Fortnite: The Rise and Fall

                                                                           Introduction

Before Fortnite was huge, it was A zombie invasion game where you were able to build in real time to stop zombies from attacking, in oppose to the usual zombies games where you are already in an environment to either run around and defend against zombies or stay in the same spot to defend against zombies. Due to it’s unique nature, you’d expect for the game to be very popular, but it didn’t get as much popularity as Epic games (The company that made Fortnite) wanted it to. Seeing the popularity of another game called “PlayerUnknown’s battlegrounds”, more known as pubg, Epic Games decided to make their zombie co-op game into a player verses player battle royale game, and it was a huge success! Fortnite battle royale had 10 million players in the first 2 weeks of release. Fortnite was the biggest game in the world at that time, and this begins what i call,”The Og era”

                                                

                                                                           

   

                                                                           The OG Era                    

Just about everyone considered this part of fortnite the best part of it by far, because things were so much simpler. The map was so good and everyone was around the same level in skill, that’s the thing with games like this, games that have completely new and unique mechanics. Usually when a new game comes out, it uses mechanics already used before in other games weather it’s the driving of a car game or fighting in a fighting game, it’s usually precedented so the people really good at those types of games will be really good from the start of the game’s release, already establishing a division in players’ skill. Things like that can make people feel discouraged from playing and just quit, but because mostly everyone is around the same skill level in fortnite, the players didn't quit as much and the game saw huge growth because of it. I say mostly because there were people really good at fortnite from the start, streamers. I forgot to mention but fortnite is a 3rd person shooter game, and isn't the first, so people with be good off of that alone. People also are just naturally good at the game with it’s own mechanics, people started to build more in fortnite instead of using structures for cover, and started to find new ways  to attack. For example, there were two types of shotguns in the game. 

One was called a tactical shotgun, and the other was called the pump shotgun. When you shoot the tactical shotgun, there was a 0.6 second delay before you could shoot it again. When you shot the pump shotgun, there was a 1.4 second delay before the next shot, but it did much more damage than the tactical shotgun. There was a bug in the game that made it so you can close the gap in  than the timings you can shoot between the two weapons, making the pump shotgun completely better than the tactical shotgun. If you knew how to do the double pump technique, there was no reason to use the tactical shotgun other than as self defense until you find 2 pump shotguns. It also had very good range so really you didn’t need an assault rifle either. This could’ve been confusing because I forgot to explain how the inventory system in the game works and I don’t know where I would put the explanation in for the edit.

 So there are different types of weapons in fortnite, assault rifles, snipers, shotguns, smgs, and launchers. In those categories, there’s also a rarity system. The more rarity a gun has the better it is. They range from common(gray), uncommon(green), rare(blue), epic(purple), and legendary(gold). There’s also healing items in the game, and shields. They’re called shields but they aren’t really shields, you drink it and you can take more damage before losing, with the maximum shield you can have is the same as the maximum health, 100. So having max shields can double the amount of damage you can take.

 A mini shield or more normally called minis give 25 shield each, and takes 2 seconds to drink 1, but you can only use them until you have 50 shield. The big pot gives you 50 shield, and takes 5 seconds to drink. It can be drank on any number of shield. So you can use it to get to 100 shield unlike the mini, but you can hold less. The slurp juice is a very special type of shield that heals you as well. It took 2 seconds to drink. The slurp juice will heal you for 1 health every second for 75 seconds, and if you had max health, it would give you shield. The last one is the chug jug, this healed you 100 health and 100 shield guaranteeing you’d have 200 hp  (hp means hit points, which is the amount of damage your character can take before dying)by the end of the very long drinking animation. It took 15 seconds to drink. For all of these, if you stopped drinking them by moving or switching to another item or getting shot, drinking it would cancel and you’d have to start over as if you drank nothing. 

Now that i have explained the basics, I can explain why only needing 2 shotguns for all attacking in the inventory was so devastating. A normal player’s inventory has an assault rifle, a shotgun, an smg, and either a sniper and health items or just two health slots. By using the double pump shotgun method you’re able to ignore the assault rifle and smg and have 3 health slots or use a lot of special items like the rocket launcher or grenades. This entire technique was taken out of the game by season 3(Feb 22 2018), the dates for season 0, season 1, and season 2 are July 21 2017, October 25 2017, and December 14 2017. It wasn’t actually called season 0 but Im calling it that to simplify it. What i call season 0 was the time before there were seasons, and was the initial launch of Fortnite. Back to where I was, season 3 ended the dominating double pump method and started the balanced era.

                                                                               The Fall

This era was in season 4(May 1st 2018)and was started by the turbo build mechanic in season 3, but it was enhanced by a whole new game mode. I didn’t mention it because it wasn’t very relevant for the part 3 but there were game modes different from the normal yourself versus 99 other people going at each other battle royale game. It had game modes, they were solo, duo, quads, and 50v50, all including 100 real people fighting each other. This game mode was different, and changed the slow learning curve of fortnite, speeding it up by an very large amount. It was called playground mode, and was a way to go into the map with only 4 people and just mess around and have fun in a place where normally you’d be shot on sight if you’re seen by another player. You could still fight your friends or the random people you got into a game with on this game mode, but if you died you would just respawn instead of being forced to spectate or go back to the lobby.

Of course with this practice potential, all the good players of this season were heavy practicers. Learning new mechanics like crazy, and evolving as players months or even years earlier than they would have without this game mode. The best way to get better was to 1v1 someone better than you or around the same skill level, then you would boost your skill and they’d boost their skill as you two fight. You can guess the results that were made from that process. This season was a beginning of a new, large division in skill. Not everyone practiced This season, around 80% of people I’d say, so 20% of the players they fought in the battle royale would absolutely destroy them if they encountered them. Of course after this a lot of people quit playing the game becuase not only is it normal for people to not like losing, but it’s intensified when you’re losing that badly. Being put in situations where it feel like there’s actually nothing you could do to escape losing, but because they didn’t practice it was almost impossible for them to win the fight against a sweat(the name players decided to call people really good who practiced was sweat).

I said almost impossible because the only way they could win is with luck, maybe by someone else sniping the sweat or a lucky headshot or something. But the next season(season 5 July 12 2018) gives more opportunity for survival. 

With the new season comes new items and weapons to help the larger player base to not quit the game. The first one of them i’ll go over is the shockwave grenade. The shockwave grenade is an item that explodes blasts you away from it, but does not deal any damage to you. You could be blasted high in the air as well but won’t take any fall damage. If you’re directly on top of it when you throw it down, you’ll go straight up, if you’re in front of it you’ll go forward, it’s a force that propels you with proper physics. You could also use it to break buildings or builds from anybody, so whenever a player is trapped in a box of an enemy player’s builds feeling like there’s nothing they can do to win, they could use a shockwave grenade and be blasted out of the box and end up far away. The next item they added could also be used for being trapped and boxed, it was a weapon class and it was the submachine guns(smgs). Based off of the real life submachine guns they have a really high fire rate.

 This gun was really powerful and overpowered builds, usually when you’re being shot at by an assault rifle and are constantly building there’s never an opportunity for you to be shot because the builds come up too quickly for the fire rates of the assault rifles, but now with the smgs if you tried to build while someone is shooting at you with one you’ll be shot every time the wall breaks, and eventually die. These weapons were game changers and were mean’t for casual players to combat the sweats, but it backfired. The casual players having these items and weapons were deadly, but the sweats having these weapons and items were just about impossible to kill for a casual player. 

Season 6(September 27 2018) was a really weird season and definitely one of the most forgettable ones. It didnt have anything notable for weapons or items and was more about the story fortnite started making. 

season 7(December 6 2018) was horrible at the start for everyone. When I say everyone, I mean for casual players, sweats, and the streamers/content creators. The season theme was snow and ice, and they made an item called the infinity blade, it granted 200 extra shield and 200 extra health and also healed the player who had it. To get it you need to land at a certain spot on the map and pull it out of the ground, just about every player landed at this spot or at least location on the map, either for the sword or for the amount of people that always lands there for the kills but everyone landed there. With the sword you were practically invincible with nothing players could do to stop you from killing them. Whenever you swing the sword, whatever builds that were in your way would be destroyed, meaning you cant build for protection against it. Even if you tried to escape from it by running away or having distance by whatever way possible it wouldn't work, because it had an ability that let you leap to wherever you’re looking so the sword user could just jump towards you and hit you, doing 75 damage per hit with  a swing rate of 1 second. Meaning you’d die in 3 seconds of being attacked by this sword. Not only this but you could build while using the sword and your speed was increased by 130%. This is why i said you were practically invincible. Of course they ended up balancing the sword a bit, making it so you couldn’t build which helped a lot. There was also another thing considered annoying and unfair. They added a new vehicle: planes. The planes were very good, being able to rush into your builds and destroying all of your protection and burning through all of your health by shooting you with the planes on the gun, or just flying into you. The planes were even worse on squads game mode, because teammates were able to ride on the wing of the plane while shooting at the enemy. These sound a little bit too unfair so of course they were shootable and were prone to breaking and exploding, but if nobody shot at it beforehand there’s no way you could break it before it killed you. If you were the first person the plane went for, you were dead, unless you had the infinity blade which lead to a very entertaining clash. Aside from the sword and planes, this season was considered one of the best for competitive players, at this point around 80% of players could build enough to defend against a sweat, but still lose, and only 5-10% of players were sweats, meaning 15-10% of players were below casual players, and were labeled defaults because they usually had the default character. The weapons this season are very good and people consider it the best.

    

                                                                         Glimmer of hope

Season 8 was on February 28th 2019 and was one of the most beloved seasons, because the battlepass was free! I don't think I explained what a battlepass was so i will now. A battlepass is a collection of skins, dances, and different cosmetics themed for the season, this was special because skins from the normal shop that had an epic rarity had a price of 1500 v-bucks(fortnite currency) costed around 15$ or maybe a bit less but the battlepass was riddled with them and costed 950 v-bucks which was 10$, and it had 2 legendary skins at the start and and the end of the battlepass. The legendary tier was worth 2000 v-bucks and costed 20$. The battlepass skins were also exclusive and never came back, and also you get 1100      v-bucks total if you complete the battlepass so you could spend 10$ to have the battlepass in season 2 and constantly complete the battlepass up to season 7 so you wouldn't need to spend any more money on it. There was a lot of value from the battlepass. So the battlepass being free was a big deal, and everyone had the battlepass this season. This season was definitely one of the best ever, and it had a lot of reason to be. This season was another one of the lore heavy ones like season 6, but it was just more fun with more interesting stuff inside of it. It was a pirate themed season with a big volcano on the map, as well as cannons to shot at people with or yourself at people through the cannons, this season also had the iconic banana skin. The competitive nature and situation with the players were the same as season 7 without any unfair items. Season 9 was on May 9th 2019 and introduced new iconic weapons and a great map theme, (arguably the best one yet). It’s futuristic style and map additions like wind tubes that let you fly around the map was very well liked. This season along with the last two kept Fortnite stable and still the most popular game of their years. It would stay that way until calamity struck.

                                                                    The completed fall                     

Season 10 or as they called it season X of Fortnite was August 1st 2019 and brought the old map that people liked the most back from season 1. Along with the map change it had a them like the other seasons, the they chose for season X were mechs. Mechs that were really hard to destroy, with the ability to destroy every thing easily. Of course this was hated by everyone in the community because if you had the mech and saw someone, they stood no chance for survival.

Fortnite has had really powerful weapons and items in the past, but this is truly the next level of unfairness. The nail in the coffin is that this ridiculously unfair item was in the season the whole time.

Most of it’s big streamers and content creators left the game because it just wasn’t fun anymore after this update. Of course they made their content and entertainment with the new items before leaving but, it wasn’t enough to save fortnite’s popularity. Season X marks the completed fall of Fortnite.