Hot Takes Friday is a column where the GR staff and community sound off with their strong, but perhaps unpopular, opinions. Let us know your thoughts on this week’s Hot Take in the comments section below!
Fortnite is huge. Its rise to popularity was almost instantaneous, and it has become a practically unparalleled video game sensation. Naturally, as a writer at a video game website, I’m required to follow Fortnite Battle Royale. Usually, if a game is hot, I do my best to get into it, hit the achievements, try and find all the collectibles.
Sometimes it’s a hard fit. There are definitely plenty of games that aren’t my cup of tea. Usually, though, I can grind against my dislike for a game until I am able to find what qualities about it I do like. With Fortnite, though, that just hasn’t happened.
It’s not that I don’t like battle royale games. It’s not my favorite genre, but I got along well enough in PUBG. It could be the hipster in me just rebelling against something that’s incredibly popular, but it feels like more than that as well. Instead, it’s something about the feel of the game in general.
Fortnite tries to tell some sort of story with the different events and season changes. It suffers from the same issue Overwatch has in that you aren’t actually really told any background or story through playing the game. In Fortnite‘s case, it’s even worse though because it has such a generic feel about it.
Everything about Fortnite‘s art just looks bland to me. When I play it or look at the skins in-game, it reminds me of those knockoff action figures you can buy at dollar stores. It’s like instead of G.I. Joe, you’re playing as “U.S. Soldier” or something like that. There’s no personality or character to the game at all, and the constant memeing of it feels incredibly forced.
The fact is I don’t find the random, zany addition of shopping carts, or jetpacks to be hysterical. I always see these things blow up like they haven’t been choreographed to be viral marketing. HAHA, Drake’S rANDoMLy PlayING foRTnItE, HOw COoL. Those celebrities are just like us aren’t they?
It’s astonishing to me that it’s such a popular game that the person who is arguably the face of Fortnite, Ninja, can say the n-word on-stream and get away with it scot-free. Sure he apologized, but everyone who gets caught doing that kind of thing says they’re “sorry,” and it was a “misunderstanding.” If you say it when you’re “freestyling” then you say it enough that it’s a standard part of your vocabulary.
All this probably wouldn’t bug me if not for the fact that Fortnite isn’t revolutionary in the least. It’s a bog-standard third-person shooter, and the weapons don’t even feel that good to shoot. If it didn’t take on the incredibly predatory free-to-play model, no one would have given it a second look. Let’s face it, most of Fortnite‘s audience (at least early on) are people who just didn’t want to fork out the cash for PUBG.
Also, you all know little Johnny or Janey are stealing mommy and daddy’s credit cards because if they don’t have the latest Fortnite skins, then kids at school are going to make fun of them. But you’ll go right on saying that video games don’t cause bad behavior in kids because you like them and other people’s kids aren’t your problem, right?
So, yeah. I can’t really get into Fortnite because it’s just lame and comes with a bunch of baggage I don’t particularly want to carry.
