There’s way too much going on in Fortnite’s core Battle Royale mode in Chapter 7 Season 4. With sprites giving everybody a bonus ability, and Overrides fundamentally changing the way the game works in the middle of matches, we’ve got kind of a large pile of gimmicks that show up in matches at random, if they show up at all. It’s made for a disorienting and inconsistent experience that’s difficult to strategize for, because there’s no real status quo to get used to. It’s a big mess, and it seems to be affecting player numbers in a big way, both for the core Battle Royale mode and Fortnite as a whole.
The thing about battle royale as a genre is that it’s already, by its nature, varied enough from match to match. Loot is random, and the other players are random, and so there’s always plenty of variety even if you drop in the same spot every single time. This has been one of the key selling points of the battle royale genre since before Fortnite existed. But at a certain point, adding more randomness doesn’t make the game more engaging; it makes it more annoying, because some of these gimmicks change the rules mid-match.
Take the Speed Shooter Override, for example, which makes everyone’s guns fire much faster and gives Fortnite a lower general time-to-kill (TTK) than it’s ever had. You have to change your playstyle when that one is active, and you have to do so on the fly, because it happens in the middle of a match. Making it worse is that Override doesn’t come up consistently enough that you can get used to it, unless you play like it’s your job. And now that we’re deep into the season, and Epic has added lots of other Overrides, Speed Shooter comes up even more rarely, which makes it even harder to adjust to when it does. Heaven help you if your enemies are lucky enough to claim the Squad Speed Shooter, which gives that power-up only to a single team.
While squad Overrides mark the team that has them on the map for everyone to see, those markers don’t tell you which Override they took. The only way to find out if they have Speed Shooter is to fight them, and probably die because their TTK is twice as fast as yours is, and you had no way of knowing that in advance. And then you’re a little more mad than you usually are when you lose in Fortnite.
There are Overrides I like, too, like the Power Pickaxe. That one lets you one-hit-kill anyone with your pickaxe, which I find delightful. But one of the reasons it ends up being so fun for me is that other players don’t necessarily adjust their play at all when it comes up. It’s an enormous change in the way the game works, and in order to really take advantage of it you’d have to play in a very unintuitive way, so I think a lot of people just don’t worry about it. So I may have some easy pickings in those matches, but my victims probably found it just as obnoxious as I find those Overrides that enhance everyone’s guns.
