Fortnite's fun is buried under five years of gaming's clutter
Epic has long argued that games these days should be one thing: a service, developed alongside the input of its players. But Fortnite is not naturally that game, and that philosophy is so obviously getting in its way. Moulding it to the service-based model means a game about building and defending forts also has purchasable loot boxes, and collectible cards, and collectible heroes, and an extensive RPG skill tree, and all kinds of bloat designed around the base tendencies of compulsion and infinite progression. An over-anxiousness towards player feedback, meanwhile, means any original vision is constantly challenged - and so what started out as a quick-turnaround game jam project morphs into a perpetually-tinkered, six-year-old behemoth. The result of all this is that it feels, at times, as though playing Fortnite is like playing a business model, when there's a fun and charming enough game hidden somewhere beneath it.
But even then, what would that hidden game be? If only Fortnite was just about the building and the defending, I carry on thinking to myself, staring at the endless, between-game tabs of cards and characters. But then that would be Orcs Must Die - and orcs are much more in vogue than zombies now, anyway.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...is-buried-under-five-years-of-gamings-clutter