Fortnite (video game)

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Fortnite

Genre	Battle royale,Survival, Sandbox
Gamming Style	Third person
Platform	Playstation 3, XBox 360, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android
Release Date	2017-Present
Developer	Epic Games
Publisher	Epic Games
Website	Fortnite by Epic Games

Fortnite is a battle royal type online multiplayer video game developed and published by Epic Games. Published by 2017, the game featured the battle royale and survival (save the world) modes, while the creative mode was released in 2018. Once published, Fortnite became one of the most successful free-to-play games in the history. As of 2021, Fortnite had totally 350 million users, and it generated 5.4 billion dollars of revenue in the year of 2018 alone. The game is available on multiple PC, console and mobile operating systems, including Windows, PS4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Android. However, the game remains on old version on App Store of MacOS and IOS because of the dispute of “unapproved paying mechanism” with Apple.

Gameplay

The three modes in Fortnite offer distinctive gameplay experiences to players, while maintaining some similar essential elements.

Battle Royale

Fortnite’s battle royale mode features a mixture of sandbox-style game and the conventional battle royale elements. Players can choose to play with themselves or form a duo or quad group with others. Once enter the game, players will be on a cargo plane, which carries 100 people, and can choose to airdrop to anywhere in the map. The goal for each team is to survive and eliminate all other teams until they become the last men standing. To do this, players can collect weapons and equipment inside the buildings to strengthen their power, and they can even destroy various of structures to collect woods, steels and bricks, which is useful for building fortifications.

To facilitate competitions between players, storms are generated per several minutes, encircling a safe area on a random location on the map. For each storm the safe zone is progressively encroached by the storm, and since players lose health in the storm, they need to plan wisely to reach safe zone. Vehicles can be beneficial if players are far from the safe zone. In addition, supply boxes, which contains extremely powerful weapons and equipment, are occasionally dropped somewhere random in the safe zone. Players can pick up the supply with the risk of being ambushed, or they can play safe and ignore the supply box.

Survival

The survival mode is essentially a PvE story mode that shares similar game mechanics with the classic battle royale mode. Players can choose to play alone or with at most 3 other players. In the campaigns, most of the human beings suddenly disappeared, and the rest of them constructed a lot of “storm shield” to protect the people inside from the attack of husk, a zombie-like monster dropped by the storm. The player acts as the administrator of one of such storm shields, and the player’s task is to make through a series of adventure and gather resources so that the storm shield can be expanded.

Creative

In the creative mode, the player can build structures on his own island and customize the rules. Other players are able to join the server and play the game on the island, which can hold up to 16 players. The creative mode was initially published with a lot of bugs, but Epic Games quickly fixed them and later introduced prefab system, which greatly facilitated building things on the island.

Ethical issues

Underage Gambling

Like many other games, Fortnite had some in-game mechanics that were equivalent to gambling. One of them is the loot box mechanism. Players can choose to spend real money to buy a random reward that may contain rare, exclusive or powerful weapons and characters, or may just having some regular items. For example, in the survival mode the players can use the “V-Buck” in-game currency to by “quirky llama” loot boxes that offer random rewards to them. The V-Bucks can be either purchased using real money or gained in the game, which is much slower. Since Fortnite was ranked “Teen” by ESRB, the young players in age of above 13 can play the game and can potentially use their parents’ credit card to spend excessive money. The loot box system had caused a lot of public criticisms and lawsuits. In 2019, the parent of a young player in California sued the llama loot box as “unfair and deceptive to consumers”. In Canada, a law firm prepared a class-action lawsuit against Epic Games for a pair of parents who claimed that “the creators ‘knowingly’ made the game as addictive as drugs such as cocaine”. In response to a range of criticisms and lawsuits, Epic Games removed the llama looting box and compensated players who brought the looting boxes with 1000 V-Bucks or credits.

Besides the looting box mechanism, the wager matches had also become controversial. The streamer or professional players organized mini-tournaments, in which they played against each other or the stream viewers and win money from the losing side. Since a lot of streaming audiences are teenagers, it was possible that they were addictive to that and spend a lot of money. Moreover, the wager holders may conspire to “cheat against other players or viewers and share the prize once they win the tournament”.