Epic Games has already had quite an eventful month. Procedure on the Epic and Google case started this weekand the company released Chapter 4, Season 5 of Fortnitealso known as Fortnite OG, to record numbers. The season leans heavily on nostalgia and brings back content from the popular shooter’s early game, recreating the game as it was in July 2018 during Chapter 1, Season 5. The season functions as a perfect time machine: players can track the exact revisit events. map and items they used five years ago. Yet the current period peeks through in other ways. That’s because of the way some people play Fortnite has changed and the OG map is not optimal for Zero Build players.
I’m playing now, like many other players Fortnite in Zero Build mode. This way of playing works exactly how it sounds: it eliminates the ability for players to collect materials and build structures. Epic Games first released it in the spring of 2022, and the addition was quite groundbreaking. Prior to its release, FortniteThe game’s entire gameplay gimmick was that players could build structures and use them to gain advantages in battle. However, it turned out that the game had a lot to offer its Zero Build players. Zero Build wasn’t just fun; it left and renewed interest in the game.
FortniteThe original map predates Zero Build mode. So its return makes for an interesting scenario where Zero Build players use a map designed when that mode didn’t exist yet. In my time with Zero Build on the OG Fortnite card, it felt a bit clunky. The map has fewer locations and each location has fewer buildings, meaning each location offers fewer ways to be creative and avoid or approach combat.
Overall, mobility is a bigger problem. Some spots on the OG map have high points that players can sit on, but reaching them requires a grabbing item, or a zipline that can only be accessed by helplessly running through an open area. In terms of items with grappling abilities, there’s the Grappler, a plunger-like pistol that allows you to move upwards, but it’s not as smooth and fast-moving as the later Grapple Glove. Some locations don’t have golf carts, so I found myself spending a lot of time running around large open areas of the map. This makes sense, as the developers originally designed the map with plenty of open spaces for building. As a Zero Build player, I had never hit the energy limit while sprinting as often as I did when playing this card. My teammates and I collected Rift-To-Gos like our lives depended on it, just because we needed them to get ourselves into trouble on a regular basis.
Despite all this, I still find things to like about OG Fortnite, even as a Zero Build player. It’s a very different map compared to the map from Chapter 4, Season 4 – and that in itself has added just enough variety to the game to make it interesting. Although it felt awkward at first, my friends and I got a feel for certain patterns, where we should go and when we were in a match. Furthermore, we only get to play on this card for a month, which is a fairly short period of time. And personally, I enjoy any update that brings people back to the game. I don’t care if the map is perfect, as long as it’s a compelling enough idea to get my core group of players to play the game again.