Fortnite Battle Royale has been an unstoppable force pretty much ever since it released for free on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Its free admission saw swathes of players hop onto the Battle Bus, and ever since Epic Games has drip-fed us new weapons, game modes, and cosmetics to keep us dropping and grinding out those Victory Royale’s. One of the biggest changes to Battle Royale came in the form of its massive map update back in January, populating the west side of the map with more named locations. While the mines of Shifty Shafts and coastal homes of Snobby Shores were welcomed by fans, one locale had fans split. That locale is Tilted Towers, and if the recent teases and fan theories are anything to go off, a comet is about to wipe it off the face of the map.
Why? Well, it’s kind of messed up the general flow of the game. Tilted Towers has such an ideal, central location in the map that, regardless of wherever the circle begins to close in on, you can get there with relative ease. Combine that with the metric shit ton of chests there and the promise of action from the get-go and it’s easy to see why the location attracts huge swarms of players to drop in at the very start of a match. If you land there and enjoy that kind of thing, Tilted Towers is great fun, but if you land just about anywhere else, the general flow of Battle Royale has taken a real turn for the worst.
Now, those named locations on the fringe of the map are, by and large, incredibly quiet. Great for preparing yourself for later in the game, but when a quarter to a half of players are wiped out in Tilted Towers by the time the first storm rolls in, that’s a problem. Frequently, I’ve found myself running in toward the circle up until the final 10 or 15 players without stumbling upon any players, or one if that. That wasn’t the case before Tilted Towers. The entire map required more strategy and cunning to get around undetected. Now, it just feels like a marathon sprint in toward the center, and who wants to spend 10 minutes running across the map for just a brief flash in the pan of action in the grand scheme of things?
That’s by and large why many fans are so excited at the prospect of Fortnite’s comet obliterating Tilted Towers off the face of the map. Sure, Epic Games could replace it with another named location, but even if it does, it’s unlikely to make the same mistakes over again.
And that’s where the argument for the removal of Tilted Towers certainly has some credence. Wipe it off the map, and all of those chests need to go somewhere. Considering leaving them all in its replacement wouldn’t do a whole lot to remedy the current situation, chances are we’ll see a bunch get sprinkled back across the map. A redistribution of Tilted Towers’ many chests can only help to improve the flow of the game. Drop them in the likes of Pleasant Park, Greasy Grove, Tomato Town, or just in the middle of nowhere to spice up the run. Make these named locations ring with the sound of shotgun blasts and rapid SMG fire from the moment the game begins as they once used to.
While these are the things everyone expects Fortnite’s comet to hopefully bring when it obliterates Tilted Towers, there’s something more exciting that its impending collision course indicates – nowhere is safe. That’s not to say that we’re now going to see some sort of meteor shower come down and wipe the Fortnite map clean, but it does mean Epic Games is listening to fans, and if something doesn’t work, it’s not going to stay in for the sake of pride. After all, Tilted Towers only got added in less than three months ago. Removing the most landed at location on the map just three months after adding it in because it doesn’t work, that’s some serious holding your hands up. It’s commendable.
What’s also commendable is the way Epic has turned this into an event. It’s united the community as fans have gone about translating vibrations into morse code to find hidden messages, collaborated on theories, and datamined assets pertaining to the comet itself. Though there’s not even any guarantee that the comet will crash into Tilted Towers, it’s enough to get you thinking about just what other crazy in-game events Epic might have in store that could change the landscape of Fortnite Battle Royale as we know it.
