Where would a game like Fortnite be without other people to play with and against?
For the majority of the time I spent playing the game to form an opinion about it, I never partied up with anyone I knew.
I wanted to see what the people playing the game were like without getting distracted.
When I chose to have the matchmaking system group me with other people, I never ran into a bad experience with another player.
Most of the people I ran into seemed to just not use microphones and didn't employ creative ways to be bad teammates.
The game doesn't feature any kind of proximity voice chat.
Interestingly, there also doesn't seem to be a way to type messages to other players, be it through Fortnite or using the Epic Games Launcher.
I think the game has a text chat feature, but it's restricted to only go to players in the same lobby and it might only work on the menus.
This limits who a given player can communicate with in both directions to players in the same lobby or on the same team who also have microphones and are willing to use them.
Of course, that's under the assumption that the player in question has a microphone and the will to use it.
Another consideration is that the game is designed to appeal to a younger audience.
Many of the random players present in a custom world or served up by the matchmaking system to fill a team may be children.
It's probably best when talking into the microphone to avoid using strong language and making inflammatory comments
relating to the supposed romantic preferences of another player or the supposed weight of their mother.
EDIT: Proximity chat was added as a feature to user-created modes in a game update. I believe this is an optional feature.
Despite the communication barrier, most players seem friendly enough.
I'm making this observation based on how the other players tend to behave.
Randomly assigned teammates are often willing to share resources when needed and will make honest attempts to save downed teammates.
If I run up to somebody and bust out some dance moves or do some friendly teabagging while waiting for the game to start,
there's a good chance the other player will return some dancing or teabagging of their own.
One of the interesting parts about the players in a battle royale lobby is that they aren't all human.
I'm guessing there's no official source for this, but the matchmaking system adds bot players to lobbies.
I don't have a problem with this on its own, but there's nothing the game does to distinguish these bots from human players.
The behavior of the bots is fairly distinct and the names given to them tend to follow a pattern, so it's not impossible to make the determination.
Even with that in mind, I'm never really sure if I was facing a low-skill player or a computer in most battles that I find to be easy.
New players wouldn't know that this is an element of the game and may not pick up on the fact that some of their opponents are just bots.
It would be better if the game had some obvious indication added to the names of its bots.
Bots | Fortnite Wiki - Fandom
EDIT: From the one experience I had playing in ranked lobbies, the above comment about bots filling a lobby is only applicable to unranked matches. If ranked matches have them, they're nowhere near as common. I don't think they appear at all in user-created modes.