It wasn't until I went looking for written reviews of Fortnite that it occurred to me to include something about the game's graphics. Really, that's about how notable I consider them to be. The highly cartoonish direction of the game's visuals works fine, but it feels to me like it lacks soul. It doesn't feel particularly unique. Theoretically, this could be a consequence of trying to make a game that would be playable on, at least, a mobile device.
I was looking through the list of games Epic was involved with developing and/or publishing on Wikipedia and noticed that the additions to Fortnite I would have considered to be entirely separate games were listed as separate games. Maybe the intent is for Fortnite to be the hub for a set of games instead of one game with multiple games in it and I just wasn't getting that message.
There seems to be at least a few versions of bows or crossbows that shoot explosive arrows. I haven't seen or used them all, but I can't imagine that any of them are anywhere near as phenomenal as the Torque Bow from Gears. At the time of writing, I have not tested to see if a headshot from any of Fortnite's explosive bows results in an instant kill and continue traveling through the air after impact.
Biscuit tricked me into trying the Guitar Hero clone. It was a variation of the mode called "Battle Stage", which somehow incorporates an elimination system into a rhythm game. There's also an "attack" feature that puts visibility-reducing schmoo over the chart of another player for a bit by charging up a bar and pressing a button. I think GH also had that. I just stuck to the easy mode because I have no GH experience and needed to figure out what the heck was happening. It seemed to play well. Songs to play in the game need to be purchased and I wasn't paying attention during the pre-game lobby so I have no idea how the selection process for that works in the mode I was playing. I'm not much of a rhythm game guy, so I don't know that I would voluntarily choose to play it again in the future.
One of the guys I added to my friends list decided to join a party I had going with one of the people I met from the full squad of people using microphones. One of his friends joined through him, then the original guy left, and more people, the vast majority of which were annoying, joined from that friend. He managed to infect two of my fucking lobbies in the same night by doing this. When he started sending party invites and join requests for a third time, I went beyond just ignoring them and opened the menu while I was in a game to reject them. He had inadvertently ruined a good chunk of that Thursday night for me.
I got duped into trying the "Rocket Racing" mode as part of the annoying people invasions from that one Thursday night. It felt like a less interesting take on a Mario Kart game. The driving controls feel too slippery. I really don't have much else to say about it.
As part of the Metallica tie-in, there were a few times scattered into a weekend where a "special experience" was available for players to hop into. I found out about it when I launched the game during the weekend and got some notification telling me that I just happened to fire it up about 15 minutes before one of the scheduled times. I was on anyway and decided to give it a go. What I experienced felt like a bizarre fever dream of different ideas crammed into a six or seven minute window of time. There were segments featuring driving, platforming, rail grinding, shooting, and standing mostly still and watching cartoony versions of Metallica performing the studio mixes of some of their hit songs. It ended with a final boss battle against a "Master of Puppets" that actually looked pretty cool considering that my expectations had plummeted in the span of mere minutes. I wonder how many Fortnite kids know what that song is about. The maps themselves all looked good and actually offered some cool looking environments. I wish the clock tower part wasn't a "rush through it" platforming section. That was a particularly stand-out environment, but I didn't get a good look at it. Overall, the experience made me feel like I needed to go sit down for a while, despite the fact that I was already sitting down.
The user-made "Murder Mystery" reimplement of the mode I'm mostly familiar with from Garry's Mod has a feature for having "bodies" drop on the ground when someone dies in a match. From what I can tell, Fortnite doesn't have an actual way to leave a body on the ground when someone is "eliminated". The developers of the mode seemed to get around this by detecting when a player dies, spawning an inanimate and intangible copy of the model they use at the location, applying a pose to it, then rotating it 90 degrees to look like its laying on the ground instead of standing up. Due to players being quickly vaporized(?) when killed, their actual body disappears fast and makes the effect more convincing when not observed directly or in slow motion. This solution somehow feels elegant and janky at the same time and I think it's fantastic.
Gears of War 2 released with a then-new game mode called "Wingman". Instead of two teams with five players on them, it has five teams with a pair of players each. It's a round-based deathmatch mode where the objective is to get as many kills as possible and be the last team standing at the end of the round. Unlike the rest of the multiplayer modes in the game, weapons spawn on the map after some time from the beginning of each round. In a way, it offers a similar experience to a battle royale game, despite being released nine years before the genre really took off. A common narrative around the addition of the battle royale mode to Fortnite is that Epic Games was copying the style of gameplay from Player Unknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), which had recently released and exploded in popularity. While I do think that holds some weight, Wingman demonstrates that Epic was experimenting with something similar long before PUBG and other battle royales made their mark.
My favorite rifle ended up being the Huntress DMR. It's sort of an in-between of an assault rifle and a sniper rifle. I find the other snipers much more difficult to use in games due to them being harder to come by, their ammo being harder to come by, some of them might get dropped without a scope on them, and the bullet drop on them being much greater. The Huntress uses the standard rifle ammo (much easier to find), is faster to move with, and can be useful at a variety of ranges depending on the scope (or lack thereof) it's outfitted with. As for other weapons, I'm also a fan of the Chain of Hades (removed from drops in "C5S3" game update) and the Nitro Fists. Even though they're probably the most important part of close-range combat, I don't particularly care for most of the shotguns. The Gatekeeper shotgun seems good though. For reasons I can't completely explain, I also like the Ranger pistol.
From regularly interacting with people who frequently play this game, I noticed the ones with many character models to choose from tend to switch between them more than I'm used to seeing. I've had at least one comment made about my relative unwillingness to switch away from Toph. Part of this may be that the customization options in the first multiplayer games I played that had them. The most prominent of these was Halo: Reach, where customizations were unlocked by playing the game, leveling up to gain credits, then using them to obtain whichever options were most desirable to the player. Switching up a look meant changing any options individually. There was no button to immediately change between two appearances. Meanwhile, Fortnite unlocks are mostly the result of monetary transactions and the customization options for a player's model are extremely limited. Forming an appearance in a game like Reach involved gradually unlocking options and refining a look to create something unique, while the lack of fine-tuning for customization in a game like Fortnite causes players to select and cycle through multiple options to facilitate a more unique overall appearance. That, or the structure undermines the attachments made by players to their in-game appearance, with the weaker ties resulting in players being more willing to switch on a whim.
The Battle Royale modes have a feature where an island floating in the sky will appear in the late stages of matches. Players can ascend to the island and capture a point to get a big pile of loot. In the "Chapter 5, Season 4" major content update, Epic's collaboration with Marvel resulted in a version of the island with Doctor Doom and a related secondary objective on it. The floating island was enough for me, but the addition of an evil doctor taking it over really seals the deal for me. The floating island is obviously a Cave Story reference.
These greetings are sorted in the order that felt most applicable to me, which means there's no exact science to how I did these.
BurpOnTheFloor: One of the first people I met who had a microphone and was chill to talk to.
Helped me gain a sense of confidence that I could actually get some foothold and not just struggle and be miserable in every game.
Doughboy: Thanks for dropping that crown for me! It led to one of the first truly remarkable matches I had playing this game.
AlphaTrooper: Sorry about targeting you instead of Doughboy at the end of that match.
Manuel, Chris, Biscuit: Without you three, I would have dropped this game a lot sooner and wouldn't have branched out nearly as much.
I don't know that I would have figured out the point of this game otherwise.
I'm extending this greeting out to their friends who joined in parties through them.
UnderIntact: The one friend I have who actually plays Unreal Tournament. Knows who made who.
I got some help from him on figuring out what to write in places.
Schrodangan: Thanks for making the art of Toph!
People who still consistently use the Avatar skins in Fortnite: I don't really know any of these people, but when I see them in a game, I assume that they're homies.
These are (sort of) my people.
This is especially true of the people who are also rocking the Toph skin.
Everyone still playing Horde in Gears of War 2: Thanks for keeping the dream alive!