I saw this today and was shocked considering how long the development has been and how little we have heard. PC Gamer has the scoop.

July 25th is the date for the "early access season" which sounds like a fun way to say it isn't finished yet. At this point I think I can wait a little longer for it not to be early access before I give it a try.

Is it possible for Fortnite to make any kind of impact at this point?

I think it has the potential to make an impact as long as it's good.

Outside of the GB circle who like to make fun of it never being released, I barely see or hear anyone talk about the game at all. Most people have probably entirely forgotten about it or never knew about it in the first place.

Looks pretty cool actually!

I'm not sure I'm sold on the tone and the art style of this game. And you can't make your own character, right?

IMPOSSIBLE !

yeah well finally i mean it feels like it's been a fortnight since the game's been announced.

i don't know how long a fortnight is

The combination of the bland cartoonish style and how uninteresting the gameplay looks reminds me of Battleborn for some reason. Not really digging the narration and the overall tone either. I guess this one isn't for me.

A fortnight is 2 weeks.

Is it coming to consoles? For some reason I think it's far more likely this is something my PS4 friends will get into rather than my usual PC crowd.

I was curious until "zombies" and "loot".

From the PR they sent:

Fortnite, its third-person Action Building game, will be available in paid Early Access for PlayStation®4, Xbox One, PC, and Mac starting on July 25.

From what I've seen, the game actually looks very polished. I think "early access" in this case is just trying to get people to buy a free to play game. The really shitty part is that there's no indication when the game will leave early access.

Will it make an impact? It's Left 4 Dead, mixed with Minecraft, mixed with a looter shooter. This game has the potential to be a massive success, IMO. I think it looks great, but I'm still going to wait for "early access" to end.

I must say, that trailer certainly intrigued me. Consider me cautiously optimistic. I may snag it later on this Summer if the initial impressions are decent. It certainly seems like a game that requires a solid group of friends to enjoy with though. That might be the only deal breaker for me. Most of my friends either move from game-to-game too quickly, or hunker down on one game for far too long (Overwatch). Most of my friends don't game on PC either. Maybe I just need new friends :(

PS4 supports Early Access now? I know Xbox has some WIP game program that I can't remember the name of, but that's good to hear thanks.

I actually hadn't even heard of this until this evening when I got an email from Epic. The trailer looks pretty interesting, I'm certainly intrigued to see what it plays like. From the trailer it looks like the kind of game which would be more fun with friends playing it.

4 different versions available though, the Limited Edition coming in at £125 with no physical goods or anything. If I were to jump in, it would be at the second from base tier (Deluxe Edition) at £49.99, but I'll wait and see how others think of the game after it goes into early access.

The game looks like a base building/shooter game. It also looks like it might be light on actual content and rewards. I think the paid early access is probably a mistake that will lead to more negative "reviews" than positive impacting what it could have done. Hopefully they release alot more info on the gameplay before people can pay to play it too.

I had a look at the release model on PC here and I am very put off by the pricing structure. The way they are selling this is by bundling up what feels like the free to play mechanics in some very expensive ways. £120 for the limited edition. Standard is £35 which is practically a full, retail release price (unless you're nintendo, then it's £50). The price is putting me off.

@alistercat@wandrecanada: Based on your experience with it, do you think paying for stuff will feel required? I don't mind buying content at a fair price. But if the game feels too grindy, monotonous, or unbalanced because I didn't throw cash at it, I might skip it.

Lost me at the gathering resources.

I love me some base building so this is definitely something I am interested in.

@tuxedocruise: I haven't played it so I don't know.

I can say based on what I've seen it is fairly grind-y but it's also mildly pointless to worry about. Think of it as tower defense with base building. Which means matches with an overarching persistence between. I don't think buying stuff is necessary and may end up feeling mostly useless if there are requirements for the stuff you're paying for.

Who knows though, tough to say from the twitch streams I've seen, they have always been cut off fairly quickly.

I played for a bit in the beta. As far as the resource gathering/crafting/base building side of things, it's the most polished experience you can get. the shooting is great (it's the unreal guys, they know how to make a shooter). The AI is pretty good, not just bum rushing a single choke point. Looks and runs great.

It's not worth the 40$ though. The free to play trappings are severe, and ill thought out. There are so many superfluous external systems that ultimately just give you slight stat boosts, and the artificial limits on your inventory just make the game a drag.

The worst example is how every crafting recipe, and hero subclass has like 3-5 rarities. The only difference is each rarity has a different skin color scheme, and the lower rarities have a lower level cap. You get xp after playing games (and very little at that), and can spend the xp wherever you want, (not just the hero you played with) and it feels demoralizing when you dump xp into a hero only to get a better rarity drop 20 hours later.

@unknownczar: Can you earn everything, including more inventory slots, from just playing the game? Or will some things only be available if you spend money?

@alistercat:

Gamestop is allowing pre orders also for July 25th. Wonder how that would work. Can a brick and mortar retailer actually sell an early access alpha product, even if its just a code?

This certainly looks like the type of game that an experienced studio would need ~65 million years to create. It's got an endless feature list you'd expect to see from a one-person life-consuming perpetual beta project, except those features are actually in the game with some level of polish.

@mavs: That's why I'm interested in this game. Usually free to play games with random loot boxes never interest me. But Epic Games and People Can Fly know how to make good shooter mechanics, so I want to give this a shot. Hopefully they don't tarnish it with a scummy business model.

@tuxedocruise: So that's not very clear. There's 2 different inventory systems, one for weapons/traps/crafting items, and one for heroes/recipes/etc. The weapons/etc one increases through the two skill trees. There's a research tree that increases over time (you more or less get a point every day), and a skill tree that increases with xp you earn from missions. (there's like 5 different xp types btw). The sales page mentions a larger hero/etc inventory if you pay more and I could not see another way to increase that one.

Like I said earlier, the F2P stuff is convoluted and slow to grind out... I like the game, it's pretty fun if you got a good group going... but I would hold off until next year as they said they would drop the $40 up front fee in 2018.

@andythemez said:

They already do. In GAME they sell codes for Ark. Pretty sure there are a few other examples too.

It's kind of amazing to that after all this time it's finally coming out but as "early access"

How do you release a fake video game?

From everything I hear it is a more complete and polished game than what you would think for "Early Access". Since it's so multiplayer focused and free to play as a longer service life they probably want to get the balance right. It won't even be in open beta until 2018.

The NDA ends on July 20th, when early access starts for previous alpha players.

So feel free to give your full thoughts about the game and its monetary structure tomorrow.

Been an alpha player since last year. AMA about Fortnite tomorrow I guess.

Edit: The pay model has been in the game for over a year so I can describe this if required.

@wandrecanada: Same here, I've bounced in and out of it a number of times.

I don't think they want to get balance right, I think they want to get the money right. Right now. Give us money if you want to play our free game.

I do enjoy some free to play titles, but the idea of paying 40 dollars to play a "free" game, and then still be stuck with whatever money making grinding aspects will be in the free version? That sounds very unappealing. This is trying to have your cake and eat it too, which really is a strange idiom, isn't it?

Either way, either your game is free or your game is 40 dollars. Pick one. This just seems shitty, IMO. The game itself still looks like it could be a lot of fun, though.

A friend has bought the $80 version. I'll see what they think but I daresay I will be waiting for the full f2p release. Paying money to play f2p games early seems like madness.

@spaceinsomniac: There is the money part too but I meant by putting it out in early access and not just putting it out. I ended up buying the second tier version (because they intentionally made the base tier look garbage) and will report back but I'm mostly going off youtube videos for my enjoyment of this game. Nobody quite knows what the free to play grind will be like.

I was curious about the differences, so I had a look. Intentionally made the base tier look like garbage, indeed.

Still, the game could end up being well worth 40 or 60 dollars, and I do look forward to hearing people's thoughts on the game, and trying it myself someday.

If anyone wants to group up, my psn is DanishingAct

I think people are going to be shocked at how little grinding you can avoid by paying for shit in this game.

I know exactly what the free to play grind will be like because the game was initially balanced that way. In fact most of the alpha community played exactly like this and it is the best form it can be currently.

If you play the game, do missions with friends, get the login bonuses and use the in game reward systems you can do just fine progressing through the game for zero dollars.

Paying dollars is basically allowing you to fast forward time between in game bonuses. Heck the currency itself is something you can earn via daily mission rewards and login bonuses over time.

From the little I got to play of it this morning, it seems alright. I went ahead and spent some birthday money and bought the deluxe edition of it. The servers seemed to be slammed as expected for a online only game that just launched. The building/editing controls will likely be something people will have to wrap their heads around though since it can be downright confusing at first.

The servers were rough for an hour or, but I had no problems after that.The game could really use a better tutorial and maybe some ui fixes. Overall having a great time with it though.

As somebody who hates the idea of paying money to a F2P game for the purposes of skipping the joy of unlocking content that can otherwise be used as a goal to play towards, is it better to pay for deluxe or just do the cheap model?

The actual game play is very well done, but they need to dial back the number of ways you can progress. There is menu after menu after menu in this game. Basically seems like they wanted as many ways to monetize the game as possible and worked backward from there. I like the longevity this may provide, but honestly these tiers of progression need to be streamlined and the menus cleaned up. Ammo crafting and weapon durability is also annoying, but getting a group of 4 friends together seems like it could make for some good fun. However, I doubt I'll get my wife or any friends to play after they see it in action. My wife was sitting watching and she said "this seems really complicated". I was really hoping to find something that could shift some friends over from Overwatch. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it.

I'll give it a shot if the early access is free and timed rather than $20 or whatever. It looks like Sunset Overdrive and Minecraft had a baby. I don't like the latter of those two games, so I'm not sold on it.

The guy at Gamestop was telling me about this game on Thursday, it looks really cool and fun. Is this coming to Steam? If not I might just get it on console.

Where do I actually play Fortnite on PC? Does Epic have their own launcher?

I couldn't see anything about Steam or anything else on their own website.