In 2018 Fortnite was described by New York Magazine as “The most important video game on the planet” and “The Instagram of video games” and since then that record does not seem to have set yet. Fortnite is still incredibly influential in popular culture and is creating such an exceptional standard of entertainment that just talking about it as a video game risks being an understatement. Andrea Agnelli recently stated that Fortnite could make football obsolete. But this isn’t an article about how influential Fortnite is or what it stands for in our culture. If you want such an article we have already written about it here. Here instead we want to introduce you to Fortnite in this quarantine, in case you have decided to use it to catch up with the passions of zoomers. Or even just to dedicate a nice addiction, given that Fortnite is among the most addictive video games now on the market (on Bloomberg it says “it has great control over the minds of young people”).
We downloaded Fortnite in January, probably as a matter of FOMO, and it became a highlight of our lunch breaks. We remain scarce: we rarely win and win a lot. We have the impression that something is always wrong, or that our reflexes are simply not made for this game. Fortnite is however more “inclusive” than other video games – Francesco Lombardo wrote how suitable it was for “casual gamers” – and you will be able to have fun and play good games even without knowing how to play. We have prepared a list of semi-serious tips for you to help you avoid at least the stupidest mistakes and focus on the most important things to learn how to play.
Where to land
The game begins on a school bus that flies over the island of the Royal Battle. From above the island is beautiful, with an alternation of climates and landscapes bordering on the unreal. Like any fancy place, it feels like New Zealand. Now you have to throw yourself. Rest assured: your entire game depends on this first choice. Stay calm and understand what you want from yourself.
Jihad match: This is the game where you accept the risk of dying very soon in exchange for a very high reward. In fact, after the last update there are on the map some places protected by computer-controlled guards and more. There are also cameras scattered throughout the buildings that will automatically shoot you if you are not disguised (we go back) and some bosses who have like 300 shields and shoot you with GOLDEN AND MYTHICAL weapons. The reward for this very high probability of death are chests full of precious weapons hidden in a vault, which you can open after killing the boss and stealing the key. The more controlled and dangerous the place is, the more treasure chests and weapons there will be, and usually the more players you’ll find there. Everyone rushes to these places thinking they are smarter than the others and come out victorious in this intensified royal rumble. So the chances of death are high. It will be like going all-in: you risk going out immediately, I don’t have time to find a decent weapon, but you can come out with a backpack of weapons worthy of a nostalgic of the Second World War.
Jihad game, but calmly: repeat the previous strategy but landing not directly in the monitored places but in the surroundings. Time to find a weapon and a cabin in which to dress up to reduce the possibility of being shot (at least you will be protected from the cameras). The real pros don’t do it: they go straight without masking and shoot everything in front of them. But I mean, you’re still not good enough at shooting to afford it.
Begbie Game: This game consists of throwing yourself into places with a high density of people, such as cities, with a considerable risk of death but no reward. So you do it only for the love of shooting, confrontation and violence in general. After all, it is the kills that release dopamine in Fortnite, which is the profound reason why you are playing even if you don’t know it. A kill on Fortnite as a like on Instagram (is this the world we are leaving to our children?).
Then throw yourself into some urban center with the pokémon name – Borgo Bislacco, Holly Hedges, Borgo Pacifico, Sweaty Sands – make your way between the white fences and dusty attics, look for a weapon as soon as possible and look for the first one that comes under you .
Fun city to land in: Borgo Bislacco is close to the agency, so the craziest of all land there. Those who want the stress and blood first in the city and then at the agency, which is the most dangerous and guarded and densely populated place with strong people on the whole map.
Hermit Game : The center of the storm varies from game to game, but the more central you are on the island the more likely you are to be in the center. The more you land at the extremes, the more possible you will have to chase the center. It’s not so bad: landing far away you meet fewer people, you spend the game running through beautiful landscapes (did I already tell you that the landscapes of Fornite are beautiful?) And look around you rather sure that nobody will disturb you. You can use Fornite to reflect on your life and human destiny at such a difficult time for our species. Put a podcast in your headphones, you won’t even need to know if someone is coming. You will get to the circle without getting your hands dirty, fresh fresh, maybe sculate and win as well.
Hermitic places to land: in all those snow-covered lands where you will have to discover the chests behind the tents and makeshift shelters. That house buggered behind the mountains that you can hardly even see on the map. The disco, under which you will find a van full of Slurp that will increase your shield.
Raymond Carver game: land in the center of the map, but in an absolutely insignificant place where you can take weapons in peace and then just go about your own business. A good place, for example, could be the flopper pond. Go down to this low-lying Canadian-style cottage, grab that green shit gun, pick up a fishing rod, and fish comfortably on the small dock. For a moment, you can pretend you are in a Raymond Carver tale and not in an apocalyptic game where the last one alive on an island more armed than Texas wins.
Be aggressive
Let’s start from a basic consideration: we are all afraid of dying, in real life as in the much more complicated one of Fornite. You have just landed on an island with 99 other people who want to kill you, it is useless to go around it. The less you are afraid of death, the more chance you have of winning. It sounds like a cheap motivational course maxim but I assure you it has practical implications. 90% of the work in Fortnite consists in noticing the presence of other players before them: once you see them go under them, take them out, do not delay, do not think about too complex strategies, shoot. Dying in Fortnite, you will realize, is easy and, as an old Roman saying goes, “Who leads first leads twice”.
Use the creative mode to learn how to build
The creative mode basically exists for learning to play. So if you are reading this, this is the way for you. It is particularly useful for learning to build: an activity that has to do above all with the automation of certain movements with the fingers. But take it only as a base: it only builds in relation to opponents who want to kill you in the context of a real battle, so the laboratory conditions will only help you partially.
LEARN TO BUILD BUT NOT TO HIDE
In Fortnite you build and shoot: you will never be strong if you don’t learn to do both, possibly together. Build and shoot at almost the exact same time as the defensive and offensive phase of Total Kick. Building offers several advantages: it confuses the opponent by making him lose his orientation on your movements, and gives you a privileged position to shoot, that is, from above. Building therefore has not so much a defensive purpose in Fortnite but an offensive one: it is not built to entrench oneself (almost never) but to have a more complex offensive strategy. Learning to build will make you feel more serene when you turn the map: when they take you from behind or from the side – and you know it: it happens very often – you can start building as if it were an unconditional reflection, your second skin.
I started playing in January and after two months I can safely say that I am still a blowjob to build. All those who kill me, however, are not.
How to face one on one if you don’t want to build
As you will soon learn, Fortnite is the interval between one who wants to kill you and another who wants to kill you. Getting prepared for a head-on collision is the most important thing and Fortnite science has established that the best way to deal with these situations is to build to defend yourself and then fight back. Does this make sense. Even in boxing we see athletes spend almost more time thinking about their guard than hitting the opponent, it’s called survival instinct. In Fortinte, however, this instinct does not exist, instead there is your manual ability to build or not. If you are among those with little ability to coordinate your synapses to those of the joypad, you know that building your forts to defend yourself from the enemy will be impossible;
What’s the alternative? The alternatives are different:
Use nature to defend yourself : trees, boulders, ridges, slopes, rivers, are all excellent solutions to protect yourself from enemy fire, it is no coincidence that even the ancients thought of these things before choosing where to build their cities.
Go straight, jump: also known as the kamikaze option, it’s about running towards the enemy trying to dodge his shots and then trying to get the better of the close combat. The refined version of this tactic is to use the pickaxe as a weapon.
Compete for the biggest one : If you have a particularly powerful ranged weapon (e.g. legendary assault rifle), kneel to improve your aim and start shooting at your opponent as soon as he enters. in the viewfinder. He requires a great deal of bullets, but if his weapon is less powerful than yours, you have a chance to win the fight.
Run : Running away is always a good tactic, too bad about that storm thing.
Trust your teammates : this only applies if you play in pairs or in groups. Let them build, let them go on, let them choose the tactic to use, let them kill the enemies. In short, take a step back and enjoy the game.
Never stand still
I know that the landscape is beautiful and that standing still you will feel like you are not in danger – a type of anxiety that if you have just started playing Fortnite you know well. But standing still won’t help – just keep walking around the map with your eyes open for the widest possible panorama. You have to be crazy dogs around the map, it’s not Metal Gear.
Have fun with speedboats (and helicopters, but less)
Perhaps the only moment of true recreation of the game is the speedboats. Of course, even there you are a target, even more visible than usual, but it is a risk that is worth taking to experience the thrill of driving and firing rockets at everything you see. The ideal is if you happen upon some enemy who was on the bank of the river to open a casket, or who was perhaps crossing, you can suddenly swoop on him and while you take him with rockets in the face (the rockets of the missiles go more or less alone in the direction of the person you are aiming, you must not be too precise) your partner, if there are two of you, can shoot him with an assault rifle. If you then arrive at the dam or the waterfalls you can rest assured and throw yourself there with the motorboat without suffering damage, as if you were at the Luna Park.
Ah, the speedboat for some reason also works on land. Slowly, only with the turbo that you have to let recharge (the bar on the right side of the dashboard, which turns from orange to green and which you operate with the circle), but if you are in a crazy game you can also try to surprise someone: what would you think if while you are crossing a meadow you see a motorboat coming up against you? The helicopter, on the other hand, is comfortable to move around and even with that you can suddenly attack enemies. But the helicopter doesn’t have rockets.
Don’t get fixated on that damn sniper rifle
Sniper rifles are the preferred weapon of those who want to escape direct confrontation through a refined strategy. The one of the lone sniper who can suddenly kill you, who looks at you in the darkness without your knowledge, is a romantic figure. With a sniper rifle in hand in Fortnite you feel omnipotent. The first instinct is to look for the highest point possible and start shooting skeet with the opposing players who pass under it. Trust me: it’s an illusion. Shooting with a sniper rifle is difficult: you have to calibrate a whole set of variables – movement of opponents, distance, inaccuracy of Fortnite weapons in general – that will escape you like sand between your fingers.
Don’t focus on upgrading your weapons
Along the map, there are stations where you can stop to upgrade your weapons and upgrade them in category. Upgrading them costs material, so if you take it into your head to do so you will find yourself picking large areas of the map for minutes and minutes as if you were a Chilean miners. The rewards for this kind of managerial video game effort – especially the sacrifice of boredom – will be minimal. Let’s take an example: the damage difference between a gray and a red shotgun is 30. This distance can be bridged by aiming at more sensitive parts of the body, such as the head. In short, the important thing is to learn to shoot, having strong weapons is one more thing. And then there is no comparison with the weapons that you can get in the Agency, the Yacht and the other hiding places of Henchmen and Bosses.
It is important to have weapons for every occasion
Weapons are not all the same, and so are firefights. And therefore it is important to have several, because there will be different clashes with your opponents (as long as your game lasts long enough). A very rough first division is that between “close” weapons (ie those that do the most damage when you find yourself shooting at an opponent a few meters away) and “from afar” weapons (when instead you see the opponent far away in your view but you still want to try to inflict damage on it).
The first category includes, among others, the pistol, the shotgun and the tactical heavy rifle; of the second the gun vamp, the machine gun and the assault rifle. But distance is not the only variable to take into account when choosing a weapon, there are also other factors that depend on your style, such as the reload time, the frequency of shots and of course the damage inflicted. For example, the shotgun is the weapon that deals the most damage up close (aside from explosive weapons and mythic weapons, we get to that) but it takes a long time to reload between shots, and therefore has a frequency of hits inevitably very low. The pistol does far less damage but has a much higher frequency. A good compromise between the two is the tactical heavy rifle. The choice obviously depends on your characteristics, starting from the quality of your aim. Almost the same can be said for weapons “from afar”: the assault rifle does more damage and has a continuous frequency, the gun vamp does slightly less damage but goes in “gusts” (that is, it has a higher frequency but yes stops at regular intervals), the SMG is the one with the highest frequency but also the one that does the least damage among them.
These are the weapons you will find most often in the chests you will encounter, but they are not the only ones. Especially after the updates of the last few weeks, which have added places on the map manned by opponents controlled by artificial intelligence (the “ghosts” and “shadows”), the weapons have increased and so have the possible variables to apply to your game : now you can also find the heavy assault rifle (lower frequency but higher damage than the normal assault rifle), the rapid fire submachine gun (which explains itself) and the machine gun, which will make you feel Rambo for the destructive charge it carries with it (and has the advantage of not having to be recharged).
How to handle the backpack
In the backpack you will have five slots and gradually you will have more and more doubts about how to fill them. The only objects that do not take up space, in fact, are the ammunition and launch pads (which will project you into the air allowing you to use the hang glider even after landing), while everything else will occupy those slots. Not only weapons (and we have already seen how important it is to have different weapons) but also explosives (such as grenades, mines or remote-controlled explosives, if you are skilled enough to use them), lures (which create for a few seconds of your projections with which to deceive your opponents), the fishing rods and above all the bandaged bazooka, which will allow you to heal you or your companions but which will occupy two slots.
You will understand how complicated managing the backpack can become over time. Much will depend on your style: are you willing to give up the bandaged bazooka to carry a sniper rifle? Do you feel confident enough to use grenades to give up a weapon in their place? Do you really want to try your luck and carry a fishing rod with you throughout the game?
The Bosses
With the updates of the last few weeks to the map have been added “special” places manned by opponents controlled by artificial intelligence: that is, the “ghosts” and “shadows”. In order not to be shot by the ghosts and shadows you need to dress up in the red telephone booths style London 70s that you will find near these places. I already feel the question growing in your brain: why?
The answer is that inside these places you will find the so-called bosses, those who in the pioneering era of video games would have been the final monsters and who today are relegated to mere extras of much more complex systems. There are five bosses: Midas in the Agency, Brutus in the Holes, Nitroglycerin at the Well, Skye at the Shark and Miaoscolo at the Yatch. Being able to kill them will grant you two advantages: collecting their mythical weapon and taking the card that will allow you to enter the vault of each of these places, where you will find dozens of special weapons and other items. As long as you can do it before the other players, of course.
If it seems like a great idea to go and kill the bosses, in fact, don’t forget that there are 99 other people who think the same way: going to the Agency or the Well does not mean having to face only ghosts or shadows, but also different ones other players like you who want to enter the vault. If you are still convinced to go, get ready for Normandy-style moments.
What are the best MYTHICAL weapons (those of the Bosses)
Miao Miao Rifle: It is located in the Yacht and where to kill the cat with muscles which is called, precisely, Miaoscolo.
Skyve Assault Rifle + Grapple: These are found in the Shark and if the mythical assault rifle, well, is a more powerful and faster assault rifle, the grapple is a really strange object, a plunger attached to a rope, which transports you to where you want (but you have to aim at an object at a reasonable distance). But don’t underestimate it: apart from aiming diagonally downwards and compulsively firing you advance faster (useful for escaping the storm, for example), but it is above all a thrill to climb high buildings, houses or enemy fortifications.
Midas Drum Rifle : Found in the Agency and you have to kill Midas, the golden type like a living Oscar statuette. Perhaps the most effective weapon in the game.
Brutus’ Machine Gun : Located in the Cave, you have to kill Brutus which is a royalty-free version of The Rock. Ok, these two-handed machine guns are an almost “carnal” pleasure. Putting them into action, listening to the noise with which they charge, which precedes the you-you-you-you of the machine guns that we have seen in war films, is also worth the risk of ending up in an overly complex confrontation with someone running around you and kills you while shooting another enemy like Scarface in the final scene. But, here, beware that they are not very easy to use. But if you target someone, he’s done for.
Explosive Bow : Found in the Wells, and you must kill NitrogliceRina. Frankly, we haven’t been able to use this properly yet. But it’s fun. It is a bow. It would be even better if there were targets around the game to hit for pure sport.
Don’t neglect explosives
They seem useless and too difficult to use; seem to require a strategic approach that does not have too much to do with Fortnite. Yet there will always be a match situation that will require you to use explosives. When your opponent is perched behind a Gothic cathedral; and when he took shelter behind walls to revive his companion; when you are outnumbered and need to try a mandrakata. In all these situations the explosive will save you.
The rocket launcher is obviously the prince of explosives: it is the weapon that inflicts the most damage throughout the game and in retaliation it is rather delicate to use: always take a good distance from the opponent otherwise you will end up committing suicide; jump before shooting; measure the shots as ammunition is scarce. At this time you will also find grenades, proximity mines and remote controlled explosives around, which I have written to you in order of preference.
Don’t forget to make material, but then don’t forget about everything else
Precisely because building is essential to have the material to do it is the basis. The first phase of the game has to do with the accumulation: of weapons, potions, medkits but above all of materials: wood, bricks and iron, in order of resistance.
There are also those who make the material above all by taking it away from the enemies just killed, but it is pleasant to obtain material by yourself: it is a meditative activity for artisans, as I imagine it is to cut wood or work ceramics, and for me that I have no practical sensitivity is a substitute for all of this. Sometimes I get so obsessed with making stuff that I forget that the key thing in Fortnite is not getting killed, and I lose focus on my surroundings. You can’t afford it.
Sharpen your eyes, open your ears
The Fortnite adventure is more all-encompassing than you think. Relying on joypad skills alone may not be enough. As when you are immersed in nature, when you are immersed in Fortnite you have to open all your senses, find the opponent who comes down the slope to your left, listen to the steps on the stairs of those who want to annoy you while looking for some weapon in a house. But also pay attention to the smells of food trucks scattered here and there on the map, to that of popcorn that can still be guessed in the drive-in area. In short, in Fortnite good hands and good aim are not enough, you need to have eyes, nose, mouth, but also and above all a lot of heart.
