Here’s Why Fortnite Has Us Drinking Epic Games Kool-Aid

Nurturing the Competitive Scene

Fortnite’s battle royale gameplay isn’t necessarily the easiest to transfer into an esport from a logistics standpoint. How do you follow what all players are doing at once? How is it all ranked when you could win the game with just one kill? Are there specific rules that are imposed? That’s just scratching the tip of the iceberg, but there’s a ton of work that needs to be done from taking a title from a game people enjoy playing at home into turning it into a competitive esport with a large audience. That’s not stopping Epic Games from giving its best, though.

In the past couple of weeks alone, Epic Games has clearly made strides to really kickstart Fortnite’s competitive scene. Not only did it introduce the Solo Showdown game mode this weekend just gone, answering (at least) one of the above questions, providing players with an opportunity to see how they fare in a competitive environment, and offering some sweet cosmetics as a reward for playing all 50 games required to rank, it also put its money where its mouth was. Epic announced it will provide $100 million to fund prize pools around the world for the Fortnite competitive scene. That’s a pretty huge prize pool for a game that’s not even a year old. Guess we know where all those V-Bucks we’ve been spending have gone.

Acknowledging & Rewarding Fans

By having this in here, we’re not trying to insinuate that no other developer or publisher has a great relationship with their fans. In fact, more often than not it’s quite the contrary. However, it’s just the fact that Epic does it so well, and in such cool ways that the community just never saw coming.

Orange Justice, obviously, stands out as the primary example of this, which saw one young fan seeing his #BOOGIEDOWN dance move entry get added into Season 4’s Battle Pass, despite not winning. You can check a video of both his entry, and the dance in all of its Fortnite glory here if you’ve yet to witness its brilliance.

But it’s not just that they added one dance in there. Epic Games does a bunch of little things to keep fans happy that likely goes unnoticed by many. In fact, just this week it managed to roll out two new limited-time game modes, the Jetpack, and a bunch of fixes with no downtime (something that’s seen fans unable to play for hours at a time each week). There’s also all of the Twitch Prime goodies they’re giving away, not to mention the speed that they hop onto an issue as soon as it’s mentioned by players. And yes, we’re sure they’re very much aware of how much you want Fortnite on Android, too. It’s comin’, not too long to wait now.

Regular and Notable Content Updates

Epic Games doesn’t go a week without bringing some sort of interesting new updates to Fortnite Battle Royale, as well as the Save the World PvE game mode. Though it’s certainly the Battle Royale mode that steals the limelight most weeks. Epic’s continued support regardless of whether you prefer your action PvE or PvP has ensured that the fanbase has a reason to stick around.

In the past few content updates, fans have finally seen the arrival of the long-awaited Jetpack as a limited-time item (after it was pulled at the last-minute from being released a few months back), Burst Assault Rifles, healing Apples, and new skins and consumables. And that’s on top of all of the patches that have brought a ton of balance changes in between the content updates.

Fortnite’s Battle Royale and Save the World modes may still be in early access, but if anything, Epic has taken this as a license to see what works and what doesn’t and getting a bit wild with things. Removing weapons from the game and ‘vaulting’ them when they don’t work within the meta, and introducing new alternatives or even more crazy ways to eliminate your opponents altogether. Heck, they even gave the map an entire overhaul earlier in the year adding in a ton more named locations, and we’ve seen similar additions since the end of Season 3, too.

Not everything’s going to stick that comes in these frequent updates, but the contents of the content updates and patches each week just shows there’re some truly passionate people working on Fortnite who want it to be the very best it can be, come the full, official release.

Compensation When Downtime Drags On

Though Epic Games does seem to be really pushing to eliminate downtime as much as possible when it comes to Fortnite’s patches and content updates, sometimes things just have a bit of a meltdown on their end. A server could randomly get an error, or just the masses of players trying to hop on the Battle Bus is too much for their servers to handle. When this has happened, Epic Games has not only been quick to diagnose the issue, communicate this with fans, and provide a rough estimated time for when it’ll be back online, it also knows where things have gone a little too far.

Back toward the start of last month, Fortnite was down for a good 24 hours or so, with fans either unable to play the game at all, or with severe issues with the Fortnite services. Where a few hours for a content update is expected, this unexpected downtime (which was then broken down in a massive postmortem for fans here) was disappointing to both Epic Games and fans. To make up for issues, Epic dished out free cosmetics and Battle Stars to Battle Royale players, and Seasonal Gold to Save the World players, as well as a Troll Stash Llama for free.

This isn’t something Epic really had to do. Sure, fans were angry at the downtime, but this is a free game in early access and so these kinds of issues are somewhat expected, particularly when you’re rocking over 30 million players. Still, fans felt the love.

Epic Events & Hidden Clues

If there was one area that Epic Games has managed to really outdo itself, though, it’s the insane events, limited-time modes, and hidden clues that have consistently popped up in Fortnite Battle Royale. Whether it’s the 50 vs 50 limited-time mode that tips the stereotypical battle royale formula on its head somewhat, the Solid Gold mode that offers up only the best weapons, or the smash-hit Infinity Gauntlet crossover event from a few weeks back, Epic Games is always looking for a way to keep the game feeling fresh outside of the weapons and items it adds in content updates.

But last month that started to expand even outside of just limited-time game modes. The comet (pictured above) and its rumored final destination being Tilted Towers set the community ablaze with speculation and theories, and Epic kept on teasing. Telescopes were placed onto the map, pointing toward the comet, signs suggesting the crashing of the comet suddenly appeared, and there were even assets in update files that were datamined by fans. With the crashing of the comet into Dusty Depot (turning it into Dusty Divot) rounding out the end of Season 3, and new superhero-themed locales appearing on the map for the superhero-based Season 4, it seems as though Epic is all for chopping and changing the map to provide some sort of a very basic storyline.

Prior to all this kicking off in Fortnite Battle Royale, the game was already hugely popular. It’s another indication that the developers bringing us all of these epic weapons, items, and alliterated location names are just as passionate about the world, if not more so than us fans.