‘Fortnite’ Has Never Been Better Than It Is Right Now

For a lot of people, Fortnite is a meme game. It has the reputation of being a game that is dominated by children who spend all day endlessly repeating the dances and emotes while wearing pinata llamas on their shirts. In reality, Fortnite is one of the most fun Battle Royale games out there.

Yes, children love it but so do teenagers, adults, and anyone that enjoys gaming. It controls extremely well, has good movement, and there is more to do than just drop into circles and shoot each other. Fortnite is huge because the developers over at Epic Games have endlessly supported it and tweaked the game. There is so much to the world of Fortnite that goes beyond the average battle royale and it’s an extremely impressive game. It’s also never been more fun to play than it is right now.

That may be a bit of a surprise for the average person, or someone that hasn’t played Fortnite for a couple of years because most games reach a peak and then eventually sputter out. It takes a truly rare experience for a five-year-old game to be more fun now than ever before. In the case of Fornite though, it really was thanks to one decision. The developers of the game decided to take a risk and remove building from the game. The entire basis of Fortnite, the thing that made it unique when it first entered early access in 2017, was that it gave player’s the ability to build in the middle of combat. Now, that feature has been removed and rumors are that it’s going to be a permanent option in the long run.

Before getting into why this is happening, it first needs to be recognized how extreme a decision this actually was by the developers. When Fortnite came out, the Battle Royale genre was still in its infancy. This was before Apex Legends or Warzone, and most games were trying to imitate and capitalize on the success of Public Battlegrounds. Fortnite’s main hook was not that it let players dance, or do funny emotes, but the building. Players could put up walls to protect themselves, create stairs to climb mountains, or utilize it in a fire fight to gain an edge. Being a builder was an essential part of the Fortnite experience, but unfortunately, this would end up being to the game’s detriment in the long run.

Fortnite is now the only game where someone can use Spider-Man to shoot Batman, while Naruto is off in the corner dancing to an Ariana Grande song. The universe that it has created is ridiculous and absurdly fun. There are side quests, NPCs, and endless things to do besides shoot each other. It attracts players of all kinds to it because of everything that has been crammed into this universe and for the first few hours, it’s really fun. Unfortunately, as players moved through the experience they all come across the same issue. Building is no longer just putting up some walls or a staircase. It is integral to winning a match and the players who are masters at it have created a skill gap that feels unreachable and honestly pushes away new players, or anyone that doesn’t have the time to learn it. There is nothing less fun in a Fornite match than catching an opposing squad off-guard and then watching them build a skyscraper in front of you in less than five seconds.

As players grew sick of the building, they moved instead to other options like Warzone or Apex Legends where the fun and skill comes from the game’s movement rather than if someone can memorize the button inputs to build faster than their opponent, or if they have more resources, or enough bullets to shoot through the walls they’ve built. So what if you took the fun movement abilities of those games, slapped them on Fortnite, and kept all the wacky stuff that makes the world so absurd? You get what Fornite is right now.

Alongside the removal of building, the player can now sprint, slide, and mount to make movement quicker. They can still destroy objects with mining, but this just gets objects out of the way and doesn’t lead to resources like it previously did. More importantly, the entire map has been reworked to assist the lack of building. Wide open fields aren’t as prevalent and there is a lot of natural terrain to use for cover and movement. Fights feel quick and since everything is destructible there is a constant need to keep moving. Firefights haven’t been this fun since the early stages of the game.

As a result of all these changes, Fortnite is now the best it has ever been. More importantly, it’s back to feeling like a game that anyone can get into. Everyone should be able to appreciate the absurd world that Epic Games has created here and the building felt like it was not letting players do that. Now, they can.