So I have this guilty pleasure.
Yes, I am an avid Fortnite player, usually for like, a quarter at a time. Zero Build, of course, I'm not a
monster. What can I say? I think the game can be pretty fun. Despite the childish associations it's often a pretty good time for me and my friends. And y'know? Some of the most fun stuff out there is made for children, so like, who cares, really. My time with Fortnite is typically very enjoyable, and it's almost never an especially stressful game, even if I'm losing. It's pretty harmless fun, and every so often the game devs will whip up some cool new twist on a season that makes playing feel fresh and exciting. As of the time of writing, they have a system in place that allows you to track down a randomly selected player/squad within a certain radius of yourself, which does a good job of speeding up engagement. Good stuff.
Recently though, I've been having this problem with the game. It's not actually a new problem, and whenever it rears its head, it usually means my Fortnite craze dies down and I fall back into my normal video game habits. Which is to say Minecraft. Jesus writing this makes me feel like I'm 10 years old. Anyways, my issue is this. Crossovers.
This might sound strange to you since for most of its lifetime at this point, Fortnite has been
the crossover game. In fact, its first ever crossover event happened in 2018, just eight months after the game's release. This collaboration with Marvel Entertainment in the lead up to Infinity War set the tone for a lot of what was to come in the future, and now the idea of Fortnite
without crossovers feels ridiculous. And I won't deny, they're fun! But they also suuuuuuuuuuuuck.
The central issue I have with Fortnite crossovers is the way that they absolutely infect a season. Basically every time I play, things will be going normally for a while, and I'll have a decent opportunity to enjoy my time with the game, until the season reaches its later stages, at which point I am playing Collab Fortnite. It doesn't matter what the collab is, because it usually turns out the same. Currently it's Overwatch, but in my playtime I've also had to sit through Avatar the Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, and DC Comics collaborations.
It kinda doesn't matter what the collab is, they tend to play out the same. Some new thematically appropriate items are added to the loot pool. They're often very good, and so the gameplay shifts from being mostly gunplay based to fighting with these weird collab weapons, which often have some sort of crazy movement ability to go along with their pushed stats. This means that final fights revolve heavily around a very frenetic and hard to follow run-and-gun style gameplay where I am at a massive disadvantage because my computer is slow and I can't keep track of all the Jujutsu Kaisen characters flying across my screen. Game states are just too damn difficult to track. I don't really enjoy this style of gameplay, even when I win, there's something that feels very hollow about it. The crossover items feel like gimicky skinner boxes, designed to get all of the dopamine receptors in your brain firing at max capacity. Consequently this means that while they are fun momentarily, they start to suck very bad with continued usage as your brain gets wise to the trickery at play, hidden behind flashy movement and VFX.
Now, less offensive but maybe a bit more crass feeling are the purely cosmetic crossovers, and there's just so many of them that it's really easy to lose track. They're funny some percentage of the time (I am often rocking a Sabrina Carpenter skin) but the joke wears thin with constant repetition, and they can be very distracting. Sometimes that's funny, like seeing Ben Ten rise from behind the mountain like a Greek god, fists ablaze with light and holy fury, raining down shotgun shells like thunder bolts from Olympus. More often it just sorta feels dumb. Now, Fortnite is certainly eclectic even without these skins but typically their in house creations share a certain artistic style that makes them feel a bit more sympatico with one another, making them much more easy to comprehend. Once again, I'm not totally against these, it just feels like Fortnite has knocked the cookie jar off the top shelf and is gorging itself past the point of joy or benefit.
Recently though I've been thinking, and I think it's pretty clear that the crossover events are emblematic of a deeper problem in Fortnite. Like, in this current season, half of the items I hate aren't even crossover items, they're just normal fortnite loot. They have the exact same problems as described above! The overdrive rifle and the seven gauntlets come to mind as being just deeply uninteresting to me, and the overdrive rifle isn't even new to this season. This sickness does not come from outside of the game, but from within. And really, I should've known that shouldn't I?
Fortnite is, first and foremost, a commercial product. It pretty much always has been. That's not to say the devs or the teams working on it have no love for the project, I am sure they do, and I'm sure they do their best to make it as good as possible. But Fortnite has always been ruled by something more crude than love. Part of me feels like it must've been better once, maybe in the few months that I played the game with my father back in 2017, before it was seized by all of the things I can't stand. I'm skeptical though. I'm not writing this because I think anything will change, even though I want it to, I guess I'm just sorta disappointed that financial interests are so tightly wound against this thing I like.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while Fortnite has lost its chance at having its own identity, the game is still pretty financially scummy, and that sucks. Even so, while there may not have been much art in the previous version of the game, there was at least something, and the loss of that something is a bit sad to think about. I don't know, I'm not really all that worked up about it. It's the way the game is, and I can still love it, even if sometimes the way it's designed means I'm going to hate it. Such is life.
Hey what the fuck's up with all these Magic cards?
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