Fortnite’s Zero Build mode is bringing people back to the game

theverge.com:

Fortnite’s latest season kicked off a big shakeup: developer Epic Games removed building, perhaps the game’s most iconic feature, from the core battle royale modes. It was a risky move that had the potential to lessen interest in the game. Instead, it appears to have had the opposite effect — especially for some big streamers.

Not everyone was on board with what Epic now calls Zero Build mode right away. “Initially, I hated it and I was absolutely furious,” Michael “The Fierce Diva” Reynolds, a Facebook Gaming streamer, told me in an interview. “Since I play the game so much, the way people would assess my skill is due to how I build and edit and things of that nature. But my movement and all that stuff, I’m not so good at it.”

Reynolds wasn’t the only one. “I thought I was initially going to hate it,” Twitch streamer Ali “SypherPK” Hassan told me. “I thought maybe I would make a couple of videos about it and then move back to the normal building mode.”

But both have since come around. “Once I got used to the way you would move around the map without the builds, I had a lot of respect and appreciation for it,” Reynolds said. “I’ve been having such a great time playing that game,” Hassan said. It’s not just those two; I’ve seen a lot of streamers who hadn’t been playing much Fortnite, like DrLupo, TimTheTatman, Nickmercs, and Tfue, jumping into the game once again.

Removing building also makes the game more approachable, Hassan argued. “Fortnite was slowly becoming inaccessible for new players,’’ he said. “Anybody who was interested in playing semi seriously was just getting destroyed by people with years of experience in building and editing.” You just need to watch a bit of Fortnite’s official competitive matches to