Fortnite esports

A Brief Background

Fortnite is a multiplayer online battle royale game published and developed by Epic Games. The game were initially released as a online cooperative shooter-survival game in which four players could take part in defending objects from hordes of zombies with help of different traps and fortifications built by the players themselves.

This game mode is called “Save the World” and is currently in paid-early access, but it’s planned to be released for free at some point in 2019. Fortnite was released in 2017, and with it, its creators also released a free-to-play game mode called “Battle Royale”. Since this game mode was free, it quickly gained a huge following and the game became very popular in no time. Within its first year released the game acquired more than 125 million players worldwide.

The game is available on Windows, macOS, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and even iOS and Android. The game supports microtransactions which allows its players to purchase cosmetic items, and a “Battle Pass” which will make leveling up your account quicker and also reward you with bonus cosmetics and emotes each time you level up. No cosmetics in the game have any effect on gameplay, so the microtransactions are mostly for people who want to level up quicker, or look unique.

In the “Battle Royale” mode, up to 100 players are airdropped onto an island where they must scavenge for weapons and equipment. Every player starts off without any weapons, with only a pickaxe at their disposal. With the pickaxe, players can tear down buildings and other objects to gather up building resources.

These resources can then be used to build new walls, ramps, roofs and such to build new structures. This allows players to quickly protect themselves from incoming attacks, build ramps to reach places otherwise not accessible or even trap other players. The end goal of the game is to be the last one surviving as in any other battle royales, but the possibility to build new structures freely is what makes fortnite unique.

How to Play

Fortnite’s battle royale mode can be played either in Solo, Duo, or Squad, and at the beginning of the game all players are airdropped onto the island with a “Battle bus” that crosses the entire map. When parachuting out of the bus, it’s important to have a landing location decided so you don’t land in the middle of nowhere. The reason for this is that it’s very vital in the early game to scavenge and loot for equipment that mainly can be found inside buildings, or chests that are placed randomly in the world. These chests mostly spawns inside buildings, or near other compounds.

Since building structures is very vital for your survival and control in player-versus-player encounters, it’s very important that you also focus on grinding resources by tearing down existing buildings and structures with your pickaxe. There’s three different kinds of resources: Wood, Stone, and Metal. With wood being the weakest and metal the strongest. The type of resource used to build your structures defines how much damage from enemy bullets or gadgets it can withstand before breaking.

During the course of the game, the playable area will decrease as an incoming storm makes the map smaller over time. It’s very important to have some awareness of where the playable area is at all times, since being outside in the storm will inflict damage over time on players. If you find yourself being far from the playable circle, there’s plenty of options to get there quickly apart from running.

Scattered over the map, you can find different vehicles and equipment that will make traveling the map easier for you. For example, you can find ATVs to drive freely, or balloons that will make you float longer while jumping and you can even find “rift portals” that throw you up in the air and let you parachute to your desired locations. Epic Games constantly updates the game with new locations, vehicles and equipment, so to get a better grip of what’s currently in the game we would recommend playing it for yourself.

Later in the game. the playable area will become really small and player-versus-player encounters will definitely happen at this stage. In the endgame you can expect a lot of players building big structures, often reaching high up the sky to make sure they have control of the highgrounds.

As in every shooter game, having control of the highground always gives you an advantage, and Fortnite is no different. Building structures like this and also making use of the building tool to protect yourself from incoming damage, it’s become the main aim of the game to build fast and efficiently. This is often where very skilled players are different from the rest, since they easily can outbuild other players and quickly control the encounter.

Regarding weapons, there’s a heap of different types of weapons you can find in the world, and they all have different levels of rarity that defines their power and quality. The rarity is defined by a colour, with gray being the lowest quality, followed by green, blue, purple and finally orange being the legendary rarity with the highest power. The different types of weapons consists of Assault rifles, shotguns, SMGs, Sniper rifles, Rocket launchers and more.

To use your weapons you also need to loot for ammunition which is scattered all over the map. There’s different types of ammunition for all the different types of weapons, so make sure to keep an eye out for the correct type for your currently equipped arsenal. In addition to finding weapons you can also find grenades, healing items and traps. Healing items in particular can really turn the tables in a fight, so make sure that you are stacked up on some healing items for the late game.

How to Watch

Since its release in 2017, Fortnite have just kept growing bigger and bigger and is today considered a cultural phenomenon. When it was released it instantly became very big on Twitch, and streamers such as “Ninja”, “TSM_Myth” and “TimTheTatman” definitely helped popularize the game.

The game has also spawned a heap of different tournaments all over the world, with one of the first being held in Los Angeles at the huge gaming convention Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 2018. Since then, there’s been a lot of tournaments and events for the game with big prize-pools and a huge viewership.

For 2019, Epic Games have announced the official Fortnite World Cup. The qualifying rounds for the world cup started in April, with the finals being held in New York on July 26th. Epic Games have put away an impressive US$30 million prize-pool for the cup, with the winner going home with the huge prize of US$3 million.

This prize-pool will be the biggest one ever, even beating the pool for The International 2018 Dota 2 event. If you want to watch the game being played you can check out the Twitch channels for some of the more famous players, which you can find below. To stay up-to-date with tournaments and the world cup, we would recommend that you visit the official Twitch and Youtube channels for fortnite. There you can both find live broadcasts of the events, but also VOD’s from earlier matches.

• https://www.twitch.tv/tsm_myth – TSM_Myth’s official Twitch Channel.
• https://www.twitch.tv/fortnite – Official Fortnite Twitch Channel.
• https://www.youtube.com/user/epicfortnite/videos – Official Fortnite Youtube Channel.