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Battle Royale' Could Be Receiving a Competitive Mode Soon
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Fair warning: datamined documents are sometimes reliable indicators of what's coming into a match, such as when we get to see that the Fortnite challenges a couple of days earlier or when the skins turn it into the game week or so before they actually hit the store. If there's a full size skin from the game, by way of instance, you can bet it is actually coming. Occasionally datamined documents are somewhat less reliable, and we are talking about the latter right now. Recent sleuthing has uncovered a new folder attached to the limited time manners with "comp" from the name, and many are taking this to mean that Fortnite: Battle Royale is getting a competitive mode. It's not the craziest idea.
Let's consider why Fortnite could use a competitive manner, to begin with. For one thing, it has a ridiculously high skill cap -- that usually means that the best of the best players may wipe the floor with folks like myself. That's mostly due to the simple fact that high-level gamers are able to easily juggle the building and shooting mechanisms into a new type of level-editing shooter which really hasn't been seen before. Lower-skilled players are largely playing a normal shooter with the ability to build ramps. Right now Fortnite has no skill-based matchmaking, that is part of the fun: that John Wick on the horizon might be a fool with too much free time or disposable income, or it might be the most dangerous player you have ever met.
A competitive manner could give those hardcore players somewhere to show off in a setting where they'll only be up against tougher players. Any sort of ranking system would also offer a little bit more of a bonus for those players to stick around: somebody who has mastered the game might just move on to greener pastures if there isn't a new arrangement in which to prove themselves.
It could also start laying the groundwork for genuine Fortnite esports. Esports with Battle Royale games are a tricky monster because arbitrary action can make things unpredictable, and sports thrive when they're predictable contests that let player skill carry daily. Fortnite Items is a much better candidate than PUBG, at least, since the resource demands of the building system encourage conflict and discourage camping, and camping is no fun to watch. Fortnite is the biggest game in the world, but it's far from the biggest game in esports -- it is hard to envision that Epic isn't thinking about how to build in this direction.
