Vidjama Gmaes Work

It’s become incredibly easy.

I keep an active ticker on the Fortnite battle pass because I like to take breaks from Fortnite and I’m also disgustingly addicted to the FOMO of the battle pass itself. It’s not that hard to do, just take the number of days on the pass and divvy it up among the 200 levels and you’ll get the general average of how many levels you should be at consistently. For Season 1 that is about 2 levels per day plus a starting advantage (96 days, 200 levels, 2 per day with 6 distributed).

So by my calculations I should be at level 20 on Saturday December 9 to keep my tally going. I am at level 33.

Well this week saw the launch of Fortnite’s new official modes; Lego mode, Fortnite Festival, and Rocket Racers. And because Epic Games doesn’t want players to think “screw this, I want to level up my battle pass in the BR mode,” all three of those modes are designed to level up your battle pass with reasonable gameplay. And they all have their own set of daily and weekly tasks, except Lego. The result? It’s becoming stupidly easy to level up your battle pass.

It saves me money, because I have used my Fortnite Crew V-Bucks to buy that pack of levels pretty much every season and I guess I don’t have to do that now. Now let me talk about modes.

The Lego Mode in Fortnite is fine, a Minecraft clone but Lego. My biggest gripe is how badly some of the skins have been changed to match a Lego design. My furry wolf skin isn’t even a wolf anymore! I’m also not surprised that the celebrity skins are not available at all, but there’s some holes in the logic when you have Darth Maul being available as a Lego character but Darth Vader isn’t. Maybe they just didn’t have time to build all the skins they were hoping to do for launch.

Rocket Racers is…a thing. I don’t see myself playing it for more than the daily quests, and thankfully you can blow through those really fast. The ranked mode is mostly broken as quests don’t advance in it, and there are way too many playlists leading to most of the maps being dead. Also the cosmetics are obscenely expensive. $36 for a car.

The Rock Band mode for Fortnite is questionable as well, but it is day one. The rotating list of songs is small and I’m not going to question the cost of tracks too much as licensing is stupidly expensive thanks to the cartel that is the music industry. Hopefully Epic can pull its weight and get more older songs for cheap. My biggest gripe with this mode is that Fortnite players are morons and the game ties challenges in with your band score forcing multiplayer.

You tend to start with four players, have one drop out before the match starts, and another be playing on their Switch getting 10% of the notes. Nobody comprehends the idea of picking a song in the lobby meaning you’re likely to just have the one song before ditching these dweebs which makes the challenges to get band stars take even longer. I think Epic should force you to pick a song and just auto-fill the list when the countdown finishes.

Oh and Fortnite Jam is a complete waste of time and effort, its only reason for existing being so people can AFK in it for a half hour to get the daily missions.

But that’s just me.