What’s it like to watch your favorite game overshadowed by a spin-off mode?
Here’s Mighty Goat, one of the many struggling streamers uploading Fortnite Battle Royale videos to the internet every day. His library offers jump-pad highlights, cross-country snipes, and garish guides on how to acquire the latest skins. But recently, in the middle of all that, he tried something different. “We’re gonna play the new—well I guess it’s not new—but it’s new to me, Save The World,” he says. “It’s like the campaign version of Fortnite. I’ve never played it. I’ve never even seen videos on it.”
It’s both funny and tragic to watch a career SEO miner play the version of Fortnite Epic spent six years developing. My favorites are the comments that dot Mighty Goat’s videos; they’re full of surly disciples excoriating him every time he says “This reminds me of Fortnite!” as he tours the Save The World infrastructure. “This is Fortnite,” they hiss. “Battle Royale is not Fortnite.”
They are correct, of course. Fortnite is a game about PvE base-building, and killing zombies, and watching cutscenes, and grinding for color-coded epics and legendaries in high-level zones. A quick anecdote: Years ago I went to a Comic-Con panel where Cliff Bleszinski, who was still with Epic at that point, unveiled Fortnite as a dream project—a sort-of proto-Destiny, with the whip-smart construction mechanics of Minecraft plugged in. The company did eventually bring that dream to life as Fortnite finally hit Early Access in summer 2017, with its scope graciously intact.
But you can’t stand in the way of history, and when Epic tossed in a battle royale module cribbed directly from the spectacularly popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds a few months later, everything changed.
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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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