Fortnite’s new season shows just how much the game has changed

theverge.com:

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

This weekend, I experienced something that I hadn’t in quite some time: a queue to play Fortnite. The long-running battle royale hit players with a dose of nostalgia in its latest season — called Fortnite OG — which brings back the game’s original map for the next month. Players have shown up in droves; developer Epic claims that Saturday was the biggest in the game’s history, with more than 44 million players. Amid all of the reminiscing that comes from dropping back into Tilted Towers or drinking an entire Chug Jug, the new season also helped me realize just how far the game has come over the years.

Going back to the original map is a pretty big deal for Fortnite. This is a game that constantly speeds ahead without looking back. When a new island comes into the game, the previous one simply disappears. Sometimes there’s nostalgia in the form of returning characters or weapons, but Fortnite OG is something else entirely. It’s sort of like the battle royale version of World of Warcraft Classic.

What’s especially notable is that this season of Fortnite is bringing players back to a simpler time, when it wasn’t obvious that all of this change was inevitable. No one had any idea that the original island would get sucked into a black hole. We were all just along for the very strange ride of bouncy lakes, erupting volcanoes, rolling cubes, alien runes, and dimension-shattering rockets. All of these weird moments were a chance for Epic to experiment with a new kind of storytelling in the game, and honestly, playing Fortnite OG has made me realize how