Why Fortnite’s Building Tools Have More To Offer

So, Fortnite, eh? Jump off the bus, skydiving skydiving, parachute, hopefully land somewhere populated but not too populated, scramble for supplies, look for victims, oh good, here’s someone who’s been playing long enough they’re dressed up like a My Little Pony, and they’re coming your way – and then, rinse and repeat. That’s the formula that’s captivated some forty-five million players and placed Fortnite firmly at the top of the list of online battle royales, even dethroning the mighty PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Cultured Vultures has been over the laundry list of the best battle royale games before, in an article which hinted at one of the factors which has set Fortnite apart from its many competitors – the free-form construction mechanism. Similar MMOs, like Rust, have had both shooting and construction elements before now, but those have tended to involve menus, and if you’re under any kind of pressure, some incredibly frantic clicking.

Fortnite, on the other hand, has the basic construction elements as accessible as changing to a different weapon. And any reasonably competent Fortnite player (that is to say, not me) will have this down to a tee already. If you fire on someone, their first instinct will likely be to throw up walls around themselves to make a mini-fort, then stick a ramp in the middle for a quick height advantage.

Obviously this can be as simple or as elaborate as you want to make it, so long as you have the necessary raw materials. There’s all manner of options – box someone in, build up a sniper roost, even make a skybridge around the edge of the storm as the cheapest possible way of staying out of danger. This last is the sort of game-breaking creativity that inspires the most fury because you didn’t think of it first, rivalled only by the ridiculous counter-measures people have discovered, such as riding up there on an RPG round.

Of course, this free-form construction mechanic sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? Granted it’s widespread, especially in simpler forms – Team Fortress 2 and Worms, among others, let you put down gun turrets on the fly – but this kind of universal, snap-to, Lego-esque construction naturally draws comparisons to sandbox giant Minecraft. And, true to form, our previous list of battle royale games included a Minecraft mod (a subcategory which ranges from ‘toilets’ to ‘recreations of Westeros’).

This is far from the only such Minecraft mod. There’s a good four thousand mods out there to stick guns into Minecraft (and, by extension, to turn the game into a third-person shooter). So, is there an argument to be made that Fortnite’s blend of shooting and building is the spiritual heir to stuff like this? Well, no. Because that would be discounting the missing link that is Ace of Spaces.

Ace of Spades was itself heavily Minecraft-inspired, running on a similar Voxel block-based engine – to look at it you could very easily mistake it for a mod instead of a standalone title. While it was a more of a traditional team-based shooter rather than a battle royale, it merged Minecraft’s construction mechanics with pared-down but solid shooting elements. And, crucially, it integrated the two. Both were simple mechanically, boasting fully three different guns and plopping down solid matte-colour cubes, but in a fully destructible sandbox world, this was enough for a fairly solid combo.

While it had the usual gamut of FPS game modes – deathmatches, capture the flag, and so forth – its most unique, and the best display of its integration of construction and shooting, was a mode called ‘Babel’. The core of this was a simple game of ‘run to the middle, grab the bag, and bring it back to your base’. The brilliant twist was that the bag was located up on a flat layer of cloud, way up in the sky – and that both teams had to scramble to build stairways up there. Fiendishly, you could only chip away at the other team’s tower while over on their side of the map – resulting in digging-in and trench warfare worthy of World War I.

Its other unique mode, ‘Push’, focused even more on construction, with teams having to build bridges between map features to the endpoint, all the while taking fire from the other side. Which brings me onto another of Ace of Spades’ best features, the maps. While Fortnite has only the one – which most remotely serious players probably know like the back of their hands by now – Ace of Spades’ fully customisable landscape led to a dizzying variety of user-created maps. One ‘Push’ map was based on the Pacific theatre of WWII, with the centrepiece being a vast mushroom cloud – probably intended just as scenery, but which people would dig up into in order to get on top and rain destruction on the other team.

Ace of Spaces was always most popular in its barebones, free-to-play beta form – in which it inevitably attracted the aimbotters and griefers who will congregate in any game with zero entry requirements, just as the Youtube comments section is catnip for illiterates. However, it became popular enough that it was eventually picked up for release by Jagex (they of Runescape fame) who polished it up, kept out the aimbotters, and also removed ‘Babel’, ‘Push’, and many of the maps. So, one step forward, two steps back.

Jagex’s version revamped the construction system slightly, in that rather than having to build block-by-block, you could now whip out vast, prefabricated constructions – which, to be entirely fair to them, explains why they ditched ‘Babel’ and ‘Push’, as this feature would have made them far too easy. This is in a way closer to and a step beyond Fortnite’s approach – the modular panels of that title cover more relative ground than Ace of Spades’ individual blocks, but don’t go quite so far as to set down an entire suspension bridge at the touch of a button.

Jagex also revamped the classes, giving the players a selection of specialised creatures more in the way of Team Fortress 2 – though there’s an argument to be made that the elegant simplicity of three different guns fit with the blocky landscapes. However, Jagex threw in jetpacks, and added the feature – showcased prominently in the trailers since the very beginning – to topple structures by taking out their foundations with a rocket launcher, so let’s call that a wash.

Now, it may appear that I’ve used Fortnite’s popularity as a pretext to ramble on about how much I like Ace of Spades. And you’d be technically correct, but honestly, as you may have guessed, the official version left me lukewarm. There’s a thousand little factors to that – lack of support from the developers, not engaging with the established fanbase, no updates since 2016 – but, and I really have to come back to this, the main reason is that they left out ‘Babel’ and ‘Push’. That’s right, it’s all been a pretext to ramble about those game modes – which I fear might end up lost to the ether, even though the shooting-building combo is demonstrably more popular than ever.

There is a tendency in the media in general to stick by established ideas, hence why every other film is a sequel and why there’s a new Call of Duty every two financial quarters, which perhaps explains developers’ reluctance to try out a new mode when they can just have team deathmatches and be done with it. But, as an analogy, look at ‘Prop Hunt’ – which started off relatively recently on GMod, and became so popular that Call of Duty: WWII temporarily included it as a game mode, before fan outcry forced them to institute it permanently. Not adopting ‘Babel’ and ‘Push’ is akin to leaving money on the table – plus, they’ve already had their trial by fire in the Ace of Spades beta, we know they work.