Professional streaming gamers on twitch.tv - Part 1: Fortnite, the video game

In this post, I explained that I had discovered the video game Fortnite Battle Royale, mostly through the streaming of his games on Twitch by the professional gamer Ninja, Tyler Blevins IRL.

I had watched from time to time video of game play on YouTube or even on Twitch, but it did not interest me until I saw streaming of Fortnite. In this post, I will give you a summary of the game Fortnite Battle Royale.

Fortnite has been created by the company Epic Games that is also the creator and maintainer of the game engine Unreal.

Fortnite is player versus player (PvP) video game that is free to play. Each game involves a maximum of 100 players that can play solo or in teams of 2 to 4 players. Each game is guaranteed to end in around 30 minutes, but may be shorter than that.

To win the game, you need to be the last player alive or the last team with at least one player alive.

At the beginning of the game the 100 players are dropped on an island from a flying bus. They can choose where to go on the island. There is a "storm" that is shrinking a "safe zone" progressively. Outside of the safe zone, players have there health going down and that eventually, if they cannot rejoin the safe zone, will cause their death.
At some point, if there is more that one player or team alive, the safe zone completely disappear and the one with the higher health will win the game. But not many games end like this, as most of the time one player or team will eliminate the other players or teams and win the game before the disappearance of the safe zone.

At the beginning of each game, all the players are in the same state: all they have is a pickaxe and no weapon.
To succeed at this game, you need first to stay alive. That usually means to find one or several weapons and munitions, to defend yourself or to aggressively attack other players.
You may also stay alive for a long time if you avoid being seen by any other players as long as possible, but you will never win a game if you don't eliminate at least one other player.

With your pickaxe, you may collect material ("mat"), wood, metal and bricks, by destroying trees, walls or other items. With the collected mat, you will be able to build wall, stairs and ceilings that will temporary protect you from other attacking players, or allow you to climb on top of buildings or hills.

There are many other aspects of the game, such as managing health or armor, looking for treasure chests or munition boxes, flying, driving a shopping or golf cart, etc...

Epic Games is changing the game every few months in what they call "seasons". Currently, we are in season 5, that started last week.

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Fortnite Battle Royale is an extremely successful game. We will see the reasons why in the next part.

Continue to Part 2