It's starting to feel a little bit like Fortnite is overrun with different battle royale modes. We already had the standard BR that everyone knows, along with OG and Reload, each with no-build variants. Then, just a few weeks ago, Epic tossed in the new mobile-oriented Blitz Royale, a mini battle royale with 32 players, for good measure. Can all these different modes continue to live alongside each other?
I think they can, so long as they each have a niche they can carve out among the greater Fortnite audience. Regular Battle Royale is the catch-all for general audiences, OG is for the folks who prefer a stable experience that rarely changes in major ways--or just those who have nostalgia for the Fortnite of yesteryear--Reload is for the sweats, and Blitz Royale, though it might seem extremely swift and sweaty at first glance, is actually the more casual alternative to all of those existing modes.
If you only played Blitz Royale right when it launched, you may not see it. When the mode initially dropped, it was pretty intense and full of sweaty folks, which was to be expected for an entirely new mode that everybody was trying out for the first time. But it didn't take long for things to mellow out as the player count normalized.
Since Blitz Royale was created to capitalize on Fortnite's return to iPhones in the US, the matches are very short, taking five minutes or less for the winning player or team, and matchmaking has to happen quickly. And with Fortnite, quick matchmaking usually means more bots in place of human players. It's certainly proven to be true with Blitz, which has typically populated my games with what seems to be eight human players alongside a pile of bot players--and that ratio tends to hold up whether I play solo, duos, or four-player squads. I've even had a bunch of squad rounds in which my team never seemed to encounter any human players at all--this has happened about every four or five rounds of Blitz Royale squads that I've played.
I'm not trying to drag the mode over this, though. Most casual players don't care if they're fighting bots or human players, and they definitely aren't playing Fortnite to test their gaming skills against the best opponents available. For most players, the game's mix of skill-based matchmaking and a generous population of bots is the formula for a fun, casual game that's more about TikTok dances than cranking 90s. Likewise, somebody playing Blitz Royale on their phone while they ride the bus to work is probably just looking for a way to pass the time. For these folks, the inclusion of a bunch of bots is not a drawback at all.
Realistically, too, everything about Blitz Royale that makes it palatable for mobile play--the short matches, the lack of builds, the gimmicky stuff like weekly themed loot pools and medallions--also make it more fun for a casual audience that just wants to pop online and shoot something. You barely have to even do any looting, since Blitz starts you at half shields and will just give you an exotic or mythic weapon a minute or two into the round. With its fast-encroaching storm, small map, and bevy of overpowered weapons that simply appear in your inventory, Blitz Royale is really just Fortnite at its least complicated.
The Blitz Knight outfit can be earned in Blitz Royale.
And having Blitz as essentially the casual mode makes it easier for the other battle royale modes to cater to a different audience, since they wouldn't need to be as accommodating to every type of player. Reload, in which players will automatically respawn as long as at least one member of their team remains alive, has been a great example of counterprogramming since it launched its new Squid Game-themed map last week. While I've had pretty long matchmaking times for Zero Build Reload matches, often taking more than two minutes to get me a round, the games themselves have been amazing. Just about every round of Reload I've played recently has been a barn burner.
The thing is, for a game of Fortnite's scale, matchmaking speed is everything. The longer it takes to get a match, says the conventional wisdom, the more likely that a player trained on modern trends of instant gratification will change their mind and not play at all. But with Fortnite now being more of a platform than an individual game, they can mix it up by providing their own alternatives. Don't wanna wait two minutes for a Reload match? Then play Blitz Royale or regular Battle Royale instead. Since Reload's matchmaking times are longer, it's not impossible to imagine that you could pull a win in Blitz Royale before you'd have landed from the bus in Reload.
With each of these battle royale modes attracting folks from across a spectrum of niches, they can target specific audiences more effectively. If most of the folks who care about matchmaking speed are playing Blitz, for example, then there won't be much need to speed up Reload's matchmaking by adding more bots. It's not splitting the audience so much as it is catering more specifically to the sort of experiences each player is looking for.
As it stands right now, Blitz Royale is slated to only stick around until mid-August. Presuming the player count stays healthy, though, it'll likely return sooner than later, giving more casual players a deceptively laidback mode built for them first and foremost.
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I think they can, so long as they each have a niche they can carve out among the greater Fortnite audience. Regular Battle Royale is the catch-all for general audiences, OG is for the folks who prefer a stable experience that rarely changes in major ways--or just those who have nostalgia for the Fortnite of yesteryear--Reload is for the sweats, and Blitz Royale, though it might seem extremely swift and sweaty at first glance, is actually the more casual alternative to all of those existing modes.
If you only played Blitz Royale right when it launched, you may not see it. When the mode initially dropped, it was pretty intense and full of sweaty folks, which was to be expected for an entirely new mode that everybody was trying out for the first time. But it didn't take long for things to mellow out as the player count normalized.
Since Blitz Royale was created to capitalize on Fortnite's return to iPhones in the US, the matches are very short, taking five minutes or less for the winning player or team, and matchmaking has to happen quickly. And with Fortnite, quick matchmaking usually means more bots in place of human players. It's certainly proven to be true with Blitz, which has typically populated my games with what seems to be eight human players alongside a pile of bot players--and that ratio tends to hold up whether I play solo, duos, or four-player squads. I've even had a bunch of squad rounds in which my team never seemed to encounter any human players at all--this has happened about every four or five rounds of Blitz Royale squads that I've played.
I'm not trying to drag the mode over this, though. Most casual players don't care if they're fighting bots or human players, and they definitely aren't playing Fortnite to test their gaming skills against the best opponents available. For most players, the game's mix of skill-based matchmaking and a generous population of bots is the formula for a fun, casual game that's more about TikTok dances than cranking 90s. Likewise, somebody playing Blitz Royale on their phone while they ride the bus to work is probably just looking for a way to pass the time. For these folks, the inclusion of a bunch of bots is not a drawback at all.
Realistically, too, everything about Blitz Royale that makes it palatable for mobile play--the short matches, the lack of builds, the gimmicky stuff like weekly themed loot pools and medallions--also make it more fun for a casual audience that just wants to pop online and shoot something. You barely have to even do any looting, since Blitz starts you at half shields and will just give you an exotic or mythic weapon a minute or two into the round. With its fast-encroaching storm, small map, and bevy of overpowered weapons that simply appear in your inventory, Blitz Royale is really just Fortnite at its least complicated.
The Blitz Knight outfit can be earned in Blitz Royale.
And having Blitz as essentially the casual mode makes it easier for the other battle royale modes to cater to a different audience, since they wouldn't need to be as accommodating to every type of player. Reload, in which players will automatically respawn as long as at least one member of their team remains alive, has been a great example of counterprogramming since it launched its new Squid Game-themed map last week. While I've had pretty long matchmaking times for Zero Build Reload matches, often taking more than two minutes to get me a round, the games themselves have been amazing. Just about every round of Reload I've played recently has been a barn burner.
The thing is, for a game of Fortnite's scale, matchmaking speed is everything. The longer it takes to get a match, says the conventional wisdom, the more likely that a player trained on modern trends of instant gratification will change their mind and not play at all. But with Fortnite now being more of a platform than an individual game, they can mix it up by providing their own alternatives. Don't wanna wait two minutes for a Reload match? Then play Blitz Royale or regular Battle Royale instead. Since Reload's matchmaking times are longer, it's not impossible to imagine that you could pull a win in Blitz Royale before you'd have landed from the bus in Reload.
With each of these battle royale modes attracting folks from across a spectrum of niches, they can target specific audiences more effectively. If most of the folks who care about matchmaking speed are playing Blitz, for example, then there won't be much need to speed up Reload's matchmaking by adding more bots. It's not splitting the audience so much as it is catering more specifically to the sort of experiences each player is looking for.
As it stands right now, Blitz Royale is slated to only stick around until mid-August. Presuming the player count stays healthy, though, it'll likely return sooner than later, giving more casual players a deceptively laidback mode built for them first and foremost.
Source