Vidjama Gmaes Work

Got to level 200 with a couple weeks left to go.

I need to get this out of the way from the start. Mortal Kombat might not be the best crossover that Fortnite has had in the last six chapters, but it is definitely the coolest in my opinion. But only once you get Scorpion in. Sub-Zero’s ice gloves were fine and all but they had limited use if the person you were fighting was actually decent at the game. That is true for Scorpion’s gloves but they are cooler overall. I don’t make the rules.

Season 2 of Chapter 6 of the Fortnite is a prime example of Epic in their “I don’t know what to do next” phase of the game. It’s also a reminder that nobody ever dies in the Fortnite universe, they just bide their time until they think it’s safe enough to resurface. This season has been all about the big baddie Fletcher Kane, a sexy wolfman who showed up on the island and immediately took it over because Fortnite islands are easier to occupy than your average abandoned suburban IHOP. Fletcher Kane has been in a power struggle with the rest of the criminal underworld, that the player characters help out over the course of the season.

Among those characters? You guessed it, Midas. Midas is back because once again nobody ever fully dies in this world. There’s a bunch of new characters this season including Big Dill, a giant pickle that runs his own crypto scam meme coin and put T-Pain in the hospital. Yes, that T-Pain. No, I’m not making this up.

Which I guess is a good time to break into the gameplay of Season 2. Gold has become a big commodity in Season 2 and is also extremely easy to obtain. You have multiple banks across the island to raid, each of which give roughly 1,000 gold for breaking into and pillaging. There’s literal gold deposits around the island, I think in one match I managed to get over 2,000 gold. And that ease of access to gold is reflected in everything being really, really expensive. Toward the middle of the season Epic introduced character kits that cost the 5,000 gold cap.

My favorite weapons of the season have been the Mammoth Pistol, the Pump & Dump, and the baseball bat. The Mammoth Pistol isn’t new to Fortnite, but it’s been gone for so long that it might as well be. It was a very short-lived weapon only appearing in Chapter 4 Season 3 and was heavily nerfed before Epic finally shelved it. A single-shot pistol that has a big punch, and a satisfying splat when you hit someone with it. The Pump & Dump is a shotgun/smg combo that hits hard if you know how to use it, and the baseball bat? It’s so much fun to knock someone off the top of a tall mountain and watch them hit the ground hard.

Season 2 has probably been one of the most extreme that I’ve seen my gameplay loop change from season start to season end maybe since the flood season. At first it was all about raiding the banks. And then over time players got access to bigger and better stuff earlier on and easier. Getting gold easier meant being able to go straight to the black market knowing they had powerful guns. You could even get into the backroom and open a special vault that cost nothing, and get a few good weapons, some shield, and maybe a Dillbit within a minute of the match starting.

You can also tell that Epic has been doing a lot of experimenting this season with weapons just by the shit they’ve put out and then immediately reduced. The lawless guns are cool as hell, and Brutus’ minigun is disgustingly powerful at close range. The lawless stink rifle is hilarious, a relatively powerful bolt action rifle that leaves a fart cloud behind. The fart rifle was released and then vaulted ten days later, then brought back as a non-guaranteed weapon in the black market.

I love the small plot of Dill mining crypto and the joke that it just keeps losing value. It’s funny when you remember that Epic is one of very few popular stores to tolerate dogshit crypto scam games. Time to start my two week vacation from Fortnite.