What's it Like To Watch Your Favorite Game Overshadowed By A Spin-Off Mode?

What’s it like to watch your favorite game overshadowed by a spin-off mode?

- Luke Winkie

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.