Fortnite is naturally very different without building, and it has led some fans to compare the game to other popular BRs, sorting out what else makes the game mechanically distinct from other games. At this point in their mutual lives, BRs have borrowed a lot from one another, so there’s certainly a case to be made that Fortnite feels far less distinct without building. Still, there’s a crucial part of the game’s aesthetic that makes it unique. Fortnite is filled to the brim with crossover cosmetics, and it keeps gaining new ones. The IP’s nature as a relatively blank slate makes it uniquely good at interacting with any franchise that Epic Games wants.
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Fortnite’s Unique Cosmetic Range
Fortnite is different from many other battle royales in that it isn’t built on a longstanding foundation of lore. For instance, Apex Legends is a spinoff of Respawn’s Titanfall FPS franchise, meaning there’s lots of worldbuilding details that Apex Legends players will probably miss if they’re not familiar with Titanfall. Fortnite does have its own lore these days, but lore wasn’t crucial to the game’s battle royale mode from the start. Since the sibling game Fortnite: Save the World proved far less popular than the BR mode, storytelling is an additional feature, rather than a part of Fortnite Battle Royale’s core. That means that Epic Games’ BR is highly malleable.
Epic Games has capitalized on that malleability to a huge extent. Plenty of BRs have crossover content in their cosmetics, but nothing reaches quite as far as Fortnite. Everything from John Wick to Star Wars to Rick and Morty has cosmetic representation in Fortnite, to name only a few, and there’s a notable number of real people who are playable in Fortnite through cosmetics, including Olympic gold-medalist snowboarder Chloe Kim. The vast variety of IPs that mix together in Fortnite add up to a wildly colorful, diverse aesthetic that celebrates the length and breadth of pop culture in a way that no other BR can.
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The Distinguishing Factors of Fortnite
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Fortnite is sufficiently unique without building. Every player’s ability to improvise advantageous terrain adds up to gunfights that simply can’t be replicated in most other battle royales. Fortnite Battle Royale may not be built on a dense foundation of lore, but building is a part of Fortnite’s DNA. Crossover cosmetics make Fortnite aesthetically distinct, but building is what makes Fortnite mechanically distinct. These two features compliment one another and make up the basic elements of the Fortnite experience.
Hopefully these two sides of Fortnite will be reunited in the near future. Epic Games probably doesn’t intend to keep building out of Fortnite forever; the current event is just an experiment. It’s definitely good to see that Epic Games is willing to try some surprising things with Fortnite, even in the comfort of the game’s overwhelming success. Epic Games should keep up that level of creativity, both when it’s planning mechanical innovations for Fortnite and when it’s looking for new IPs to intersect with. Building and crossover cosmetics define Fortnite, so future updates ought to keep finding new ways to surprise players in both departments.
Fortnite is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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