What went wrong with Fortnite?

Fortnite has been a juggernaut since its release, especially since it released its Battle Royale mode. More recently, it’s been experimenting with different modes away from its core Battle Royale mode, and they made such a big noise about these releases. We have Rocket Racing and its Guitar Hero clone, Festival. Even more recently, they introduced “battle mode” to their Festival mode.

Whenever you view a mode on on Fortnite, it gives you a player count for that mode and oh boy do these numbers really fluctuate. I frequently see well over 300k players in the individual Battle Royale modes (Zero Build, Reload, Battle Royale) but that’s where this trend stops. Rocket Racing struggles to hit 4k players at a time, and the less said about Festival, especially Battle mode, the better. Last night (at the time of writing), Festival Battle was on 744 players. So where did this go wrong?

I’ll start with Rocket Racing, which to me comes down to it being as simple as choice. At the start of this mode, maps were few and far between so you ended up driving the same track frequently, with poor rewards such as new trails for your car’s boost. As time has passed, they’ve done themed updates, adding new tracks but rarely giving it more than that. They’ve now pulled the plug on these, essentially killing off this mode to all but its die-hard fans.

Now for Festival mode. This mode could have been incredible, especially as it was headed up by Harmonix who created Guitar Hero, but it seems Epic saw a chance to monetise this completely and milk it dry. However, that’s not quite where this mode started its downfall. It started as soon as it was released, missing the one vital component that made these games so popular. It was released without those fun, plastic controllers that made the likes of Guitar Hero and Band hero. Who wants to play a “Guitar” via their controller, when you used to be able to play them with a physical piece of plastic?

They’re amending this now and say they are going to add legacy support for controllers, but the current offering for a Guitar controller is at least £130 to play in a single mode on Fortnite. That’s not all, we have other ways they pull money for the fans of this mode too! This mode has its own Battle Pass, which costs more than the Battle Royale battle pass, whilst offering a lot less! It has its free track, which offers some rewards, but to get the premium track of the Festival pass, you’re paying 1800 vbucks which is roughly £11.68, almost double that of the Battle Royale battle pass.

Then we have the tracks themselves. They come on a daily rotation with a select number of tracks which you can’t choose. Is a song you want to play not on that list? Tough! Pay for it. You have to pay to play the songs you like frequently, and as they expand their catalogue of songs, the ones you like will not be in rotation as often. Want to buy a song, well you got to fork out 500 vbucks, around £3.25 but remember, you have to buy a minimum of 1000 vbucks through the store.

Festival mode has been made to be milked and as it currently sits, struggles to hit 5k in terms of current players from the stats shown on screen. I’ll stick to playing Battle Royale Zero Build of the Epic made modes. One thing Fortnite is doing well though, is really driving user content where some of the user creations are far out numbering the player count of Epics modes. Two of my favourite user modes are…

Murder Mystery by Good Gamers – Map Code 5253-8468-3364
Murder Mystery is a round-based party horror game featuring 10+ unique maps. 12 players are put into an environment where one is secretly a murderer. The murderer must hunt down and eliminate all of the innocents before the sheriff finds them out and takes them down. In each round, a new murderer and sheriff are chosen. They often add new features, new maps and some time-limited modes to. Well worth checking out!

Zombie Escape by Bloom Creative – Map Code 5263-9200-9917
Currently my absolute favourite creative map thanks to its speed and quick rounds. Run, Jump and Fight your way through the parkour maps as the Humans outrun the Zombies. Fight to the end of the parkour run to your escape, which is in one of 4+ zones! By completing runs, taking down humans and surviving, you earn XP for the in-game levelling system (whilst earning some Battle Pass xp!) which you can use to Prestige and start with better guns to take down the enemy. A really fun mode with a great community behind it trying to make it better all the time, listening to feedback from its players.

Written By: Aaron Bird
Favourite Game – Resident Evil 2 || Favourite Film – Hercules
About: Aaron is the creator of Pending Plays, and when not running things in the background, he’s busy playing games. When not reviewing, he’s busy pestering his dog Kuro.
Donate: https://ko-fi.com/pendingplays