Epic Games’ Fortnite is the most popular game in the world at the moment—but its popularity is actually owed almost solely to the “Battle Royale” mode, a spin on the battle royale concept popularized by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds last year, as opposed to the original mode that the game was pitched and launched as—Save the World, which was meant to be a survival action game.
When Epic decided to capitalize on the battle royale craze with the new mode, they had to make some choices about what would and would not come over. One of the things that got the axe in the transition was classes. Speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine in their May issue, Epic Games noted that the classes in Save the World have different characteristics, such as hit boxes. “If we were to put those classes into Battle Royale, everyone would gravitate towards the one with the smallest hit box.”
That said, in the interests of achieving more uniformity across the two modes, Epic did note it is something it will eventually work on—getting the classes into the Battle Royale mode, that is. That’s out of a sense of the developer feeling the two modes need to feel less disparate.
”We’ve talked about how things could more closely integrate,” they said. “It’s a tough problem to solve, because they’re different paces of game. Battle Royale is a 15-20 minute digestible experience, while Save the world is an RPG with persistent elements. It’s not something that’s easy to map from one to the other. Certainly, we problems in trying to get there.”
Hopefully, these are all issues that Epic looks at addressing over time. In the meanwhile, however, given Fortnite’s popularity, it’s not like the independence the two modes have from one another has hurt the game at all. In fact, one might even argue that it has been more to the game’s benefit than anything.
You can check out the full story for the game and get more information in OPM’s May issue. You can subscribe to the latest issue here.