Gone are the times of scrounging up loot at dilapidated taco joints and rusty playgrounds in Fortnite. Epic Video games launched a large new replace to the battle royale recreation this week as a part of Chapter 5 Season 1. The patch actually blew up the OG map with a meteor, changing it with a completely new, a lot fancier map. As a substitute of tough locales like Greasy Groves or Tomato Temple, gamers now discover palatial manors like Lavish Lair or the manicured vineyards of Nice Piazza. Fortnite is principally a flowery European trip now, and it feels a bit outdoors my private price range.
Builders stuffed the new map with luxurious factors of curiosity. One other instance: Grand Glacier, a lodge nestled on a snow-capped mountain that appears prefer it’s straight out of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Lodge. If the mountains aren’t your factor, you may head over to the Ritzy Riviera, a picturesque shore-side city with villas nestled right into a sloped hillside. At locations like Elegant Courts, decrypted playgrounds with damaged concrete have been changed with manicured hedges.
Picture: Epic Video games
Name me a traditionalist, however I love to do dumb shit in Fortnite. I personally play as Kakashi from Naruto, and magnificence him with an Amongst Us backpack as I regale different gamers with emotes just like the Gangnam Model dance. A part of what made me fall in love with Fortnite was the garishness of all of it. It’s a vibrant, cartoony recreation the place you may go fishing with Ariana Grande, then flip round and scuffle with Goku. Within the new season, numerous that whimsy is nonetheless there: Peter Griffin is now a pores and skin, and seems as an NPC you may battle. However that tone doesn’t appear to be mirrored within the map, which kinds a central a part of the sport.
It isn’t that earlier maps had been missing in high-end areas. Previous to the return of the OG map, Chapter 4 Season 4 added the cyberpunk-inspired Mega Metropolis and the sweeping Japanese estates of Kenjutsu Crossing. Whereas Kenjutsu resembles the extra elaborate locales within the present iteration of the sport, a few of these additions nonetheless evoked a form of surrealism: Mega Metropolis’s sci-fi components felt true to the much less reasonable components of Fortnite.
All that mentioned, areas are topic to vary with every replace. So it’s potential that additional meteors or different unwell fates would possibly befall a few of these fancy locales and convey again among the good outdated Fortnite appeal — tough hedges and all.
