Comment by Itsdijital | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Itsdijital | Hacker News Reader

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Everybody here is missing why this game became so popular, and it's very common trap with the game. Its the reason why the game has also been so polarizing. I've played the game steadily for over a year now, so I have a bit of a grip on what happened/is going on.

- Fortnite is not a shooting game. This is the main trap of the game. It looks like shooter, feels like a shooter, can be played like a shooter, but is not a shooter. Fortnite is a fighting game and should be played like one. It has an incredibly heavy reliance on mechanical skills (ala fighting games) and failure to recognize this will just lead to disappointment with the game.

- Fortnite's success was a complete accident. The BR mode was a spun off "weekend project" for fun in order to attract players into buying Save The World. It was free and meant really just as an advertising tool. There wasn't much thought put into how it was supposed to play, but Epic 100% did not see where this was going, nor did the community at the time. And that was very much instrumental to it's success. Had Epic saw this coming, they would have totally destroyed the mechanics that made it so good right off the rip. I could write an essay about this, but the short of it is that the building mechanics were used in a totally unintended/unforeseen way and it lead to a wild success. Mark my words, one day in the future, free of NDA's, former devs will come out with some truly wild stories about FNBR.

- Fortnite became a runaway success with kids because they have the easiest time adapting to completely new game mechanics. It gets a little gritty here, but the short of it is that Fornite is a completely new type of game with a completely new type of play style. Older players were trying to shove a square piece through a seemingly square hole (see note 1 about shooter/fighter), while younger players could easily adapt their blank gaming slates to fortnite's play style. Yeah the cosmetics and stuff helped, but nobody likes playing a game they suck at.

TL;DR: Fortnite is deceiving in what it is. Fortnite was a total accidental success, because of accidentally awesome mechanics. Kids love fortnite because they were less prone to that earlier mentioned deception, and can pick up new things much quicker than older gamers.

This reminds me of a little-known game called Worms 2. Someone figured out how to hack the weapon properties and effectively created a surge in popularity around this game for a new type called a "rope game". It's still one of the most fun and skillful games I've ever played. But this was back in the 90s, so in-game purchases weren't a thing.

So to monetize on that popularity the creator of the game released "Worms 2 Armageddon", with a rope game. The problem was, they didn't get it at all. The official rope game had none of the elements of the hacked one, and was a complete flop. But oddly enough, Worms 2 (the original) was still being played almost a decade later.

Oh I wouldn't call Worms "little-known". The whole series was a pretty big success in the 90s

Relatively speaking it was pretty tiny compared to the big EA games at the time. Apparently it only made $1.7M its entire life.

Huge Roper fan here since Worms Armageddon! It was all because the Team17 devs allowed to mod game maps and weapon configs so easily. Creativity then kicked in and roper games became a stable online thing! Also BnG and "Shoppa"

You are completely right about the mechanics, I've played it some with the step-son and I can't get the hang of it, I've played FPS on and off over the years and I'm not bad at them but it just doesn't fit my mental model.

Which delights him immensely how badly I suck :).

Same - I don't totally suck in FPS and can put up at least decent fight all the way back to Doom II which we also tried in the interest of software history. But I get thoroughly spanked in Fortnite, every time.

Exactly right. I improved the most in Fortnite by just landing in a corner (pre creative mode) and practicing building, editing, build-shooting, the same way I would work on combos in fighting games.

"There wasn't much thought put into how it was supposed to play, but Epic 100% did not see where this was going, nor did the community at the time. And that was very much instrumental to it's success. Had Epic saw this coming, they would have totally destroyed the mechanics that made it so good right off the rip."

Similarly, combos in fighting games were originally a bug. In the original Street Fighter 2, you could attack someone two or three times before they could block or counterattack (I believe the initial term was called a 2 in 1). Capcom liked what it did to the game, and consequently kept it in.

It's not so much learning speed, but it being a level playing field. Old gamers who have been fpsing since Doom / Quake / TF2 / whatever might be capable of learning Fortnite, but they won't dominate it without spending thousands of hours on it. Kids will spend time getting good, because they have more free time and they enjoy it because for once they don't get destroyed by the fps crowd.

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