-only game will probably never have enough people online at once to keep going, and sink without a ripple.
But people keep making them, so some of them must be succeeding, right?
(I'd like to point out that you can setup games with your friends where you don't get booted out for dying.)
It was fun until you hit what felt like a brick wall in progression. If I recall it got super grindy really quick. People hated it but the company got lucky by saving it by adding BR mode. Things quickly started to become free and the game is a completely different game than what I bought.
For me it's not that I hate people that play it. It's sort of like waiting in a long line to go to an amusement park you've been dying to go to. You pay to get in and it's terrible. Then they immediately open the gates and let everyone for free and change it to a water park. I'm just annoyed by the entire experience.
For when I want a long term profile, weapons that carry over between raids etc, then I'd invest that time into an RPG.
edit: it's worth adding that I have no issue with unique avatars in FPS. I just don't think it's fair being spawned 5 meters from someone with a customised minigun when the best pick up you can get on that level is a handgun.
There is no such thing in Fortnite.
I don't like fortnite at all though, everything feels exceptionally random (bullet spread, damage, weapons, kill zone, you name it, it's got a couple RNG calls), the build mechanic feels more like a crutch for not knowing how to play around cover unless you really put effort into learning it, and even then it's basically "build 3 walls quickly" or "destroy a wall to shoot through it" type "skill".
It just never grabbed me, I played a few casual rounds and did reasonably well (top 5-10 twice in my first 5 games, with a few kills at least on average, no wins or top 3s though) but it felt like I got lucky, either catching enemies out and getting their good guns, or killing people who could barely aim, then dying to someone sitting in a shelter on a cliff with a one-shot kill sniper that they picked up at the beginning of the game.
If I want the BR experience I'll play Apex, if I want a wacky kids game where you can only "heavily influence" what essentially feels like a ball of randomness, I'll play Mario Party.
Since the beginning Fortnite has positioned itself as a social space, in itself this is not a problem. However, the ability to perform socially is monetized in an otherwise free game. This is emotional and social manipulation at it's finest, and contributes to why Fortnite honestly frightens me as someone who enjoys games.
The marketing for this game has been incredible. In-game events featuring real-life artists. Weekly events which push the dev team to the limits of crunch what has to be almost every day. It pervades any space relating to games. It's presence is unrelenting. It's designed from it's core to have as much mass appeal as possible and the barrier to entry is downloading Epic's launcher, so naturally it's popularity is off the charts.
It's the epitome of "designed by committee." It's soulless. It's success was bought and paid for by TenCent and I'm assuming the investment is at least doing okay, considering how much money they continue to pour into it.
I don't hate the game itself. It's aggressively "okay." Nothing mindblowing and certainly nothing meriting the response it's gotten. The response is almost entirely down to the marketing, and I don't like everything else about it. I don't like how it's shoved everywhere imaginable via advertising. I don't like the by-the-numbers merchandising. I don't like the fact that "default" is now used like a slur in schools for the kids whose parents won't buy them digital crap.
I just... I hate this. All of it. I don't know why to a great extent, it just bothers me.
Fortnite is pushing boundaries for how to tell a story, it's creating a new kind of narrative, a new immersive way of writing that is worth seeing how it plays out. It's too young to know if it's any good, but it's distinct, and in something as old as storytelling, new things are insanely rare.
I've literally never played Fortnite, but it seems like a lot of people do, and if Epic can parlay that into something new, I'm very interested, even if I continue to only watch from the rafters.
It's not bad, it's just aggressively okay. If this had a list price I doubt it would've been nearly the success it is. It's the upper echelon in quality for free-to-play.
The point of the article, as I read it, was to describe how Fortnite uses its play area over time to build a lore, without words, and as a pretext of "battle royale" happens around it. The novelty here is how immersive the experience seems to be, from the author's perspective, which is something he doesn't believe has historically been possible with writing as we understand it currently.
I'm really not. The "plot" involved in any multiplayer only shooter is at best, incidental to the game. It's almost never a selling point.
> The point of the article, as I read it, was to describe how Fortnite uses its play area over time to build a lore, without words, and as a pretext of "battle royale" happens around it. The novelty here is how immersive the experience seems to be, from the author's perspective, which is something he doesn't believe has historically been possible with writing as we understand it currently.
And I agree with all of that, my problem is that it's all centered around a game that I believe is fundamentally unworthy of that honor. A cynically produced product designed from the get-go to pry money from people's wallets, by way of manipulating their children. I find it inhumane and cruel especially to the kids who's parents aren't financially well-off enough to indulge them.
Games have a tremendous potential that I think is largely yet untapped, and it grosses me out that one of the first games with mass appeal to accomplish some of that is this... thing. This gross, manipulative, soulless little mediocre shooter.
That's how Fortnite got popular, and now it's using the spotlight it grabbed to innovate in the storytelling space, but all you want to talk about are the very things that end up being true about nearly every single AAA game released by any major studio in the past 5 years.
In other words, you sound grumpy, and you seemingly would rather take away the imperfect toy (and completely ignore its storytelling style) than see the incremental progress it's making as something of potential genuine literary value to be nurtured and grown.
I disagree with this, Fortnite figured out how to deliver a video game in an agile way.
The techniques developed around building and combat are top-notch, the game manages to feel very challenging without being miserable to play. It might not be your cup of tea.
> I don’t like how it’s shoved everywhere imaginable via advertising
Not Epic’s fault. You can thank the tech industry for figuring out how to put ads on everything, I don’t see how this is Epic’s fault. Don’t shoot the messenger when your problem is with online ads.
> I don’t like the fact that “default” is now used like a slur
Again, Epic didn’t make those kids shitty. When I was a kid, it was all who had which Pokémon cards, the fact that the goods are digital now doesn’t make a difference. That behavior existed when I was a kid.
That's fair.
> Again, Epic didn’t make those kids shitty. When I was a kid, it was all who had which Pokémon cards, the fact that the goods are digital now doesn’t make a difference. That behavior existed when I was a kid.
I mean, Epic didn't make kids shitty, that's true. But they did explicitly create a situation where the ability to express yourself in their social space requires financial investment. Don't tell me that wasn't intentional.
Thankfully adults don't judge each other by the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, etc. /s
Selling crap to kids by way of their parents wallets is a time honored tradition in our society. Epic knew what they were doing. All the games like Fortnite do.
If you think the kids who didn't have gameboys at all didn't get bullied because they weren't in the ecosystem, you'd be gravely mistaken.
Even if you weren't into collecting, it was difficult/more expensive to just buy the cards you needed for a good deck. You'd have to keep buying packs until you were able to build a deck you were happy with.
Probably the only thing that's changed is the immediacy and the scale: both of purchasing and of the social effects that come from the purchase.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. They built a game and tried to make it as popular as possible, and succeeded. We should be upset that a capitalist entity requires money to participate? The craziest part about that argument is that the game is completely free to play. Are you saying that Epic built FN and monetized it specifically for kids to bully each other?
Epic knows how to make a hit game. Their games are almost always extremely well made and fun. Gears of War pretty much invented the cover mechanic in most modern shooters. To denigrate them just sounds out of touch, frankly.
I played Fortnite for a few hours because, hey, it's free, and it definitely has Unreal's genes with some building and last-man-standing techniques piled on top.
The difference in skill between me and the players who won was outstanding, just like it was back when I used to play UT after school. It's a solid game.
From the Wikipedia article...
In the design of Gears of War, lead developer Cliff Bleszinski of Epic Games credits Kill Switch's cover system as one of the influences they put into the game's design, as Kill Switch's lead designer Chris Esaki was employed by Epic Games and was involved in the development of Gears of War.
What? It started a base building tower defense. I'm not a fan but this is way off, it's not like GTA in any way.
And you don't need story to have great gameplay. If you shoehorned a story into something like Rocket League it would actually be hilarious.
I can't imagine how you'd come to that conclusion unless you think GTAV invented "multiplayer on a big map."
> It's designed from it's core to have as much mass appeal as possible and the barrier to entry is downloading Epic's launcher, so naturally it's popularity is off the charts.
There's ten gazillion cynical, manipulative free-to-play games out there. None of them blew up like Fortnite. When it first launched, the gaming press was genuinely excited about it. It was the first really polished, professional entry in the (effectively) brand-new battle royale genre, finally pulling away from the jankiness and generic brown "realistic military" look of PUBG and its mod predecessors.
The game has become inextricable from the social phenomenon, at this point. It was mostly luck and good timing that pushed into into mega-success territory. But it was never bad or even mediocre.
Edit: Basically I'm saying that it's pretty silly to assume that just because you don't like something, anyone who does like it must be either an idiot or a shill.
Yes I know many other games fit that model, especially things like popular shooters, but fortnite seems to have perfected it. Miyamoto’s big moment was figuring out people liked being someone else (Mario). Fortnite feels like a place where you are defined by others. And it feels gross to me.