Fortnite’s new map is simply too fancy for my tastes

Gone are the times of scrounging up loot at dilapidated taco joints and rusty playgrounds in Fortnite. Epic Video games launched a large new replace to the battle royale sport this week as a part of Chapter 5 Season 1. The patch actually blew up the OG map with a meteor, changing it with a completely new, a lot fancier map. As an alternative of tough locales like Greasy Groves or Tomato Temple, gamers now discover palatial manors like Lavish Lair or the manicured vineyards of Nice Piazza. Fortnite is principally a elaborate European trip now, and it feels a bit exterior my private price range.

Builders stuffed the brand new map with luxurious factors of curiosity. One other instance: Grand Glacier, a resort nestled on a snow-capped mountain that appears prefer it’s straight out of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Resort. If the mountains aren’t your factor, you possibly can head over to the Ritzy Riviera, a picturesque shore-side city with villas nestled right into a sloped hillside. At locations like Stylish Courts, decrypted playgrounds with damaged concrete have been changed with manicured hedges.

Picture: Epic Video games

Name me a traditionalist, however I love to do dumb shit in Fortnite. I personally play as Kakashi from Naruto, and elegance him with an Amongst Us backpack as I regale different gamers with emotes just like the Gangnam Fashion dance. A part of what made me fall in love with Fortnite was the garishness of all of it. It’s a brilliant, cartoony sport the place you possibly can go fishing with Ariana Grande, then flip round and scuffle with Goku. Within the new season, loads of that whimsy remains to be there: Peter Griffin is now a pores and skin, and seems as an NPC you possibly can battle. However that tone doesn’t appear to be mirrored within the map, which types a central a part of the sport.

It isn’t that earlier maps have been missing in high-end areas. Previous to the return of the OG map, Chapter 4 Season 4 added the cyberpunk-inspired Mega Metropolis and the sweeping Japanese estates of Kenjutsu Crossing. Whereas Kenjutsu resembles the extra elaborate locales within the present iteration of the sport, a few of these additions nonetheless evoked a kind of surrealism: Mega Metropolis’s sci-fi components felt true to the much less sensible components of Fortnite.

All that mentioned, areas are topic to alter with every replace. So it’s attainable that additional meteors or different ailing fates may befall a few of these fancy locales and produce again a few of the good previous Fortnite appeal — tough hedges and all.