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While Fortnite might not do anything new as a business, as a game, on the technical side, it does offer new stuff. Fortnite supports large worlds with lots of p

While Fortnite might not do anything new as a business, as a game, on the technical side, it does offer new stuff. Fortnite supports large worlds with lots of players in fast-paced multiplayer. To make matters even more complicated, the players can build large structures in real time. The game also features a large amount of interactable objects with no loading screens. You could say that games like Minecraft do that, but those are graphically much simpler.

k__ 7y ago
Sounds mostly like Tribes to me, the very first game I played online.
- latch 7y ago
  Tribes didn't support more players than other games of that time, didn't have a build system beyond placing turrets, had no special world interaction, and maps weren't _huge_ (and for competitive play, mostly short maps were in the rotation)
  - k__ 7y ago
    Maybe the modded versions where different? I remember games with 50-100 players and maps that were multiple square kilometers in size.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    How about ETQW (2007)? Huge maps, 64 players per match, vehicles, lots of interactivity on the map in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6leg-2Let0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6leg-2Let0
  - oliwarner 7y ago
    Getting a dozen people in and on a dropship in Tribes2 was a highlight of my LAN gaming days. Utter chaos. Superb fun. Too intricate a game for online play but great otherwise. Codename: Eagle hit similar notes.
cdubzzz 7y ago
I haven’t played Fortnite, but this sounds (at least partially) like Battlefield 2 about 15 years ago — huge 64 player maps with fast paced action. I remember at the time being amazed that I could fly jets and helicopters, drive tanks, or just scurry around on foot all in one game. I played many, many hours of that. The base game did not have building or many interactive objects but there were a couple of custom mods that did.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  I get where you're coming from and it is an evolution in it, but Fortnite does have more players per map. And the map is a lot bigger. The interactable objects and building is what make it quite different technically. With games where building stuff is just tacked on, you'll find that performance drops very quickly after just a few hundred objects are placed. This limits building significantly. The interactive objects point is also something that wasn't too common until recently (past few years). Skyrim had loading screens to go indoors so that they could have a lot of interactable objects indoors. If you went and put the objects from a few houses together then the game's performance dropped significantly.
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    Rust (survival game) actually handles a lot of placeable elements in a huge map quite well, and the main focus of the game is PvP and strategic base-building. Fortnite is more accessible being cross-platform and a more family-friendly (Rust has its share of naked people running on beaches/spawn points)
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      You're not wrong about Rust, but Rust was in beta for so long that Fortnite and Rust had their full release in the same year.
  - mattmanser 7y ago
    You are a bit out-of-touch in games if you're comparing a 9 year old game like Skyrim when saying Fortnite is revolutionary. You missed the Day-Z mod for Arma 3 (released 2013), H1Z1 popularised the battle royale genre before shooting itself in the foot, and of course PUBG picking up the baton. As for building in multiplayer you've got years of work before, putting aside Minecraft, you've got 7 Days to Die, Rust, Arc Survival:Evolved. Fortnite's not even got particularly complicated building compared to many of those other games. The article is total dross, Epic took an existing genre and slapped Valve's already proven monetization strategy on it. Other companies were already copying Valve before Epic. Both DOTA + TF2 have been free and make money from hats for over a decade! There's been jokes about it for years[1]. I'm not saying that Fortnite's not good, I'm not saying it's not a massive success, but revolutionary or innovative it was not. This puff piece is obviously written by a someone who hasn't got a clue about games. You can even argue that they took a failed game's assets and cobbled together a battle-royale shooter and, almost accidentally, became massively successful. Right place, right time. Overwatch did much the same thing. Several other companies failed doing exactly the same thing (e.g. Battleborn, H1Z1) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/12kirq/valve_marketing_approach/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/12kirq/valve_market...
dogma1138 7y ago
Fortnite doesn’t offer anything new, it is however very polished and accessible game with a good gaming loop that is easy to pickup but has enough depth to be hard to master. It also runs rather well across a wide range of hardware and devices.

k__ 7y ago

Sounds mostly like Tribes to me, the very first game I played online.

latch 7y ago
Tribes didn't support more players than other games of that time, didn't have a build system beyond placing turrets, had no special world interaction, and maps weren't _huge_ (and for competitive play, mostly short maps were in the rotation)
- k__ 7y ago
  Maybe the modded versions where different? I remember games with 50-100 players and maps that were multiple square kilometers in size.
- int_19h 7y ago
  How about ETQW (2007)? Huge maps, 64 players per match, vehicles, lots of interactivity on the map in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6leg-2Let0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6leg-2Let0
- oliwarner 7y ago
  Getting a dozen people in and on a dropship in Tribes2 was a highlight of my LAN gaming days. Utter chaos. Superb fun. Too intricate a game for online play but great otherwise. Codename: Eagle hit similar notes.

cdubzzz 7y ago

I haven’t played Fortnite, but this sounds (at least partially) like Battlefield 2 about 15 years ago — huge 64 player maps with fast paced action. I remember at the time being amazed that I could fly jets and helicopters, drive tanks, or just scurry around on foot all in one game. I played many, many hours of that. The base game did not have building or many interactive objects but there were a couple of custom mods that did.

Mirioron 7y ago
I get where you're coming from and it is an evolution in it, but Fortnite does have more players per map. And the map is a lot bigger. The interactable objects and building is what make it quite different technically. With games where building stuff is just tacked on, you'll find that performance drops very quickly after just a few hundred objects are placed. This limits building significantly. The interactive objects point is also something that wasn't too common until recently (past few years). Skyrim had loading screens to go indoors so that they could have a lot of interactable objects indoors. If you went and put the objects from a few houses together then the game's performance dropped significantly.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  Rust (survival game) actually handles a lot of placeable elements in a huge map quite well, and the main focus of the game is PvP and strategic base-building. Fortnite is more accessible being cross-platform and a more family-friendly (Rust has its share of naked people running on beaches/spawn points)
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    You're not wrong about Rust, but Rust was in beta for so long that Fortnite and Rust had their full release in the same year.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  You are a bit out-of-touch in games if you're comparing a 9 year old game like Skyrim when saying Fortnite is revolutionary. You missed the Day-Z mod for Arma 3 (released 2013), H1Z1 popularised the battle royale genre before shooting itself in the foot, and of course PUBG picking up the baton. As for building in multiplayer you've got years of work before, putting aside Minecraft, you've got 7 Days to Die, Rust, Arc Survival:Evolved. Fortnite's not even got particularly complicated building compared to many of those other games. The article is total dross, Epic took an existing genre and slapped Valve's already proven monetization strategy on it. Other companies were already copying Valve before Epic. Both DOTA + TF2 have been free and make money from hats for over a decade! There's been jokes about it for years[1]. I'm not saying that Fortnite's not good, I'm not saying it's not a massive success, but revolutionary or innovative it was not. This puff piece is obviously written by a someone who hasn't got a clue about games. You can even argue that they took a failed game's assets and cobbled together a battle-royale shooter and, almost accidentally, became massively successful. Right place, right time. Overwatch did much the same thing. Several other companies failed doing exactly the same thing (e.g. Battleborn, H1Z1) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/12kirq/valve_marketing_approach/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/12kirq/valve_market...

dogma1138 7y ago

Fortnite doesn’t offer anything new, it is however very polished and accessible game with a good gaming loop that is easy to pickup but has enough depth to be hard to master. It also runs rather well across a wide range of hardware and devices.