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Let's Talk About Fortnite's Big New Update

It's been about a week since Fortnite added its three new main modes, so I figured I could jot down some notes about how I feel about each one, since I continue to play an absolute obscene amount of this game, given it's basically the only live service game I've ever connected with.

Lego Fortnite

This is maybe the biggest new mode added to the game, and at a glance, you might think it's their take on Minecraft. Having put about 10-20 hours into it now, I can tell you it's a lot more like Valheim, sprinkled with a bit of Terraria. It's a survival game, where your goal is to start a town out in the procedurally generated wilderness. As your town levels up in size and complexity, you attract NPCs to take up residence, which you can put to work gathering resources, manage farms, cook food, or party up to help you explore the world and raid various caves.

There's enough content here to support that 10-20 hours, but you'll eventually run out of things to do, given there's just three biomes and only a handful of creatures. Updates are already promising things like merchants, more creatures and even quest givers, so it definitely feels like it has legs, and I think what's here plays well enough. It just feels more like a foundation right now. This is one of those things where, like, it may be worth checking in on 6 months down the road, because there's a lot of potential it could grow into. And hey, it's the only one of these modes that doesn't have any additional fees hooked on top of it yet. That's a plus.

Rocket Racing

Created by Psyonix, this is a racing mode that's a little hard to quantify. The actual racing mechanics themselves are solid: drift to charge up three levels of boost, with a kind of "active reload" system that can almost double your boost if you hit it just right. There's a jump button, and your jump jets can be used to hover over hazards. After you jump, you can also use the drift button to perform a flip in four directions, because your car can also drive up walls and across the ceiling. So, if you jump, push up on the stick, and then tap the drift key, you'll flip up on to the ceiling. Despite all of this mechanical complexity, Rocket Racing still feels too simple to have much lasting power. Some of the fun of a racing game is how everyone tunes their vehicles differently, but so far there's just the the one Rocket Racing car.

Epic and Psyonix could be going for more of a Trackmania feel, and user-generated tracks (the main appeal of Trackmania) are something they're teasing for Rocket Racing, but it's worth mentioning that Trackmania has always seemed kind of niche. It's never had the success of something like Forza Horizon or even Need for Speed.

This also has one major strike against it that Trackmania does not: you collide with other players in Rocket Racing, which is actually sort of a nightmare thanks to network latency. I've run into a lot of shockingly aggressive opponents that treat the game like bumper cars, and every time they crash into you, it's like rolling the dice as to whether or not the collision will actually register. Sometimes your opponent harmlessly slides off the side of your car, and other times the most gentle tap will send you into a tailspin. I wouldn't call the mode terrible, but judging by Fortnite's own menu system, player numbers are dropping fast. It's cool being able to flip around between walls and the ceiling, but there's not enough to sink your teeth into long-term besides overpriced vehicle cosmetics.

Fortnite Festival

This is literally just Rock Band 5. The main change is the way you play notes -- there's no plastic instrument support yet (that's coming later, apparently), so you're limited to playing it on either a keyboard or a gamepad. The way the buttons are mapped out by default, there are certain combinations of notes they are never going to make you press together, because it's impossible to hit both left and right on the d-pad simultaneously. Besides that, I'm not kidding, it's actually just Rock Band, and unfortunately I'm one of those people who struggles to connect with rhythm games.

I love something like Parappa the Rapper or even Theatrhythm, but I just don't connect with a lot of the genre in the same way most people do. This version does at least connect to Fortnite's cosmetics system, so you can have Michael Myers singing vocals in Gangnam Style, backed up by Beast Boy and Ellen Ripley wearing a Ghostbusters proton pack. During downtime where you might not have any notes to play, you're given the option to use your Fortnite emotes. That's fun enough on its own, but it's extra fun on skins with transformation abilities. Going back to Beast Boy, it's fun to watch the camera pan by him in his regular Teen Titans attire, only for him to suddenly be a bass-playing gorilla the next time you see him.

Also included are "Jam Tracks", which let you play specific pieces of songs outside of the Rock Band mode. So if you want, during a Battle Royale match, you could start playing the bassline to Seven Nation Army at any time, anywhere, and even change the pitch and tempo. Other players can choose to join in, adding vocal tracks, or lead guitar, or drums, all from different songs, creating a strange sort of on-the-fly mashup. It's not super deep, but I suppose it's there to justify the fact that songs in Fortnite Festival are roughly $5 each. Festival also has its own Battle Pass, at $18 -- almost twice what the Battle Royal Pass costs, and unlocking stuff on the Festival Pass feels like the slowest possible grind. Too many Festival quests only give 10 or 15 "points" towards the pass, when you often need THOUSANDS for the next unlock. Kind of a bummer!

Battle Royale

As a bonus, some commentary on the current chapter of BR: as of this latest iteration of Fortnite, it feels like they've basically rebooted the entire game. If you've been paying attention to industry news, Epic's had quite the exodus of high-ranking staff lately, leaving me with a feeling that a completely different team is handling Fortnite now. Every piece of the gameplay has been retooled seemingly overnight, from healing systems to movement speed. The best way to sum it all up is that it feels a lot more like PUBG now. But like, worse? Weapons have attachments now, foregrips and sights and stuff, but there's no way to pull a sight off one gun and put it on another. You can only buy attachments at a workbench, of which there's only, like, seven on the entire map.

So generally you're stuck with whatever attachments are already on a gun when you find it, and there's no easy way to compare attachments if you want to swap for something else. The previous system -- which was basically just WoW's rarity system -- was a lot clearer and easy to understand. A purple gun is always better than blue. Now those waters are a lot muddier, and you don't have access to the information you need to make informed decisions about what is better than what. The simplicity that made Fortnite more accessible than PUBG is gone now. The other changes just take some getting used to, but the slower movement does mean running from a closing storm circle is a lot harder in a way that feels like nobody on the team really understood or accounted for.

The main issue is that Battle Royale is still trying to be the "spotlight" mode in Fortnite right now, which means its trying to incorporate a little bit of everything and it's hurting the experience. The new cosmetics locker system is a total nightmare to use, more tedious in every single conceivable way, to such a degree it's hard to comprehend anyone actually thinking it's a legitimate improvement. Fortnite also tries to pull in your Rocket Racing cosmetics to BR now, but only for certain vehicles, which in itself taps into a long standing frustration with Fortnite's handling of vehicle cosmetics overall.

Close to five years ago, Fortnite introduced its "wraps" system for guns that work like liveries in a racing game -- basically a custom texture for your gun. Wraps have inconsistently applied to other things as well. Fortnite's earliest vehicles like the golf kart and quadbike accepted wraps, as did boats. There are even skins now that can wear wraps as clothing patterns.

But cars could never have wraps applied to them. There were hints that maybe wraps would eventually apply to vehicles, as there were updates where they started appearing on pieces of a vehicle, but never the whole thing. Now we finally get vehicle cosmetics, but it only applies to one vehicle type, and transforms it into a completely different car body? It feels half-baked and deeply arbitrary.

Fortnite has often had many different vehicle classes on the map together, between pickups, sports cars, sedans, and hauler trucks. But now the sports cars are the Rocket Racing car? It's cool on the surface, but a strange portent of future seasons. What of the other vehicle types? They're not in the game right now, but will they be? Will sports cars be a permanent fixture of the Fortnite map going forward, so the cosmetics always carry across between modes? Is this a hint that other vehicle types are coming to Rocket Racing, and that eventually, we'll be able to apply cosmetics to everything?

Which is to say nothing about the fact that wraps don't even seem to apply to guns anymore. There's a lot of systems that hook into wraps that they can't just get rid of -- but it definitely seems like whoever is in charge of things right now is trying to find a way to ignore them, starting with the core functionality they were invented for.

Like a lot of things about what's happening to Battle Royale in Chapter 5, it feels super weird, and very divorced from the Fortnite I used to know and enjoy. Their attempts to try and tie everything together like this so that Battle Royale can have elements of all (or most) of the other modes incorporated into it just don't mesh very well or feel very necessary. They're recreating and then solving problems that were already solved four years ago.

Which is ultimately the bummer: I'm not sold that any of this needs to be inside of Fortnite, and I don't think it's going to pay off in the end. It's hurting the core experience a little bit and the best, most fun new modes would have still been fun as standalone games.

I just don't see the point. How big is big enough, Epic?

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