We are saddened to report that Fortnite is still, somehow, very good
What are video games for, if not to see Spider-Man kill a gun-toting banana with the laser beam from Dragonball Z?
Games Features Fortnite
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
The frustrating thing about Fortnite—a video game that actively works to devour as much of human culture as it can get its brightly colored tentacles on, rendering all aspects of our shared existence as just so much grist for its never-ending content mill, thus that it may feed it back to us (and our children) in the most simplistic of digitized forms—is that it’s actually very good.
This thought occurred to me recently, as a round I was playing ended abruptly when my sole surviving enemy—dressed, obviously, like Tom Holland’s Spider-Man—destroyed the garage I was hiding in with a Dragonball Z Kamehameha, and then shot me in the head. “This is a good fucking video game,” I thought to myself as Tom Holland danced on my corpse. “It’s so cool that this happened.”
Reader, I was not being sarcastic.
It’s easy to make fun of Fortnite, of course: For its Weezer integration. For its attempts at political self-seriousness. For its bizarre position as a canonical Star Wars plot delivery mechanism. For its complete domination of gaming culture, especially via the codification of so many elements of the free-to-play ecosystem. For its obsessive, screech-volume memeishness. For all the banana shit. Etc.!
And yet, for all that: Fortnite is actually very good!
I take no relish in revealing this; it’s the gaming writer equivalent of praising the McDonald’s cheeseburger as a model of cheap flavor and efficiency. But it is, unfortunately, true.
And it’s true for a couple of reasons, the first and foremost being that the game it originally ripped off, lo these many years ago—PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the patriarch of the battle royale genre—was just such a good damn idea. Throwing 100 players onto a shrinking island and tasking them with killing each other, besides being an apt metaphor for about a thousand different real-world nightmares, is still just an incredible hook, a mix of high highs and humiliating lows that can make the hands shake in anticipation as that next sweet Victory Royale looms closer, even now. (Or: Spider-Man laser murder, see above.) Hell, Fortnite has even made its ties to the base design even clearer of late, by offering a mode that gets rid of the whole fort-building bit, which was always a bar to entry for those of us intimidated by children capable of whipping up impenetrable plywood palaces in 10 seconds or less. It doesn’t hurt that Epic, the studio that makes Fortnite, has been in the shooter biz for longer than most of their competitors have even been in business, period; the guns in Fortnite might be goofy, but the shooting is incredibly solid, the weapon design shockingly smart.
Take, for instance, that Kamehameha, which is still floating around the game after a recent DBZ event: It really is a fascinating display of the game’s philosophy toward new weapons. Sure, it’s a meme item, carrying all the excitement of firing off Goku’s big blue beam—but it’s also a fascinating risk-reward, allowing players to do an immense amount of damage to enemies or destroy their cover, at the cost of making the user float up in the air while yelling and generating a very bright “Shoot me before I laser you!” light. The genius of Fortnite is in crafting an item that is clearly a blatant Dragonball Z cash-grab and a tactically fascinating addition to the game’s combat mechanics—both trash and treasure all at once.
Which brings us to the more fundamental reason that Fortnite is actually very good, an explanation that is, unfortunately, going to involve the word “palimpsest.” Because like those ancient writing slates, Fortnite is messy. It’s weird in a way that none of its competitors have ever grasped, and that weirdness is what keeps it fascinating even as more technically impressive rivals crop up. The amazing thing about Fortnite is that it still contains traces of every blatantly dopey decision or content tie-in it’s offered up in its five years of operation. That’s present in the player skins, of course—so many player skins, from so many licensed properties—but also in the game’s base mechanics. All of the things that now make the game such an expansively weird product—it is, as far as I know, the only battle royale shooter where you can fish for food before solving an Indiana Jones puzzle or doing a full automotive racing track to pick up some fancy new guns—have been added to it piecemeal over the years, and have just sort of been … left intact, through multiple wipes of its scattershot “lore.” The result is a sort of chaos that would have been extremely difficult for the development team to make all at once, but which has become a natural outgrowth of years of constant updates, an evolution of design that transcends any single given design document. Or, to put it another way: Even as Fortnite has striven to devour all of modern pop culture, it has also moved to devour itself. And that’s kind of beautiful, in an awful sort of way.
Also: It’s a video game where you can kill Darth Vader by hitting him with a grenade that makes him dance, and then use his lightsaber to murder Goku. So that’s fun, too.
22 Comments
While I understand the frustration of wanting something to be bad so you can slag it off, it’s pretty emblematic of a toxic pop culture discourse. It’s fun to tear something down a peg, but 9 times out of 10 it’s just plain odious. You’re allowed to enjoy things!There’s no shame in acknowledging that a popular shooter is pretty well crafted; pretentious contrarianism is far more childish. That’s how we wind up with gritty reboots of Bomberman and American Kirby’s angry eyebrows.This weekend is for putting my new PC together. I decided to take the lazy route of swapping parts into a cheap prebuilt machine, as it’ll be a long while before I can justify a new graphics card. Remaining tasks are to move my old 1060 over and swap the off-brand power supply out, which should leave me with a serviceable new machine and a downgraded older one.As far as gaming goes, It’ll probably be some social gaming tonight (Jackbox or Catan most likely), and a bit of Borderlands 2 tomorrow if both computers aren’t still in pieces.
Good luck swapping the parts in!Graphics card prices are actually going down, look to get a 2000 or 3000 series once the new line releases and you should be able to find a decently priced one. I highly recommend EVGA, they replaced my 1080 Founders with a 1080 Super XC Ultra when it got hit by lightning even though it was a couple months out of warranty.
Thanks! It’s the PSU that I’m really not looking forward to, as that accounts for half the damn wiring I’d hoped to avoid :PAfter the crypto boom I think it’ll be years before I trust a second hand GPU, but tbh this 1060’s still doing great and I mainly play AAAs on console anyway.
Yeah that wiring is a pain, especially if you’re a person who likes a clean looking case with hidden wiring. Personally I’m usually happy with unimpeded airflow(a lot easier now that ribbon cables aren’t a thing) and fans not clipping my wires ;)Ah ok if you’re doing AAA on console mostly then yeah a 1060 should do you fine. I have a buddy that’s still running on a 980, though he’s looking to upgrade real soon, but still it works for most stuff.
The wild part is it costs as much now as when I bought it years ago
Some prices go down, even good storage is cheap as hell these days, but some stuff just stays the same lol
A couple of years ago, I was shocked at how little a 500 GB external SSD cost, especially compared to how much more it would have cost me to get a laptop that came with one just a few months before.Although the reason I needed it in the first place was coming to realize just how limiting 128 GB of internal storage is if you want to have more than one “major” game installed at once (I have Crusader Kings 3 and Hearts of Iron 4 and an assortment of indie games too but none of those take up more than like 8 GB and many of them are barely 1).
Yeah the 500gb Samsung m.2 drives I got around this time last year are $20 cheaper now.
I’m not sure if my piece is the target of the accusations of “pretentious contrarianism” here; I did my best to give a good faith explanation of why Fortnite is both compelling and repulsive to me (and sometimes compelling because some of the stuff that’s been baked into it over the years is so emblematic of its sort of all-consuming capitalist mindset).
I was speaking more in generalities rather than accusing you specifically; but that you expressed shame in enjoying the game (ironic or not) feels like it highlights something toxic in how we tend to talk about pop culture. Sorry if I didn’t express that very well.As an aside, the palimpsest comparison is fantastic and taught me a cool new word 🙂
I see no reason to take someone else’s joy, and if Fortnite is enjoyable for you, I say play your heart out. It’s just not for me. Meanwhile, my wife and I will co-op some Diablo 3 this weekend (We both feel a bit icky about playing this, given the discourse surrounding Activision/Blizzard, but said discourse doesn’t make the game any less fun. , and when she’s ready, she’ll pick up the Switch and continue dying to emmi’s in Metroid Dread, while I stick to the PS4 and head back to Tokyo for either some Yakuza: Like A Dragon or some more Persona 5: Royal. Have a great weekend!
Fun fact: Even though I spend way too much time on sites talking about popular culture and video games in particular, I have, so far, completely and utterly escaped anything Fortnite. That’s not meant to be a brag, it’s puzzling to myself just how little I do know about this behemoth.
I mean, recently, my happy place have been late-evening walks during nearby woods, listening to, of all things, the Dungeons and Daddies-podcast. (Another party which I have been very late to — but it’s really good. Funny people who know a lot about narrative using a very loose interpretation of D&D as a springboard for doing long-form collective storytelling and, improv comedy. It’s basically most of what I like about PnP RPGs, without the tedious stuff mixed in.) And I came to the episode in which they are using Fortnite as a sort of cultural touchstone that needs no introduction at all — and I did not get any of it. (Fortunately, they’re mostly working with is a lose structural framework and not as some sort of “I understood that reference”-shortcut for actual comedy.)
All of which is just to say: It’s good to hear that people are having fun with a game that is, I hear, good! Also, I’m having fun listening to Dungeons and Daddies, will do so this week-end, and probably also play a wee bit of Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation. And Midjourney, which basically is also a wonderfully playful thing.
More Soul Hackers 2 and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 for me this weekend. I’ve gotten a little burned out on the former, because I’m playing on Normal instead of Easy, and it’s a bit more stressful than I had perhaps intended. Time to grind! XC3 on the other hand continues to have its hooks in me. I’ve kind of let the main plot fall by the wayside as I explore side content, and I should probably get back into it. But the side content is very, very good, adding a lot of flavour to the world. I could probably mainline the whole thing very quickly using bonus EXP to level up, but I prefer to savour the experience.
I keep looking at Soul Hackers 2 and then holding myself back; I feel that yearly JRPG urge rising inside me, but I’ll probably try to put it off by playing one of the old 3DS SMT games instead. (I’m like a quarter of the way through SMT 4: Apocalypse right now.)
I stopped using bonus EXP in Xenoblade after I found out that being too high of a level in comparison to enemies makes it harder to unlock Hero Classes on additional main characters besides the one that gets it initially.
I’m not going to begrudge anyone their fun in Fortnite, or PUBG, or Warzone, or Call of Duty, or TF2, or CS:Go, or Tom Clancy’s Wet Fart, but I’ve had the noob experience enough to know that I just don’t have the patience to suffer the casual experience in a world other players live and breathe. Shooters are miserable for someone as unskilled as me.I just finished getting An Ending in World of Final Fantasy, and have started doing a few battles in the final chapter to get The Ending, which I should accomplish this weekend. This has started to feel a bit like Pokemon, where I could have a versatile strategy for raising a wide variety of mirages with a range of elemental attacks and defenses, swapping them in strategically to match the weaknesses of every boss I’m about to face, but a level 99 charizard just mops the floor with everything, so why not keep the same mirages on my team so they can become as gods I’m currently rocking a set of magitech armor with strong defenses against all but two elements and a phoenix that survives any major attack with 1 HP and auto-revives the entire team if somebody dies, both loaded up with elemental attacks to cover the entire spectrum, minus dark. It’s absolutely silly how overpowered this team is, without really putting a lot of thought into how I put it together. This isn’t the most hardcore, thinky RPG, but I still appreciate the systems, the world, the characters. I’d certainly put it above FF13 and FFX.And for my online co-op nights, we’ve been going through the We Were Here series for the past couple months. The first three were OK, cheap, not terribly difficult, but forced a lot of hilariously rough conversations about swords that went like THIS, and then cut over like THIS, and then had kinda of a SCHWOOPY thing before coming to a point. But We Were Here Forever is an amazing step up from the other three games, in terms of puzzle complexity, environmental variety, and sheer length. They’ve actually given the bleak, snowy world a background story and gives the two antagonists more fleshed-out motives than simply “evil guy 1″ and “evil guy 2.” I’m glad we enjoyed the first game enough to invest in the rest of the story, because the payoff for getting to the most recent one is powerful.
You should try Fortnite. They have attempted to solve your problem. They have modes with building and no building. In addition, they have skills based matchmaking and AI players that make the game bearable for even the most unskilled players.It’s very, very new user friendly, and it tends to keep you around your skill level. You will lose, but they make sure you have early success and can get better
Presumably, I will run out and grab a copy of Splatoon 3. I play a fair bit of Fortnite myself, but the Splatoon series is the only shooter I feel like I ever got good at. And that’s because the actual aim of the game is to shoot the floor.Also, I am about 5 clips away from getting all the scenes in Immortality. That may honestly take me all weekend to pull off.
I keep diving back in to Immortality to find those last few scenes, and keep getting frustrated clicking, like, a chair to try to get a scene I know is in there but just never getting the right result. The randomness is frustrating, but the game is so neat that it drives me to keep trying.
Really they’ve added a no base building option? Neat. That was the cause of why I found Fortnite a rather humilating experience as I used to think I was good at FPS games. Mainly as I was the only person playing Quake at various lan parties who knew about rocket jumping. Fortnite though I just could not wrap my head around the base building. Not even the slightest bit. I could get to top 5 by playing tactically i.e hiding, but actually fighting was a nightmare where I could barely get a basic cube up in the time my opponents could make something comparable with the sistine chapel.
After reading this I recommended to a friend that we delve back into Fornite to explore this palimpsestic quality, but we ended up playing Totally Accurate Battlegrounds instead. I asked why someone wouldn’t just get over themselves and succumb to fortnite, and he didn’t have a very clear answer.Otherwise I started Loop Hero and had so much fun! Scratches the itch of a roguelike, a tower defense, and an idle dungeon crawler all in one, and has a pretty thought provoking storyline.