Play it on: PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch
Current goal: Face Godzilla, and survive!
I have a complicated relationship with Fortnite these days. I feel it’s fallen very far from the game it was in its spectacular first year when there were no bots, when each match flung skilled and unskilled players alike into a clusterfuck of contingency and comedy and loss. Now, that bracing experience is gone, replaced by a lukewarm bath in which most opponents you encounter are bots doing a half-hearted performance of attack while actually serving themselves up to you for execution on a silver platter. Gone, too, is the game’s ethereal, mysterious hint of a story, largely left open to interpretation. Now, it’s all MMORPG-style quests and chatty characters spelling out standard video-game lore, all while more and more characters from popular “IPs” (blech) hit the shop each week, eradicating whatever distinctive identity of its own Fortnite might have once had and turning it into a corporate dystopia a la Ready Player One.
And yet, I’m not immune to Fortnite’s pull. It’s still a game in which I can really feel the terrain under me; I love the ease with which I can run, slide, leap, and mantle across its map. On a hard day, I still have a habit of logging on and quickly busting out three daily quests to earn some easy XP, an activity I can get lost in for a bit. And I’m definitely not immune to Fortnite’s spectacle, especially in those moments when it does something wild at a scale that few other games could match. Right now is just such a time as Godzilla, king of the monsters, has a chance of spawning in each match. I saw a video online of what it’s like to play as the big guy and it looks incredible, the sense of scale and his destructive power all seeming just right. This weekend, I suspect I’m gonna play way more Fortnite than usual, hoping to experience the sheer size of all that destructive power from the viewpoint of a puny human and running for my life from something that actually feels incredibly dangerous. So hey, if you happen to be playing Fortnite this weekend and you turn into Godzilla and then see me as a tiny speck running around way down below, please don’t hurt me. I mean you no harm! — Carolyn Petit
