Fortnite and “Sandbox” Gaming

The Last Game Standing

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For anyone that is an actual adult, you may not have heard of the newest video game that is all the rage with the young’ns - Fortnite. Overwatch, minecraft, CS:GO, and LOL move aside, there’s a new champion in town.

Fortnite is a free-to-play a “sandbox” style shooter that’s still being tested in Beta on multiple consoles and the PC. At first, it looks like a cartoony shoot-em-up where players try to eliminate one another in a “king of the hill” setup. You traverse a giant map in search of weapons and tools that will help you win out against the ~99 other online competitors from around the world. But with closer inspection, you’ll realize that there’s a whole different dimension to the game not previously seen before in shooters.

• Source: Gamespot

At the start of each round, all players will be dropped onto a giant open-world map with nothing but a pickaxe. Upon hitting the ground, you are tasked with foraging weapons, ammunitions, health supplies, and other tools that will help you survive and take down the opponents. The pickaxe can be used on existing structures and elements of nature to accumulate materials - wood, metal, brick - with which you can instantly build walls, ramps, and horizontal platforms. Fortnite mashes together traditional elements with a Minecraft type of sandbox gaming. It makes for a creative experience that keeps players on their toes and constantly vigilant of their surroundings.

The opportunities and variations are endless as the game brings together up to a 100 players for each short round. Persistent elements like a shrinking traversable ground makes the same map feel fresh and dynamic every time.

Shoot Your Own Adventure

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I only recently started playing this game a few days ago, on recommendation by my buddy @pesto, and I can fully see why it’s all the rage. Although I’m an avid gamer, I’ve never really stepped foot into mass-multiplayer online games like this or its incredibly successful predecessors. The Twitch and e-gaming generation is more centered around teens and adolescents born in the 90s and early 2000s. With my first foray into this kind of experience, it’s tremendously refreshing to see creative elements being incorporated in gameplay.

• Gathering resources for the ultimate fight. Source: Reader's Gambit

“Sandbox” style gaming was made internationally popular with Minecraft where breaking down and building up little cubes into innumerable iterations hooked the hearts of millions around the world. Creativity is not typically a widespread character of gaming with few exceptions such as Sim City or Rollercoaster Tycoon. It especially isn’t incorporated into much other than slow-paced, not time-sensitive games. And yet, in the last several years, there has been a substantial appetite for games that aren’t so linear and do not rely so heavily on narrative. Instead, the real joy and memorable nature of the game is to create one’s own course and unique moments with the tools offered to them.

• Source: Data 4 Origin

Dishonored by Arkane Studios is one such example that also surprised me a great deal. Again, this seems like a typical first-person shooter at first but the accumulation of diverse weapons, abilities, and cohesive map allows for any approach to defeating, overcoming, sneaking around, distracting, and subverting enemies and challenges. Each moment requires thoughtfulness and an understanding of the context.

A Different Genre

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In previous generations of gaming, creativity was mostly dependent on variety. Offering more play styles gave an illusion of choice and difference in experience. Today, these games have developed into ones that emphasize freedom above all else. There are no right ways to play, no ensured routes to victory. Instead, you have to determine what you should do with the purposefully limited number of physical choices at your disposal.

• Source: IGN

I certainly hope these models are experimented with more by independent small studios. We’ve witnessed a rise in niche development and developer access to massive internet consumers gives them the newfound chance to experiment with their tools.

Let me know what you think below! Have you played Fortnite? What do you think about “free” gaming?