Does the battle royale mode have its own OT, or is this the place for discussion of that too?
I've been really enjoying it so far. I think for me, it's the most fun I've had on Fortnite, and I think that really says something about the rest of the game.
At its core, Fortnite's gameplay is really fun, exploring the environments, looting, and observing your character develop and gunplay (which is responsive, and features a relatively wide variety of weapons), and the Battle Royale mode condenses that into these 15 minute sessions.
In Fortnite's defense modes, exploration is rarely valuable, and it's very difficult to see any meaningful change to your character progression within a short space of time. Players are bogged down with the clumsy UI if they want to achieve any sense of character progression. It's confusing and frankly, needlessly complex.
Unfortunately the base building aspect, which is this games hook, isn't all that useful within either mode. In Fortnite's defense mode, I haven't needed to build anything for the first 20+ missions of the game, and within Battle Royale, while you do sometimes see people building stuff, it's usually to platform around, rather than create any real form of fort. Using build mode is a big risk as it a) tells players where you are and b) takes time.
I think in Fortnite's defense mode, it could be neat if instead of building from scratch on every mission, missions featured prebuilt structures that you could then modify if you wished. A big issue with building is that it consumes resources, and players want to conserve as many in order to use them elsewhere, such as directly on their base. The problem then, is you get many, many missions where players build very little, or nothing at all. This is where the game becomes very boring. When the traps aren't doing the work, you're just playing a very average zombie shooter, the game really falls apart.
I can see that. Dropping a Decoy, then using TEDDY and/or Shock Tower on the horde.. that could be game changing. I guess I'd need to play more but, fragments worry me. They're not always where you need them, and then when you run out... I'd like to see an ability to generate one fragment on demand when you have none for the "Oh shit." moment, even with a long, long cooldown.
The fragment system just isn't much fun in general to be honest. Makes it feel like, despite having unique properties, 90% of the time your highly levelled up character, does nothing unique. Also, because fragments do not regenerate with any reasonable speed and aren't easily acquired after the defense phase has started, there's always a sense that you might want to use the ability later, and therefore save it, until the end. Again, it feels like your characters abilities have minimal impact on the battle, and that just isn't much fun. If Epic think they're overpowered then they should tone down the abilities, and provide a passive recharge rate, just to make the game less homogenous between characters, if nothing else.
