Raze to the ground and start anew
I’ve never been so invested in something I’m so detached from. Fortnite will begin its fourth season tomorrow, which means that Epic will implement some changes. One of those long-rumored revisions is that Tilted Towers is gonna get blown the fuck up.
This needs to happen. I have played exactly zero Fortnite battle royale matches. Still, through internet-complainers, I know what Tilted Towers is. It’s a high-activity, high-reward area that’s almost smack dab in the middle of the map. A lot of people jump there. A lot of people die there.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. PUBG, Fortnite‘s closest competitor, has its analogs in Hacienda, School, and the Military Base. People flock to the best loot, even if that means a realistic chance that they’ll be quickly killed. But, the times they come out of those skirmishes alive, they’re almost always set up nicely to reach the endgame. It’s a viable-but-risky way to play battle royales.
Where Tilted Towers differentiates itself is in the sheer number who jump there every game. It’s enough that it can throw off the pacing of the rest of the match. There’s a distribution of players that’s overly-concentrated on one location, which has the effect of making other areas feel underpopulated. It’s literally divisive.
It’s figuratively divisive too, though. There’s no shortage of social media diatribes exclaiming a loathing of Tilted Towers. But, everyone who jumps there is implicitly endorsing it. Can developer Epic placate both groups? How’s it going to be addressed?
For weeks, Epic has teased an in-game catastrophe by adding meteor showers. Players were perplexed by this atmospheric change. Since then, they’ve become more and more intense. In recent days, those space rocks have hit structures and caused actual damage. Epic’s Season 4 promotion has the caption “Brace for Impact!”
The prevalent theory is — assuming Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck don’t save the day — these meteors are going to level Tilted Towers. Epic will acquiesce to the player complaints. They must. How often are changes to multiplayer games justified through in-game events? Never. The developer simply releases patch notes that say “A new town was added to the northeast corner of the map” and then it is so.
Epic has built a month’s worth of speculation out of some increasingly-dramatic meteors. The physical landscape of Fortnite‘s island will almost certainly look different tomorrow. When it does, Tilted Towers has got to go. That’s partially because it’ll probably make Fortnite a better-balanced game. But, it’s more because this whole meteor tease is too cool of a notion for it to not result in drastic changes.
