Building Is Back In Fortnite

Two weeks after it was removed—or to put it another way, a fortnight after it was removed—building is back in Fortnite: Battle Royale. Play any of the regular modes and you’ll once again be susceptible to someone who has mastered the editing tools instantly putting you in a box then deleting a wall just long enough to shotgun your face off.

However, what’s being called Zero Build mode remains in the menu as an option. “Play Your Way”, says the tweet announcing the new status quo. “Sprint, climb, and smash your way to a Victory Royale whether you choose to build up in Fortnite Battle Royale or go no-builds in the new Fortnite Zero Build.”

The building-free version of Fortnite was snuck inside the mega-popular battle royale within the Trojan horse of an update for Chapter 3, Season 2, part of the backstory involving an invasion of the island by the reality auditors of the Imagined Order. I’m not sure if there’s a similar layer of story to go with its return, for all I know it’ll be explained in an upcoming spin-off comic featuring a team-up between Iron Man and Tiny Tina.

Morgan Park will be pleased to see Zero Build mode remain, as he stopped playing Fortnite when, as he memorably put it, “Firefights stopped looking like two people shooting guns and more like dueling carpentry sorcerers competing to make the tallest pile of garbage.” Fortnite is better without the forts, he wrote, while praising the new movement mechanics that appeared in the absence of construction wizardry.

“Players now run faster by default and can sprint in short bursts. I love Fortnite’s sprint, partially because the animation has a lot of personality and detail, but also because it heavily cuts down the time I’m running across fields of grass. Ditto for the new slide and mantling abilities ripped straight out of an FPS—navigating Fortnite’s colorful towns and rolling hills is now easy and fun.”

Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He’s written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was published in 2015, he edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and actually did play every Warhammer videogame.