A new strategy is sweeping Fortnite: Battle Royale, and it’s either crazy or genius depending on how you look at it.
A lot of people come down on the free-to-play Fortnite: Battle Royale as a simpler, more cartoonish clone of PUBG, and while there are certainly a lot of similarities between the two, there’s one very large difference that cannot be ignored: you can build stuff in Fortnite.
Owing to its heritage as a PvE survival game, Fortnite gives every player a pickaxe that can be used to harvest materials from the surrounding environment. Whack a tree and get some wood, hit some stone and get some… stone. You get the idea. Farming resources takes away from scrounging for weapons, but those resources can be used to build fortifications, structures, and defenses against every other player in the game.
You can also build a ramp. A very large ramp.
In a strategy dubbed “Stairway to Heaven”, players grab as much wood as they can and then build a ramp as far as the game allows, which turns out to be pretty far. This gives the players an unobstructed bird’s-eye view of the playing field below - far, far below.
RELATED: PUBG VS FORTNITE - WHAT SHOULD GAMERS PLAY
The downside is pretty obvious. If a player looks up and spots the bizarre stairway leading to nowhere, they can shoot the base planks and cause the whole thing to collapse, sending the heavenly player straight down to… that other place.
Actually, there’s tons of downsides. In order to grab enough wood you have to forgo looking for armaments, and this leaves the player quite vulnerable should they be confronted by an opponent. There’s also the problem of the shrinking circle, which can catch a player out of bounds if they don’t have a degree in civil engineering.
Really, the whole thing seems ridiculous. There haven’t been any confirmed winners by way of this strategy, and it all seems like a goofy way to lose. But then again, finding new and interesting ways to have fun is half the reason people play Battle Royale games in the first place.
And keep in mind, Fortnite: Battle Royale is only a few months old. There’s sure to be even wackier cases of engineering gone wrong in the not-too-distant future.