Once I had my plan in place, it was time to jump in. I mostly stuck to the solo queue so I wouldn't need to worry about teammates while I tried to get the challenges done to "unlock the Chakras" and eventually work my way to getting the Appa glider. As time passed, more quests were listed as part of different Chakras, those being Water, Earth, Fire, Air, Sound, and Light, made available one at a time in that order with the exception of the last two, which happened at the same time. I went back to rewatch a few episodes from The Last Airbender and ended up rewatching most of the show. The Chakras were based more around emotional states and mental clarity. I'm not sure how the Fortnite implementation was instead centered around "the four elements, except we actually need two more to pad things out, so we'll just wing it the rest of the way." Well, I think it's more likely that the elements were chosen to be more closely tied to fundamental aspects of the Avatar series for players who weren't familiar with it or didn't remember much from it.
CORRECTION: Rewatching the episode again (Season 2, Episode 19: The Guru), the names of the Chakras in the game are consistent with the ones in the show. Well, basically. The show has a seventh and final "Thought" Chakra and the order between the two doesn't match exactly. The order in the show started with Earth, Water, Fire, and "the fourth Chakra", which is most certainly Air, but it doesn't explicitly state that as such. Sound and Light are in the same order. There's more detail to this, but the important part is that my criticism in the above paragraph was botched due to forgetting, then missing some details. As such, I will forfeit the opportunity to read into "thought" being the only one of the seven from the show not included as part of the event.
Oh, what's that?
I've spent too much time talking and now I've landed on the ground from the drop?
Dang, I should have known that would happen.
Lucky for me, the fundamental strategy for what to do upon landing hasn't changed in the last six years.
Drop in somewhere likely to have items laying around and chests to be looted, grab as many useful items as can be carried,
then book it out of there before someone else doing the same thing decides to get aggressive.
Other players being around means an inevitability of this going sideways from time to time, but it generally works out well.
It helps that I know how to be a sneaky bastard and that I'm using a mouse to aim.
Many things to be grabbed, but some things are obviously going to be more useful than others.
With a melee weapon and five inventory slots, choosing the right items to bring along and leave behind to cover for close-quarters combat,
long-range engagements, and healing items that ward off bad cases of not winning is a balancing act.
Thanks to the Avatar tie-in, there are also elemental bending scrolls that serve different functions and are all extremely useful for their own reasons.
Overall, what I try to get my hands on is a marksman rifle, an auto shotgun or SMG, then items for restoring health and shields.
That describes four of the five slots.
The last one isn't something I have set in stone and is usually determined by what I can find and whether or not I'm looking to experiment.
UPDATE: The Avatar items were removed from circulation in the battle royale game modes in a game update.
Not content with only one player or team who must fall, the bar has been raised so that all but one (player or team, depending on lobby) must be eliminated to determine the winner. How to go about this can vary wildly. On top of the loot system, the game also adds secondary objectives that can provide better gear, vehicles, and even more information on where the death storm will be moving to. All are helpful in their own ways. The best strategy seems to be camping out in quiet spots until the number of players remaining drops to a point where confrontation becomes too necessary to continue skirting around. If Gears of War 2's Horde mode has taught me anything, it's that gathering a healthy surplus of ammunition and holding a good camping spot may not always be the right answer, but it's never the wrong answer. I seem to lose most of my close-range encounters when my opponent has a shotgun anyway. My long-range "trying to snipe the guy trying to snipe me" interactions tend to go more favorably for me. What I'm gathering from this is that shotguns are the meta, even when building is completely removed from the mix.
EDIT: In the first sentence of the above paragraph, I intentionally chose words from the title of a game Epic published in the 1990's as a nod to it. About two months after writing this, I found a poster of that game's cover art (with the title blurred to be illegible) on a wall inside a small building in a nowhere spot on the map. I never would have expected that.
I'll give Fortnite credit, the experience of playing the Zero Build mode gets more visceral than I would have anticipated.
There's good tension at times when I'm running through open areas with no certainty of who may be lurking about.
Trouble can start shooting at me without warning from two feet away or two hundred feet away.
I hear unexpected bullets flying by and I'm sent scrambling for cover as I try to figure out where I'm being shot from.
Battles are fast and every hit taken and given feels meaningful.
It does a good job of keeping me on my toes.
I find this to be a stark juxtaposition to the pre-game lobby where players just act relaxed and show off their dance moves
and player models officially licensed from more properties than I can name (available for purchase in the Fortnite store, of course).
Instead of disliking this, I think it actually adds to the experience.
Sure, all these people are about to embark on a journey to scavenge for weapons and supplies like ravenous beasts to kill each other off until everyone else is dead,
but the fun dancing beforehand reminds everyone that it's all in good fun!
As I've been describing the gameplay experience of what is undoubtedly one of the most played video games in modern history,
I can't shake the feeling that doing so may be pointless.
Especially so, with the amount of readily-available videos that would just show what playing the game is like.
Something tells me that most everyone else would feel the same way.
With that in mind, my decision to attempt a somewhat detailed description of the gameplay may actually be far more important than I originally thought.
I just checked for written reviews of the game and didn't find much.
I did manage to find a review very similar to what I'm attempting to do with this, although not to the same breadth that I'm aiming for.
I'll include a link to it here. He includes more details about how playing the game actually works.
Fortnite Review by Caden Brooks - Medium
I also saw a post with a screenshot of Xbox user "Lost 1one1" giving a two-star review of the game with the title "France"
and the description "As soon as I shoot someone 2 times they build the eiffel tower on top of me and then run across the map."
I've included this here because it's fucking hilarious.
Fortnite Xbox Reviews - Reddit (r/FortNiteBR)