YMMV / Fortnite

In General

• Adaptation Displacement: When someone talks about Fortnite, it is mostly referred to the Battle Royale mode. The original Save the World mode has to use the subtitle to distinguish itself ^note This is a common problem in the official subreddits, as trolls would make posts about how Battle Royale sucks but actually post it on "r/FORTnITE" rather than on "r/FortNiteBR".
• Awesome Music:
  • The somewhat-audible Battle Bus rave music, which gets you pumped up to drop onto the island and whoop some ass.
  • The End Event, a dramatic piece that turns bombastic as the Visitor and his counterparts attempts to contain the Zero Point through the same meteor that crashed him onto the island in the first place, before it turns surprisingly peaceful after the singularity swallows the entire Fortnite universe.
  • "Ruckus" by Konata Small. An badass and bopping rap that plays as you fall down the new island in Chapter 2. Its as epic as it sounds.
  • Final Showdown, the music played during the battle between Mecha Team Leader and the Devourer. A brilliant, thrilling piece that wouldn't be out of place in a movie soundtrack.
  • The Device event's music, befitting the dramatic climax of an epic spy movie when Midas finally puts his plan into action...
  • Many of the Lobby music songs that Battle Royale has released are delightful, including I'm A Cat, Orbital Overload, Sparkles, Butter Barn Hoedown, and Sunny's Song.
  • With Fortnitemares 2021 and Season 8 comes the Queen's Anthem, the absolutely glorious Disney-level Villain Song for the Cube Queen, ruler of all the Cube entities.
  • From Save the World, the "Stand And Fight" music video unlocked by beating the Storm King.
  • The Game Awards trailer for LEGO Fortnite features an orchestral cover of "Any Way You Want It" that's far more uplifting and epic than it has any right to be.
  • Swim Free, Poseidon's Bragging Theme Tune about his rule over the oceans and his love for all sea creatures, is as majestic as it is campy - and provides an incredible Call-Back to longtime players with bits from Coral Chorus mixed in.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Prior to the reworked Hero Loadout, the Shuriken Masters (Sarah and Llamurai) were often placed as Support Bonuses for their 20% boost in ability damage towards heroes.
  • Survivalist Jonesy is a common supporting Hero in the new Hero Loadout for the ability of regaining health after eliminating enemies. This practically replaces the Adrenaline Rush and allows the player to use other gadgets.
  • Gas Traps, Wall Launchers, Wall Dynamos, Broadsides, and Floor Spikes ^note Only used for slowing down Husks rather than damage; Uncommon Spikes are preferred to reduce resource cost are the most common traps placed as it's the most efficient in stalling and damaging Husks. The others are either situational, require many resources, or are outclassed.
  • According to Epic, one reason for the pump shotgun's removal was due to the weapon contributing to over a quarter of eliminations in default playlists. The next weapon wasn't even close.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The female Constructors. It's almost impossible to watch any videos on the game without at least one comment calling them "extra thicc". The fact that they, like all hero characters, come in four ethnicities is also a plus.
  • BASE Kyle (male Constructor) is also proving popular amongst the fanbase.
  • The most popular default outfit in Battle Royale is Jonesy (the blond, white guy who, like other default outfits, is not named in Battle Royale despite being the same character from STW). Most memes that involve a default outfit use him, and he's one of the only defaults that people call by name.
  • A lot of skins in Battle Royale also get this despite being renamed versions of the STW soldier heroes. Examples include skins like Raven, The Reaper, Leviathan, Brite Bomber, Teknique, Sun Strider, and Zoey.
  • The unseen Bus Driver is also popular, and an update allows the players to thank them before dropping off.
  • From the "Door to Darkness" STW Halloween event, Willow, a hilariously snarky ghost who can switch from a voice similar to Ray to Voice of the Legion at the drop of a hat, has proven incredibly popular with the STW crowd, and even appears later in the winter (Season's Hauntings) and summer (Yarr Returns) questlines.
  • The GHOST and SHADOW Henchmen, who were the original Mooks on the map in Chapter 2, Seasons 2 and 3. Since then, a pair of Henchmen from each faction have been spending their time emoting and partying together. Fans have grown to enjoy seeing where the two end up each season, and it got to the point where they got added as skins in the game, to the joy of many players.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the other popular 100-player battle royale shooter.
  • The game is a also target of hate from players of Epic's other free-to-play titles, Paragon (2016) (shut down six months after Fortnite's release due to a quickly-dwindling playerbase) and the fourth Unreal Tournament (hasn't been updated since Fortnite released, and eventually confirmed to have too much of its staff dedicated to Fortnite to continue updating), who accuse the game of apparently stealing players and development time/resources away from them.
    • Especially Unreal fans, thanks to how the development of the Unreal Engine 4 iteration of the Unreal Tournament has been put on an indefinite hold, often blamed to how the team is more committed to Fortnite. This animosity skyrocketed when Epic doubled down and stopped selling the entire Unreal franchise in January 2023 everywhere, leaving the only way to acquire any of the titles if they weren't purchased before the removal to third-party resellers, leaving a sour taste in many an Unreal fan's mouth in the process.
  • Apex Legends. Of all the battle royale games released since 2017, Apex has become the biggest competitor to Fortnite in both userbase and Twitch views.
  • Call of Duty: Warzone, Call of Duty's version of a battle royale that has a massive contrast in art style compared to Fortnite.
  • The "Minecraft good, Fortnite bad" meme evolved into a contest to show how one game was superior over the other based off of views. During Season X at the height of furor over the BRUTE mechs, some Fortnite streamers switched to playing Minecraft to show their displeasure over the game's changes.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Many weapons have received all manner of nicknames:
    • The burst assault rifle is typically just shortened to "burst". The remaining four assault rifles are referred to as their real-life counterparts, being the M16, SCAR, FAMAS, and AK, and the Drum Gun is simply referred to as the Tommygun.
    • The first three shotguns types are classified as pumps (pump-actions), tacs (tacticals), and heavies/assault shotties (heavy shotguns, the latter part being added due to several other weapons getting "heavy" variations). The remaining shotgun, the double barrel, is usually interchanged with the name "sawed-off".
    • Snipers are divided between bolts (bolt-action), semis (semi-automatic), and hunting (hunting rifles, natch). Heavy snipers are usually called just that due to the other "heavy" weapons.
    • The alternate title of the Hand Cannon is the Deagle.
  • Every now and then the acronyms can pass for a legit term - the Semi-Auto Sniper Rifle becomes SAS Rifle (referencing the British special forces), and the Thermal Scoped Assault Rifle becomes the TSA Rifle (since the actual TSA also uses thermal imaging).
  • The named locations are simply shortened to their first word.
  • The unnamed Battle Royale island is sometimes called "Athena" coming from the location's in-game file name.
    • Likewise, the Chapter 2 Island is often referred to as "Apollo" due to it being its codename in the files.
  • Most of the unnamed landmarks in Chapter 1 had nicknames, due to the game not providing one;
    • Motel is usually called just that.
    • The large hole in the ground east of Motel is Umbrella (which was actually used by Epic in a "treasure hunt" weekly mission).
    • The location with RVs northeast of Retail Row can be some variation of "Trailers", "Campsite", or "Trailer Park".
    • The skull-faced building on the mountain northeast of Snobby Shores is typically "villain base".
    • The Viking mountain has gained traction as "Valhalla".
    • The area filling with shipping containers west of Lonely Lodge can go by "crates", "boxes", or "shipping".
    • The southeast area full of houses between the truck stop and Paradise Palms is commonly known as Mexico.
    • The athletic area just west of Tilted Towers is mostly Rec Center.
    • The other factory northeast of Flush Factory had multiple names, including Second Factory and Yonder Yard.
  • The rarity variants are referred to by what color they are, rather than their actual names (Rare/blue, Epic/purple, etc.)
  • Any of the various default outfits are typically called "noskins". In the inverse, the various skins are categorized by the model type using the Soldier-class names from Save the World.
  • Dance Moves is simply called the "default dance".
  • When it comes to outfits, "The Reaper" is almost universally known as John Wick by the players, likely because that's exactly who he's supposed to be.
  • Clingers are often just "stickies".
  • Due to the Auto Mod in the Fortnite subreddit removing posts with the word "cube" in the title, the community began referring to the large purple cube as "Kevin" as a workaround. The name stuck among players, later becoming an Ascended Meme with the "Li'l Kev" back bling received through a challenge after the cube's destruction.
    • After the cube entered Loot Lake and turned the water into a semi-solid "bouncer" mass, the cube was also referred to as the "cosmic jello crystal". There's some Fridge Brilliance here as the cube is later shown growing upwards through the island, rather like real crystals do.
  • The subreddit also dubbed the east coast racetrack "Gus" due to the fact that if you turn your head 90 degrees to the left, it appears to say that.
  • Sometimes they mimic the alliterative naming from the game - the peak in the middle of the map, where the storm tends to close in on, is often called Melee Mountain due to the close quarters shitstorm already brewing there.
  • The game itself is called "fork-knife" by some, mostly because it sounds silly. It's also been given a nod by Epic Games, although more subtlety: the Major's artificial hand is armed with a fork and knife, and the Battle Royale mode has a food truck named Fork Knife. And with the introduction of Dual Wielding pickaxes, one of the custom replacements for them is a huge fork and knife.
  • After Wendy's did a stream where they wore the Fable skin and destroyed the Durr Burger restaurant and their frozen beef, a few took to calling Fable "Wendy".
  • The Infinity Blade is usually just called "sword". Due to its similarity to Thanos from the May 2018 Thanos limited-time mode, its name sharing "Infinity" with the Infinity Gauntlet, and the "add Thanos's name to anything" meme, it also goes by "Thanos Sword" sometimes.
  • Players on Asian servers for Save the World may have noticed the Japanese players referring to TEDDY as "Kuma-chan". Less widespread would be the Lobber being called "Marie Kondo", since both are notable females known for throwing something...
• Game-Breaker:
  • Save the World:
    • The Dim Mak team perk with a pure (or nearly pure) Ninja loadout can make a player virtually invincible. The perk may not seem like much (2.7% shield regen per second while in Shadow Stance per ninja in your support team), but note the per ninja in the description, meaning with 5 ninjas you're getting about 13.5% shield per second and 10.8% per second with 4 ninjas - in practice with four or five ninjas, it regenerates so much of your shield that as long as you're in Shadow Stance, you will rarely if ever run out of shields, making it significantly more survivable to just rush in with a melee weapon and go ham on the Husks. Oh, there is a reason why you may want to not do a pure ninja team - put Survivalist Jonesy on your support team to get his Survivalist perk (aka being able to restore 39 base health over three second every time you eliminate a Husk), and suddenly you're able to restore both health and shields just by doing what you're regularly doing in combat.
    • In fact, Survivalist Jonesy himself is basically a requirement for combat-focused builds. Warden Kyle is also a useful support for providing consistent healing without the need to put down specific healing traps, letting builders stay out of sight and heal while their traps do most of the work, provided they had the right setup.
    • Commando Spitfire is easily the most powerful solider in the game, as his commander perk lets him use Going Commando extremely frequently if he's your lead, and when paired with Sargent Jonesy (an additional 5 seconds of time with the minigun,) and Diecast Jonesy (25% more minigun damage,) you can pull out a weapon that effectively uses no ammo, quickly destroys husks and mist monsters alike, effectively every 20 seconds. The only problem with Going Commando is that your movement is slowed and you can't pick up items while it's out, and if you pull it out by accident, you'll just have to wait until it wears off.
    • Rescue Trooper Ramirez (More damage from all assault weapons,) and Stars And Stripes Jonesy (Chance for shots from all assault weapons to not use ammo,) makes for a very powerful combo, as it can make it to where you don't have to reload as often during waves for weapons you do more damage with. On top of making room for the aforementioned Minigun loadout.
    • The Founder's Revolt is locked at the Epic rating, but it can chain bullets to the closest Husk with higher damage output. Aim it at a heftier Husk and those surrounding it will vanish before the main target does.
    • There was a time when there was a specific combination of Wargames types that would just make it extremely easy with the right build - Denied (which spawns rifts all over the place that do damage to nearby players) and Husk Swarm (which only spawns regular but empowered Husks). However, with the right Constructor build (a Power Base Constructor, plus Fully Contained, Electrified Floors and Lofty Architecture at least) allowed for players to just place their B.A.S.E. in one specific spot that covers every structure the Husks will focus on, stand in one place, and just watch the regular husks destroy themselves by walking on and attacking structures, only to basically be completely unable to do enough damage to actually break through anything by the time the wave ends, as the structures just continuously heal and have too much health to break down anyway. Epic ended up removing Husk Swarm outright, as it was so easy to cheese.
  • Battle Royale:
    • One that was later patched: double pumping. When switching to a pump action shotgun, you used to be able to fire it immediately. Combine that with a second pump action and you could fire, then switch to the other one to bypass the pumping animation, basically increasing the rate of fire exponentially for free. Considering a green^note updates later changed the white and green pumps to green and blue. pump action shotgun to the head could do 200 damage, this was a pretty big deal. However, later patches forced a pumping animation whenever you pull out a pump action, nerfing the strategy to the ground...only for it to return in early Season 4 due to the shotgun swapping animation still being faster than pumping the shotgun. Season 5 nerfed the strategy below the ground by forcing the player to wait about 2 whole seconds to be able to shoot a second shotgun after shooting a first shotgun and switching to the other.
    • Boogie Bombs. When thrown at a safe distance from the player to an opponent, they are unable to retaliate against you for a few seconds, giving you an opening to kill them. This was balanced by the fact that the bombs could only spawn in stacks of one, but the Getaway update buffed it so they spawn in stacks of two and one inventory slot can hold ten.
    • The Drum Gun/Tommygun, with its beefy 50 round clip, decent damage, moderate accuracy, good fire rate, and high range, became the new face of the maligned spray and pray Metagame during late Season 5 after the heavy nerfs to the SMG and Compact SMG. Season 6 vaulted it. And then players voted to unvault it at the end of Season 8, only to be reminded of why it was vaulted in the first place, and Epic nerfed it. Could've been worse, one of the other unvaulting options was the Infinity Blade.
    • Spike Traps, which is why they're such a Scrappy Mechanic. Chapter 2: Season 2 pretty much vaulted them for good as they haven't been in the main modes since even many seasons later.
    • An intentional, limited time one is the Infinity Gauntlet from the Battle Royale mode, as it turns you into Thanos. Yes, you read that right- THAT Thanos. Doing so allows you jump around the map with abandon, and bestows upon you three extremely strong powers, making you borderline unstoppable. Better yet, killing a Thanos causes the Gauntlet to drop, turning YOU into Thanos if you pick it up. While the change is irreversible, getting the Gauntlet during the last few minutes of a round can turn an unlucky game into a pathetically easy one.
    • If you get a Scoped Assault Rifle, you have what is basically a sniper rifle with a high magazine capacity and a fairly common ammo type (as opposed to the Heavy Bullets necessitated by proper sniper rifles). A Thermal Scoped Assault Rifle is even more powerful, as it lets you more easily see enemies and, on the iOS version, has a surprising amount of aim assist.
    • Another trap has rivaled the infamy of spike traps, Mounted Turrets. While the trap will root the gunner in place, facing it head on is suicide, because it has almost no falloff, hits as hard as a Heavy AR but shoots as fast as a minigun, and from the front, the gun can block headshots. Positioning is key to getting rid of turrets, since they turn a little slowly.
    • Dynamite. It's rather telling when it got temporarily disabled within an hour of its release. While one piece of dynamite can't kill an unshielded player, it has an absolutely insane blast radius. One or two sticks can demolish entire buildings instantly. Then again, it takes a while to go off and they've later included the option to throw it back where it came.
    • Season 7 gave us the completely broken Infinity Blade. Its various abilities included destroying structures in a single swing, allowing players to leap huge distances, killing other players in three swings, doubling health and shields to 200 each, granting regenerating health as well as health for kills, and running faster than everyone else. Due to giving the player increased speed, ridiculous defence and power, and having no easy counter, the sword barely survived 4 days in the game before Epic released their mistake and just vaulted the thing instead, rather than trying to balance it.
    • Right at the beginning of Season 10, a new vehicle was introduced in the form of a Mini-Mecha entitled B.R.U.T.E. The amount of firepower it has is ridiculous; it fires 10 lock on missiles at once that rip through structures with ease, and it still has an automatic shotgun on top of that. It comes with 1000 health, and can sacrifice materials for a burst of invincibility to the player, which isn't a trade-off at all considering the mech can get mats just by walking into structures and destroying them, rendering it essentially indestructible. It also has a leap reminiscent of the Infinity Blade, build-eating and all.
    • While not a huge game-breaker, a few cosmetics have provided an unintentional advantage either due to a bug or from an overlooked aspect of the item. An early example of the latter being the Toy Soldier outfits since the green variant's color was very similar to the grass', providing an unintentional camouflage bonus. Epic eventually updated the skin to be more noticeable in any environment (while also offering refunds to anyone unhappy with the new design of the skins).
    • The outfits from the Boundless set (commonly referred to as "the superhero skins") feature a myriad of customization ranging from the suit pattern to the sticker featured on the suit. Despite all the options given, it isn't uncommon to see players use the full mask style donning two of the same colors as a way of camouflage. This became more notable when players started using an all-black and all-white style in order to blend in darker and lighter environments easily, concerning players who then called the outfits pay-to-win. Due to this, Epic had to disable the ability to use an all-black or all-white style and banned the outfits from competitive play. Even with these changes, the outfits still get comments about being pay-to-win.
    • On the bug side, the Dragon Rune Lance and the Riot Control Baton pickaxes both had an instance that made the wearer's footsteps quiet when equipped, causing them to be disabled temporarily.
    • Chapter 5 brings with it the Frenzy Auto Shotgun, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: an automatic-firing, magazine-fed shotgun that can burst down anyone who gets in shotgun range at expense of a long reload time and doesn't need much aiming if used right. Many encounters can easily be decided by whether someone is carrying the Frenzy or not, as it simply trumped any other gun when fully loaded in close-quarters thanks to being able to kill within its small magazine, though missing any shots without a Drum Mag attachment might get you trouble. And this gets even worse if someone defeated the Oscar boss, acquiring his Mythic version with full weapon mods and absurd damage. Season 2's response (after four months of Broken Base) was to make the weapon grossly ineffective outside of point-blank ambushes, stripping it of its sheer versatility as the dominating shotgun.
    • Similarly to above, the Reaper Sniper Rifle in Chapter 5 is easily the source of most of the rest of the Broken Base about the Chapter. With a common version, a single body shot can do upwards to 121 damage, shattering Overcharge Shields and devastating most of a player's health bar if they haven't had time to get any extra shields on top, and the damage only gets nastier with each tier upgrade it gets, though thankfully it has no Mythic equivalent. If it lands a headshot, that's invariably a One-Hit Kill, breaking full health, full shields and overcharge in one fell swoop. Then weapon mods come into the equation; despite being a bolt-action rifle, the Reaper has 3 shots to a magazine, but the Drum Mag can extend that to five shots, and if you place a Suppressor on top, even players using visual indicators for audio can't track your shots besides damage direction if the first shot doesn't kill. You can also get a Thermal Scope that handily highlights targets in the open. All of this on a wide open map for the chapter where a sniper has endless opportunities for taking out players before they even see it coming. The developers took multiple opportunities to nerf its drop rate, effectively making it a Rare or Legendary-only gun which decreases the sheer number of them around, but if someone survives to the end of a match, there's a good chance they have this gun still and they only need one good shot to send a target into a panic or outright eliminate them.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • A silly glitch surfaced in early August 2018, coinciding with the launch of the Beef Boss skin. It caused any flowing clothing pieces, such as Valor, Zoey, and Huntress's skirts, Raven's feathered cloak, and Drift's Stage 4 cloak, to break. They were still present, and were attached to the character, but failed to animate properly or move with the character, resulting in silly things like crouching and having a dislocated part of your clothing floating above you, or doing a dance and having part of your clothes stay in place.
  • Season 6 had a bug where you could permanently turn invisible by dying while picking up a Shadow Stone. Normally this wouldn't matter since Permadeath is in play, but in respawn-enabled modes like Disco Domination and Playground, you would respawn while invisible, with the only drawback being an inability to use your pickaxe to harvest materials.
  • When Season 7 introduced ziplines, they had a bit of a rough start, and their physics did some weird stuff if you dared to build near them, such as sending you flying clear across the map.
  • An occasional update would reintroduce a glitch where Save the World characters appeared in the Battle Royale lobby and were able to emote. Before the Locker was implemented Save the World in Season X, this was usually the next best thing.
• I Knew It!: With the addition of Ryu and Chun Li from Street Fighter in chapter 2 season 5, fans familiar with the lore immediately projected Guile and Cammy as the next ones, since they were military personnel more appropriate to a FPS game than martial artists. Sure enough, they were added 2 seasons later.
• More Popular Spin-Off:
  • The Battle Royale mode is much more popular than the original Save The World mode, to the point that it helped increase the number of Fortnite players to 7 million. It's considered an interesting alternative to other games in the battle royale genre because of its free-to-play model, construction mechanic, and colorful stylized art style. This has lead to some displacement however, as some people aren't even aware that Fortnite's base mode exists (despite it literally being on the main menu right next to the BR mode). It's gotten to the point that after the demise of Paragon, the Save the World community feared they'd be next, but Epic has said they still plan to support that mode long-term, and have backed up their words with continued major patches and new events.
  • Battle Royale mode itself got this when 50v50 v2 debuted during Season 3. Despite being a limited time game mode, it was available for a month when most special gamemodes don't even get a whole week to themselves, lasted through the end of Season 3, came back early in the start of Season 4 for a few more weeks of mayhem, and then returned as 50v50 v3 in the middle of the season, compared to other limited time modes which usually only appear once per season, if they even appear at all. Eventually, 50V50 became Soaring 50s, which resulted in the mode’s popularity increasing even more.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The Cube Monsters look and act threatening, until you realize they can be affected by Boogie Bombs. They'll dance in the same choreographed manner as a regular player would. The Husks in Save the World can also dance.
  • The Loot Sharks are scary, and very dangerous. They are also a VEHICLE, one that you can equip by using a fishing rod and getting them to bite the lure. Stylish surfer music plays as you ride them.
  • Klombos are giant, intimidating dinosaurs with razor-sharp teeth and are impossible to kill via normal means, and can devour almost anything. They're also completely passive so long as you don't attack them, and get the most adorable look on their faces when they spot one of their favorite berries.
• Not-So-Cheap Imitation: Not long after the release of Save The World, "Fortnite" released a free to play Battle Royale mode as a response to the popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. However, not only did the Battle Royale mode boost downloads for Fortnite, it even surpassed PUBG in popularity, much to Blue Hole's dismay. Jim Sterling addressed the possible causes including Fortnite being free to play, lacking the bugs that affected PUBG, and having a style that gave it more of an identity.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The default dance that anyone can do? Not a Fortnite original; it came from Scrubs. To a lesser extent, this applies to the majority of the game's emotes, which are typically generalized as "Fortnite dances" by people but are actually based off of various different sources.
  • Save the World was released a couple of months before Battle Royale. Even then, the former mode was in Development Hell since its teaser trailer in 2011.
  • Epic Games as a whole is uncommonly referred as an upstarting or indie company. The company is known for their Unreal Engine and their development of games since the 1990s such as Jazz Jackrabbit, Unreal Tournament, Infinity Blade, and Gears of War.
  • The popular Battle Pass feature that many other multiplayer games have implemented following its success in Fortnite actually originated in Dota 2 as early as 2013. The term "Battle Pass" was coined three years later.
• Polished Port: The PS4 and Xbox One versions are this, especially compared to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' Xbox One version being a notorious Porting Disaster. It runs at 60 fps even on the base model versions of both systems, with the only noticeable drops being when the player skydives onto the map. It's probably not surprising that Epic Games knows how to optimize their own engine.
• Porting Disaster: Despite the Polished Port of Battle Royale for consoles, the same cannot be said for Save the World. Plagued with latency issues, bugs, and way-too-frequent crashes, it's no surprise that Epic Games stated in a Reddit post that priorities have shifted entirely to optimizing the game on all platforms before adding new content.
• The Scrappy:
  • In terms of locations, Coral Castle. Located in the top east corner of the map, its location and its geography as well as the lack of chests make it an unpopular POI. Since it's beneath sea level, the only way out is either up the waterfalls (which is impossible if you don't have a boat to speed through them, or alternatively, you could build, but that would require harvesting a lot of materials first) or the islands surrounding it (since the POI is in the corner, the only island you'll want to go is the one closest to Sweaty Sands/Believer Beach and the Stealthy Stronghold, but it might as well be a bottleneck for other players to kill you since it's essentially the only exit). Also not helped that in Chapter 2 Season 5, it would be spawn-guarded by IO Guards, and in Chapter 2 Season 7, the most popular island for escaping would be protected by a hostile RPG/explosives-wielding NPC.
  • There is some hate for the survivors who won't let you rescue them unless you locate their medkits which are located in inexplicable locations sometimes on the other side of the map. Not only is this an annoying Fetch Quest in a Fetch Quest, but the game gives no reason for why they need it. Plus surely your base would have plenty of medical supplies?
  • Lars for some. All the time you're running around the map or defending him, he just sits there in his van doing absolutely nothing.
  • Guggimon is mostly seen as this due to his creators, Superplastic, being supporters of the widely controversial NFTs, and to a lesser extent, the exorbitant prices for their simplistic vinyl collection figures.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Save the World:
    • One that was later patched; some Constructor and Outlander abilities, such as the B.A.S.E, TEDDY and Shock Towers are classed as buildings by the game. If you happened to spawn into someone's Storm Shield defense and build permissions were disabled (which were most likely were) then your abilities were unusable.
    • Outlanders especially, some of their abilities require Charge Fragments as well as energy, and the only way to find those are by exploring the map. Meaning that should you run out during the defense phases then you'll be forced to abandon the defense to find more. Good luck if your allies have not marked them for you too. Not only does the game not justify this, but you can't mark them yourself either (unless you run really close by). Oh and you can only carry two of them at a time as well. This was updated so that abilities only require energy, become available again after a cooldown, and the fragments are used to reduce the cooldown timer.
    • Defenders. Not only are they really poor shots, but they require you to provide them weapons, they also will burn through your durability. You also have to give them ammo as well, not so good if you're playing a lot of Storm Shield defenses and you run out of crafting materials. Thankfully they are not compulsory (and you can use them only if the session has fewer than a full set of four players in it).
    • Loot Llamas, they are the only way to gain new equipment and character cards. Except the loot generated is random. The upgrade Llamas won't drop anything useful unless they turn into silver or gold. The Founders Llamas and Special Llamas require more V-Bucks or special founders coins. Plus the supply of V-Bucks becomes less as you progress through the story, meaning you'll have to start paying real life money for a chance to advance. This was fixed later by introducing X-Ray Llamas which provide the player in advance what rarity and cards they're going to get before purchasing one.
    • Random Drone Salvage missions, in which you are suddenly called to a random spot on the map with little to no time to prepare (if you're very fast or lucky, you might get to set up four walls after it crashes (anything you set up beforehand will get destroyed in the crash itself)) for a sizable Husk assault that immediately spawns right on top of you. And by random we mean that they'll even spawn during missions where you're already defending an objective (Weather Balloon, Lar's Van etc.).
    • Progress to a new location is based on clearing Storm Shield Defenses and not through a main storyline. High-leveled players are miffed that lower-leveled players can be carried through all of them by their teammates and reach Twine Peaks very underleveled and underprepared.
  • Battle Royale:
    • A popular cheesing tactic was the "double pump", where a player would grab two pump action shotguns, put them right next to each other in their inventory slots, and would immediately switch between each one after firing a shot in order to bypass the slow rate of fire the pump action normally has. This became so infamous among the playerbase for the Battle Royale mode that Epic nerfed it with the version 3.0 update, making it so that you always automatically pump the shotgun when you pull it out. However, this tactic later made a resurgence in Season 4, and was met with the same level of ire. Season 5 buried this strategy by drastically increasing the time it takes to shoot a second shotgun after firing the first and swapping.
    • Spike Traps. They deal 150 damage (originally 125) in a game mode where you can only have 200 health tops, can be placed on almost any wall, floor, or ceiling (and failing that, people can make their own surface for it), and the (team of the) person who placed the trap is not affected by it, which very easily lends itself to camping in locations peppered with Spike Traps. Some people also like to leave them in random houses or other buildings, potentially costing somebody three quarters of their health just because they didn't look both ways before entering. Additionally, since traps only have one second of delay between placing and triggering, many people love to use them to win fights due to the fact that the opponent gets roughly half a second to react or get skewered for most of their health; they either try to bust the trap and get shot, try to escape and get shot or stabbed, or try to win the gunfight in the half second before the trap decimates them.
    • Bloom. Basically, it's a completely RNG mechanic that causes your shots to fly off on non-straight trajectories. This means it's entirely possible to lose a gunfight through no fault of your own because you kept rolling bad RNG and shot circles around your enemy, whereas they got good RNG and hit nearly all of their shots. A later patch made during Season 3 partially fixed the problem by guaranteeing you a 100% Bloom-less shot for several weapons, including assault rifles, pistols, and Hand Cannons, if you were standing still while aiming down the sights and hadn't shot in the last few seconds. In comparison, other Battle Royale games, especially PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, has recoil based spread.
    • Before Season 6, being able to play with a mouse and keyboard combo on console. A keyboard player could completely break the meta of console players by being able to quickly outbuild them with hotkeys and having a much simpler time aiming right where they want with the mouse. The problem came in when people realized that despite being able to choose to play with only console players and not PC players, they could still get matched up against people playing PC control schemes anyway. Mercifully, the Switch doesn't have keyboard or mouse control support, instead limiting the use of the keyboard to chat, and the start of Season 6 made it so that keyboard console players could only play with others using the same control scheme.
    • Before Sony allowed cross-play between the other consoles for the game, those who got the Switch port were displeased to find out that if they tied their Epic Games account to a PlayStation Network account (to play on PS4), they could not use their Epic Games account on Switch. It went the other way too: linking your Epic Games account to your Switch disabled you from using your account to play on PS4.
    • At around the start of Season 3, the game suddenly started building further away from the player for seemingly no reason, often leading to scenarios such as trying to climb a mountain, only for the game to build your piece inside the mountain where it's completely worthless, or attempting to build a wall between you and your enemy in a gunfight and having the game build behind your enemy instead, or having to take 5 seconds to fill a single hole in a fort at ground level when you're looking right at the hole.
    • At some point in Season 4, players suddenly gained the ability to go through build pieces if they were in the construction area when the player started building, instead of being forced out of the build zone as they were in prior versions. This can be a problem when building meets combat, with players jumping clear through walls to kill their enemies.
    • The tilt controls on the Switch version, though well-liked, do have a bit of a quirk in that yawing (rotating along the Z-axis, like you're turning a car) requires you to roll (rotate along the X axis, like you're barrel rolling) the controller. The idea seems to be to mimic a steering wheel, but the disconnect between input and result can be jarring, especially in handheld mode. There is an option in the settings to switch between yaw and roll turning, which tends to be useful if you switch between handheld and TV play a lot.
    • The Primal POIs in Chapter 2 Season 6, while initially interesting, eventually became this, due to the things of worth there being the bone ingredients needed for crafting Primal weapons, which are seen as Scrappy Weapons for their longer reload times and lesser accuracy than their normal Mechanical counterparts — which you could craft by harvesting for gear ingredients at the normal POIs.
    • Supply Llamas became Animate Inanimate Objects from Chapter 2 Season 7 to Chapter 4 Season 4, requiring players to damage them in order to unlock their rewards. Although they drop more building materials and healing items now, the sound of weapons firing will inevitably draw the attention of nearby enemy players. There's also the fact that it's virtually impossible to open one with only your harvest tool, often making a player who spots a llama very early in the game feel unlucky rather than lucky.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer:
  • It's very easy for players to get side-tracked by going creatively crazy with the build-mode to try to go about constructing some crazy objects, or structures, in both Save the World and Battle Royale mode. Some creations seen amongst =YouTube= videos include making giant ships, airplanes, tanks, UFOs, pyramids, and stadiums for the basketball and soccer fields. The limited-time mode Playgrounds and the Creative supermode allows you to simply take your sweet time building things without worry of the storm or enemies trying to kill you.
  • There are plenty of minigames and other diversions set up around the game world, such as vehicle time trials, balloon popping, soccer, and target practice.
  • Any challenge that requires you to do something you wouldn't otherwise do in the game.
• Signature Song: "Right Foot Creep" by YoungBoy Never Broke Again. The "Get Griddy" emote has been a perennial Top 10 emote since Chapter 3.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Most of the survivors you rescue in Save the World are also the Defenders you arm and deploy, in every combination of gender and weapon type except female bruisers ^note There is a female bruiser named Val, but she was an exclusive Defender for the 2018 "Spring it On!" event. You know some folks will arm the blonde with pigtails with a mallet.
  • Due to a few issues, mainly Adria Arjona being busy with other roles, Ramirez in Save the World disappears from the plot and is replaced by new characters and plotlines. Because of this, her plotline of going to Twine Peaks to save her family was completely discarded and given to a new character.
  • Drift is a human first introduced in Season 5 of Battle Royale that was ostensibly taken from the real world to the Fortnite world. Yet, the possibility of him revealing to the characters that they're in a video game goes completely ignored.
  • In Season 6, the cube that caused Loot Lake Island to lift out of the lake is also growing into the island, with the cube sprouting inside the cave under the house and reaching the house as well - while shooting the actual cube has the usual effect, using your pickaxe on the growing cube material does nothing. Subverted after Loot Lake Island split into pieces, scattering the crystallized cubes all over the island and spawning Cube Monsters.
  • Chapter 2 Season 4 implemented Marvel characters such as Doctor Doom, Mystique, Storm, She-Hulk, and Groot. While the "Devourer of Worlds" event featured a presence from Iron Man, the current Thor, and Wolverine, the others are left as background characters during the final push against Galactus.
  • The Will Smith skin is based on Mike Lowrey from Bad Boys, however, it was released during the alien-themed Chapter 2 Season 7, and many wished it was based on his role in the Men in Black films instead (though it's popularly speculated that Epic did try to collab with it, but couldn't get the rights).
  • The "Kiss Me More" emote is built in on Joy's skin, which on one side of the detractors' aisle, suggests little faith in her skin as it is incentivized with a Doja Cat song. On the other hand, people who aren't negative about Joy's skin just wish that the emote wasn't built-in.
  • Despite being a key member of the Seven, the Foundation doesn't show up at all in Chapter 3, Season 2 until the Collision event, probably because of him being portrayed by Dwayne Johnson.
  • The Herald, the Big Bad of Chapter 3, Season 4, barely felt like she had a presence in the already loose story of the season outside of being a boss on the map. Compared to the Cube Queen, the Big Bad of the Chapter 2 finale, the Herald just comes off as a Generic Doomsday Villain in comparison, and as if that wasn't enough, ends up becoming nothing more than a Cutscene Boss in the Fracture event that concluded Chapter 3 as a whole, much to the disappointment of the player base.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • Update 6.30 was this for the Save the World community, as it gave the game the attention it needed for the months of being overshadowed by the Battle Royale mode.
  • After a controversial tenth season, the version 11.00/Chapter 2 update was this for the Battle Royale community, as it debuted a new map fans had been anticipating for months, streamlined the loot pool (removing items deemed unneccessary or overpowered such as the aforementioned B.R.U.T.E), introduced bots to help lower-level or new players, and finally adding a release to confirm edit button. The game has since seen a resurge in popularity, with the event blackout also contributing.
  • Similarly, the addition of a no-build mode for Battle Royale players dubbed "Zero Build" in the version 20.00/Chapter 3 Season 2 update finally allowed players who are either not fans of the building mechanic or are less skilled at building to play the mode without having to worry about mastering building, resulting in another resurgence of players coming to try out/play the mode.
  • In December 2023, Fortnite had a Big Bang event that revealed three new game modes: LEGO Fortnite, Rocket Racing and Fortnite Festival. This caused the game to reach peak traffic.

Save the World

• Catharsis Factor: Successfully funneling a group of Husks into a trap tunnel and seeing the spam of damage numbers pop up is very satisfying.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Takers are the most annoying Mist Monster to fight as they are fast, can fly, teleport through walls, and deal an absurd amount of damage (sometimes an instant shield break or kill). The only saving grace is they are weak, so a couple of shots of a properly leveled gun will take them down.
  • 'Sploder Husks carry around a large propane tank that effectively destroys any Tier 1 buildings and cripples Tier 2 buildings. The only way to avoid triggering their throwing animation is to stay far away from them which is sometimes difficult due to certain distances between spawns and the main objective, and the players' tendency to go into close quarters. If one eliminates them quickly before they toss the tank, then the propane tank will stay put until a stray bullet from you, your ally, or a defender activates them (though melee attacks can swat them a few feet away before they blow up). Certain updates even have the Lobbers' projectiles activate any left over tanks.
  • Blasters are essentially a souped-up version of Gunslinger Husks (See below in God Damn Bats). Though, Gunslingers can only fire one freakin' laser beam at a time, Blasters have no problem charging an entire Beam Spam to decimate your health and shields. Thankfully, those spams are easy to disrupt with middling firepower. However, like Gunslingers, Blaster lasers cannot be dodged without cover.
  • Shielders come in two flavors, one generates a forcefield around a single Husk and effectively doubles or triples it's health, the other generates a giant forcefield that can cover an area and thus, multiple Husks from your bullets. Thankfully, they are one of the few enemies that can't attack you, but if you aren't skilled enough to shoot them first or shoot them once you've killed The Husk they were shielding, they can and will attach themselves to another Husk to support them.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Lobber Husks. Their typical mode of attack is to throw flaming skulls at your objective from afar, preferably from behind some sort of cover. While Lobbers themselves aren't particularly tough and the projectiles are slow and can be shot out of the sky, the Lobbers' tendency to stay out of range and usually behind walls or cliffs makes them difficult to take out. They also make certain defense missions extremely difficult to solo (such as shelter repairing), as they will wreck your buildings from afar and either make holes in them to let more husks through or just do damage by themselves, meaning you're being assaulted on multiple fronts and have to leave your base to wipe out the lobbers.
  • Riot Huskies for their small hitbox on the front (or relying to dance around them to get a shot), using their shields to push players around, and being a large bullet sponge.
    • Regular Huskies in general can be an annoyance; As they move at the same pace as their thinner counterparts, but dish out and take around two to three times the damage.
  • Beehive Husks are simply the most basic Husk in the game, but they have a beehive on their head that can summon clouds of bees for attack and defence. They aren't too hard to deal with, but bees can dish out damage to you even after you've dealt with the husk.
  • Dwarf Husks are small targets that have the smallest health pool of all The Husks, but they're nimble and can leap to get to locations other Husks can't. That wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also like coming in packs of four or more. Those two factors make them an annoying swarm to deal with.
  • Gunslinger Husks are slightly more powerful and infinitely more tiresome to deal with versions of Pitchers. Like Pitchers, they stay away from you and try to hit you with ranged attacks from afar. Unlike Pitchers, it's impossible to dodge their attack without building cover. They, like Pitchers, also love to come in swarms during a wave.
• Spoiled by the Format: The addition of the BR storm to the STW Retrieve the Data mission meant that the data drop location you'd normally spend half the time hunting for would be in the exact center of the storm circle - given that the mission has a strict time limit, this may have been necessary.
• Nightmare Fuel: In alpha versions of the game, the world map music was really unsettling, filled with beeps, chatter and tuning from radios alongside some not so welcoming music. The offficial release wasn't any better with the llama shop music being a slowed down version of the main menu music which really sets in the post apocalyptic vibe this game was going for.
• That One Level:
  • "Evacuate the Shelter". It's a nightmare when you're doing it solo, even if your defense position is good. You have to construct a base immediately and under a time limit that is short enough that you need to have a full resource count at the start to have a chance of building a base that can hold together well enough since you don't have time to farm, as unlike Data Protection missions, the shelter is a 3x3x2 area that needs covering. This wouldn't be so bad if the swarm that comes to attack your base wasn't overwhelming, significantly more than any other defense mission.
  • "Repair the Shelter" is also a pain to solo. The basic premise is that you and your team, must not only build a fort to defend the 3x3x2 shelter, you must also find 8 construction bots while beating back husk attacks. The problem is that the construction bots are invisible and the only way to find them is to either wander into them or defend See-Bot whenever he chooses to show up. All 8 construction bots take a minute to install on the shelter and there is almost no way to prevent a mini-husk assault on the shelter, in addition to a huge wave as soon as all the bots have been located. Cooperation is essential here, 1 person will basically never be able to do it.
    • Possibly due to the way Save The World is designed around cooperation, Any level that requires defending multiple points at once can be this. Especially if you're playing on your own.
  • It's particularly very brutal to solo the "Vindertech Research Lab" mission in the "I'm Probably Dead" quest in Plankerton. It's pretty much impossible to save all four servers in the titular lab from a six-minute assault from a ruthless army of Husks singlehandedly. One time-consuming way to get past this one is to trash up part of the lab to make room for your own fortifications and traps around one or two of the servers and let the others be destroyed.
  • The Underground Canny quest. You are supposed to find three bunkers. The problem here is that they're not easy to recognize at first and only one of such bunker spawns per mission valid for this quest, meaning that you'll have to spend an hour completing at least three or so missions to clear it.
  • Canny Valley after defeating Blackboot Ayers is a long stretch of tedium. Most of the campaign quests has to be completed in the Ghost Town zones. Not only are there a few zones in the map available to the quest's corresponding player level (even less for specific mission quests), but the player is, more often than not, required to finish more than one mission to complete one quest ^note Was worse in prior versions where collectibles rarely showed up, most notoriously in the "El Jefe" quest. One will be sick of the Ghost Town zone before reaching the Storm King.
  • "Hit The Road" can be seen as this. As not only is it a big Escort Mission, it also starts you off with none of your weapons or traps you would normally use in every other Save The World mission. You have to scavenge for every weapon you get, and the Husks get stronger as you go. The real kicker is that unlike every other mission in Save The World, getting knocked down takes you out of the game until the next sub-mission is completed. If all four players get knocked down, you lose.
  • "What's in the Box?" is notoriously hard to complete as it requires you to eliminate a Mimic, which have very inconsistent spawn rates. What's worse? You need to complete this mission to continue the story, leaving most players stranded in Plankerton, unable to progress.
• Ugly Cute: The Mini Reward Llamas are seen as this due to their droopy eyes and cheerful voice and personality.

Battle Royale and Official LTMs

• Abridged Arena Array:
  • Non-LTM modes can basically be summed up as "80% of players land in Tilted Towers to easily grab weapons and most of them proceed to quickly die off due to the high player density." Seasons 4 and 5 tried to alleviate this by sprucing up the outer regions of the island; Season 4 also made a de-facto nerf to Tilted Towers by having a small meteor impact one of the larger buildings, and Season 5 introduced a new urban location called Paradise Palms, along with rifts that make it far easier for anyone leaving the outer regions to get back in once the storm starts rolling in.
  • Disco Domination has an absurd concentration of players go to Dance Floor "A" (the center floor) after the first circle closes. It can get to a point where they'll ignore (re)capturing the dance floor below their respawn point. It is telling whether victory or defeat is imminent when one team's score is more than doubled at the end of the second circle. Epic tried resolving this by straight-up removing the center floor, leaving only the four at the edges, and players still flocked to the center even though it was no longer relevant.
  • The center area of the island is known to often show up as the arena circle for most large-scale team modes. Players would usually fight on the mountains left of Dusty Divot, at Dusty Diner, or in the forest, rarely on the flat ground.
• Best Level Ever: The 50v50 mode in Battle Royale, which is very popular with fans. This "limited time" mode was in rotation for almost 4 months. Apart from the fact that the mode is just plain fun, with its chaotic large scale battles, the low pressure environment makes it very newbie friendly, while also being a viable place to grind Battle Pass challenges. It also silences any matchmaking issues, as more experienced players don't have to carry the team for too long before sheer strength of numbers takes over. Some players on the Fortnite subreddit and on Twitter even admit to playing 50v50 more than the standard Battle Royale modes. Its popularity increased as a result of being reworked into Soaring 50s.
• Broken Base:
  • Mid-June of 2018 brought with it a nerf to explosive ammo, limiting the maximum to 12 rockets (not counting what you have loaded in the weapon). Some people think such a change was long overdue and needed to be done to keep people from winning just because they can rain explosive death, while others believe that with how large and tough buildings can be, 12 rockets barely lets you destroy any massive structures your foes have built. However, this base was fixed once all explosives (including grenades, C4, and the like) got buffed so that they no longer need line of sight to break things (i.e. a wall behind another wall can be broken), increasing the damage done to structures by a huge amount without making explosives stronger against players.
  • Building can be a contentious gameplay point. Either it's a unique and expressive gameplay mechanic that separates Fortnite from its other Battle Royale peers and most shooter games in general, or it's a clunky hard-to-learn mess that gates new players out too harshly.
    • Starting at the end of Season 4 and moving into the beginning of Season 5, Epic announced their intention to change the meta of the game to involve more options than “just build lol”. This announcement was intended to counter the fact that most late-game matches would involve build battles several stories high between two players until one got just the right angle to 1 or 2 shot the opponent in the head with a shotgun. In the following weeks, the power of shotguns were nerfed while the power of submachine guns were buffed considerably to provide a close-range alternative. The strength of player-built structures was also nerfed, making it much easier for structures to be destroyed by weapons with a high fire rate such as the newly buffed SMGs. Some players have raised big complaints about these changes, saying Epic has ruined the meta of the game making it too dependable on spraying opponents with bullets and hoping RNG works out in your favor. Others say these complainers should simply adapt to the new meta and that the old meta was too stale and unwelcoming to new players.
    • The first week of Chapter 3 Season 2 sees the Imagined Order setting up Build Nullifiers on the island, replacing the players' building powers with a regenerating overshield and parkour abilities, splitting the player base neatly in two. One side clamors for this state of affairs to be made permanently available for new players and traditional shooter fans, while the other says that the introduction of a non-build mode will negatively affect balance and gameplay decisions.
  • The glider redeploy test is infamous for having a controversial reception — Twitter polls by Fandom VIPs showed an almost perfect 50-50 split on whether it should remain in the game or not. Perhaps fittingly, it ended up partially removed — at first Playgrounds and team-based LTMs kept it, while the three main modes removed it, and then it was reworked entirely into a consumable item (available in all modes but granted by default in Playgrounds and team LTMs).
  • Season 7’s notorious Infinity Blade. The player base is divided into those who think it’s a fun weapon that makes the game even tenser and actually allows less skilled players a shot at the Victory Royale, and those who think it's a completely and utterly broken mess which makes matches incredibly one-sided and completely destroys all challenge. Epic agreed with the latter, and the sword was vaulted after only 4 days.
  • With Season 8 came the Boom Bow, a, well, bow that is capable of removing half of your hitpoints in one shot, fires an explosive arrow, is silent (it is a bow, after all), and charges a very fast projectile insanely quickly with little to no height dropoff and the arrow's trajectory clearly marked for you. Unlike the other explosives, it fires shotgun shells instead of rockets. Some people like the weapon's ease of use and viability as a sniper, but it's easy to see why others hate the weapon's spammy nature and insane amounts of damage for all its upsides. This becomes especially apparent when you compare it to the Suppressed Sniper Rifle, a gun that uses heavy bullets instead of shells, does the same damage as a Boom Bow, and trades in a scope for the loss of all of the Boom Bow's advantages.
  • Season 8's event near the end of the season. The Drum Gun, a gun known for its particularly broken DPS and magazine size, was chosen to be unvaulted by the community, and the volcano erupted straight after, sending massive volcano fragments flying into Tilted Towers, Retail Row, and Polar Peak. The first ended up completely destroyed, the second half destroyed, and the third intact but not by much.
  • Season 9. Everything about Season 9. The fanbase is divided on whether or not Neo Tilted and Mega Mall are suitable replacements for the old Tilted Towers and Retail Row, the Slipstream transportation method, the removal of the Pump Shotgun (before being readded)...
    • The new locations: Some find them much too different and cramped while others love the variety and close quarters of Neo Tilted and Mega Mall.
    • Weapon vaults: Fan favourites like the Suppressed SMG and Hunting Rifle were vaulted in favour of more spammy alternatives such as the Semi-Automatic Sniper. Two particular ones were the Pump Shotgun and Suppressed Assault Rifle, two fan-favourite guns that were vaulted at the start of the season.
    • Weapon additions: The season featured a lot of spammy additions. These include an automatic sniper rifle, a proximity grenade launcher, a tactical assault rifle featuring a high rate of fire, and even a throwable Molotov-like bottle which creates an artificial storm zone in the safe circle or an artificial safe zone in the storm area.
    • Slipstreams: A train line-like transport method that relies on wind tunnels to take players across the map, some find the Slipstreams make transportation easy and stress-free while others argue that third-partying is too common and that the tunnels promote way too much aggression.
    • Combat Shotgun: A notorious example. The Pump Shotgun was vaulted and replaced with a faster and more accurate shotgun known as the Combat Shotgun. No other shotgun could deliver such a deadly headshot. The only two shotguns in the game at the time were of the fast firing playstyle, and the Combat's stats invalidate the Tactical completely. It was also known for being a bugged mess when it came out, doing inconsistent damage, but now that it's fixed, it's not uncommon to see someone get sniped at rifle range by a Combat Shotgun. Needless to say, some are happy about the change of meta and ranged shotgun playstyle offered by the Combat, but others hate the gun's power and how the Pump was vaulted. A more recent problem is the spawn rate of the Combat Shotgun which was recently nerfed into the ground, occurring in roughly one in a hundred spawns now. Players argue that without a Combat, it is impossible to win close-range fights, and this one is a much less base breaking issue.
  • Whether Summer Drift should've been sold in the item shop; in addition to original Drift owners getting the summer version for free. This is partly due to Epic stating that Battle Pass items would not appear again in some form. Unlike the Reaper and John Wick, who are separate characters experiencing Expy Coexistence, Drift and Summer Drift are the same character with the only major difference being the rarities and the summer version lacking the additional styles of the battle pass version.
    • Reception towards newer versions of previous Battle Pass characters (Midas Rex, Summer Brutus, Toon Meowscles, etc.) has warmed up over time, however, there is still a Vocal Minority who complains about the perception of Epic Games breaking their promise not to bring back Battle Pass items at all.
  • Season X's new vehicle, the BRUTE mech. With a powerful shotgun and a missile launcher that sprays missiles at a target so fast it tears through builds, as well as a stomp that can harvest materials easily, to say that it's a controversial addition is an understatement. Nerfing it by reducing the number of rockets fired and removing its ability to harvest haven't done much for the BRUTE's popularity.
  • Many aspects of Chapter 2, ranging from trivial matters to entire seasons, have created noticeable divides in the community.
    • First of all, the new map. Is it a worthy successor to Chapter 1's island, or would the game have fared better if it had just kept updating the old one? Those in favor of the new map often point out that some of Chapter 2's notable additions, such as swimming and fishing, wouldn't have been possible without a total refresh of the map, with some accusing the other side of being blinded by the memories they had on the old map. Those who want the old island back often point out the lack of changes that have occurred on the new map, with large swaths of it being completely unchanged after 7 seasons, with new biomes often being removed as soon as a season is over.
    • Collaborations have been a contentious point ever since they started appearing in the Battle Pass in Chapter 2 Season 2. Some say that they're necessary to attract new players and are fun additions for those that enjoy each respective franchise, while others argue that those spots could have been given to original characters to help build up Battle Royale's story, which was finding its footing at the time. Not helping matters were two back-to-back seasons themed around collaborations.
  • Many players were disappointed by the designs of the Greek gods in Chapter 5 Season 2 - usually after comparing them to their concept art. Aphrodite's design, however, sparked some debate - did they remove all the unique elements from her concept design, or is her simpler fashion sense justified by her trying the hardest to get along with the mortals out of all the gods?
• Casual-Competitive Conflict:
  • When it comes to build battles, most people fall into two camps: the ones who think they're an important, interesting, and exciting part of the game, and the ones who think that they're inconvenient and annoying to engage in.
  • In general, Epic seems to favor changes made to appeal to the casual community, such as strong items like the Infinity Blade, Planes, Ballers, and Brutes, or removal of weapons commonly used by higher-skill players like the suppressed SCAR or pump-action shotgun, which most frequently results in the competitive side of the playerbase voicing complaints. The casual side usually do not mind these changes, as they allow lower-skill players to still keep up with better players. Those on the competitive side will cry foul, as a game having a skill gap and Emergent Gameplay isn't a bad thing. The bigger issue comes from the inclusion of Ranked mode, a competitive version of the normal modes, also receiving these strong items and loss of weapons. A commonly suggested compromise is having whatever experimental weapon be excluded in Ranked, while letting it hang around in normal modes for player testing. Later updates down the line would see some of these compromises included, with certain items being only available in the normal modes.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • As if Jonesy cannibalizing Peely wasn't enough, one of the 2019 Summer Block Party shorts reveals Peely's origins: Jonesy was eating himself.
  • Another Summer Block Party short has Jonesy accidentally shoot down the Battle Bus, killing everyone onboard and getting himself declared winner before the match even starts.
• First Installment Wins: Dance Moves (A.K.A. the default dance) is the most recognized emote in the game. Partly due to Memetic Mutation, people have made non-Fortnite characters do the dance.
• Franchise Original Sin: A lot of the things that people began to complain about in later Seasons actually started in the much-beloved Seasons 3 and 4, such as new Season-exclusive items that nobody expected, huge events out of nowhere, and sudden removals of items. The thing is, Hop Rocks weren't incredibly gameplay-destabilizing and had a huge part in the story of Season 4, the Thanos crossover event was unique, but was limited to its own mode and didn't detract from the regular game styles, and some removals made sense, such as the Submachine Gun, which was pretty redundant due to the Tactical Submachine Gun also existing. Later Seasons didn't have such things to balance them out; the Infinity Blade was a massive Game-Breaker of a weapon and planes changed the meta of the game significantly, Fortnitemares 2018 completely removed the ability to play normal modes and the players had to voice complaints to get just regular Squads back into rotation, and several well-established weapons, such as the bolt-action sniper and burst assault rifle, were removed for seemingly no reason.
• Growing the Beard: Seasons 3 and 4 are usually where most people agree the Battle Royale mode hit its stride, striking a fine balance between gameplay, balance, story, gimmicks, and new items.
• He's Just Hiding: After the Collison event that concluded Chapter 3, Season 2, a subset of people believe that Slone is still alive after being seemingly crushed by the Mecha Team Leader's giant fist, pointing out that she was seen getting into her tank just before being crushed and also that the tank wasn't actually shown exploding. They would later be proven correct as Slone reappears in the Chapter 4, Season 3 trailer no worse for wear.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During the winding-down portion of Season 6, Wendy's did a stream where they kept landing at Greasy Grove and destroying Durr Burger because of their usage of frozen beef. Season 7 opens with a massive ice wave consuming the lower-left portion of the island, leading to Durr Burger and Greasy Grove having much bigger problems with freezing.
  • While everyone expected some kind of tie-in with Avengers: Endgame after what they did with Infinity War, nobody was expecting the movie to return the favor with Korg from Thor: Ragnarok shown playing Fortnite!
    • On the same vein, Fortnite's Infinity War tie-in was a special Limited Mode that allowed you to play as Thanos. Five years after the snap in Avengers: Endgame, Fortnite is still up and running. Did Thanos spare the staff of Epic Games from his snap as thanks for featuring him?
    • This goes two levels deep when you realize that the version of Fortnite seen in the movie is not much different from the start of the Time Skip, whereas the actual game has not only changed maps but thrown in several new play mechanics. In November 2023, the year of the projected end of the time skip, Fortnite does a throwback season called Season OG that features the classic map!
  • During Season 3, Epic added the Reaper, who was a incredibly obvious expy of John Wick, leading to many christening the skin after him. Fast forward to Season 9, and they hosted the Wick's Bounty LTM, featuring the man himself, which they lampshade in its trailer.
    • John Wick in his own universe is sometimes referred to as the Boogeyman or Baba Yaga, which may have inspired the addition of an actual Baba Yaga skin in Chapter 2 Season 4.
  • The Smooth Moves emote was a Writing Around Trademarks take on the dance moves of BTS, while the actual band was among the dozens taking on the Fortnite dance challenge - now BTS has grown big enough that their newest dance moves have been formally added to the game.
  • The opening cinematic to Chapter 2 Season 6 was co-directed by the Russo brothers, meaning that the Marvel crossovers have now come full circle. Worth noting is that the entire scene is missing any of the Marvel skins from previous seasons, meaning that the Russo brothers basically got to direct Ready Player One.
  • In May 2020, Simu Liu made a tweet saying "Can we stop debuting things on Fortnite?? It's like the Jar Jar Binks of video games." Then come 2021, where a Shang-Chi skin was released to tie-in with the release of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Liu immediately deleted his Tweet after the announcement. Even funnier is that the Shang-Chi skin doesn't even use his likeness, as it isn't based on Shang-Chi's MCU depiction.
  • Joel McHale had a cameo in Spider-Man 2, when Peter had to run off to deal with Dr Octopus, and commenting "that boy of yours is a real hero." Now Joel is in the end of Chapter 2 event as the voice of the Scientist, who pulls a Big Damn Heroes right before Spider-Man debuted in the first battle pass of Chapter 3.
  • Furthermore, Spider-Man's skin debuting in the first battle pass of Chapter 3 was just after the fate of the Cube Queen in the Chapter 2 finale mirrors that of Dr Octopus' tritium reactor in Spider-Man 2.
  • Additionally, the Spider-Man skin was an obvious cross-promotion with the then-upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home despite being a generic "evergreen" design (not meant to represent ongoing media like cartoons), until Epic made an additional MCU-accurate Spider-Man later on. No `Way Home ends with Peter Parker leaving behind his usual suit and switching to an "evergreen" Spider-Man suit.
  • This image◊ somehow successfully predicted Peter Griffin of all people would become a skin, even correctly guessing that the Buttscratcher and Petercopter would be parts of the set.
  • The original Dance Moves emote was modeled after a dance Turk did in Scrubs to the song "Poison" by Bell Biv Devoe. Appropriately enough, when Fortnite introduced its new Rhythm Game mode in Fortnite Festival, "Poison" was one of the first tracks included in the setlist.
• It's the Same, So It Sucks: On August 13th, 2019, Epic released a new pet called Gunner. Many took notice that the pet was nearly identical to the Bonesy pet from the Season 6 battle pass with minimal changes. Unsurprisingly, fans were not happy and accused Epic of being lazy and going back on their promise to not re-release battle pass items. Less than a few hours after, Epic apologized, removed the pet, and refunded players for it.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many Fortnite players only want to play the Battle Royale mode - it's the most popular of the six.
  • After Chapter 5 added 3 different game modes, there are certain groups of players who only want to play LEGO Fortnite, Rocket Racing or Fortnite Festival.
• Loot Drama: One of the most common issues in 50v50/Soaring 50s Final Fight, and other general large-team modes is that the first 2-3 minutes after the bus doors open are a mad dash to grab some good gear before your teammates beat you to it. You might try to land someplace sparsely populated to avoid this, only to see another player with the same idea landing in the same place. Less-cooperative teammates may stalk you so that you'll open chests only for them to quickly swoop in and swipe what you were going to take.
• Narm: The 2021 MLK LTM turned out to be a source of unintentionally hilarious mockery. In that mode, players could visit virtual museum that showed Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech and had exhibits about the Civil Rights Movement. However, players could use whatever skin and emotes they wanted for the event, leading to goofy moments of licensed characters like the Xenomorph and Rick Sanchez dancing on the Washington Mall. While Epic Games would disable most of the emotes, one that got away was a Catwoman whipping emote that couldn't be removed due to a licensing clause by Warner Bros. and DC comics; the problematically racist connotation of the whip emote lead to trolls spamming it. It also didn't help that one loading screen during the event encouraged players to go for headshots. Needless to say, a rather solemn tribute was undermined by the silly nature of the game.
• Narm Charm: There is something intensely hilarious (and downright disturbing) to the fact that you can still emote while you're transformed into Thanos. Seeing the Mad Titan, destroyer of over half the life in the universe, lover of Death itself and usurper of the very fabric of reality dab is absolutely surreal. This also applies to the Demogorgon as its mouth typically opens when emoting. And with new crossovers and emotes constantly coming to Fortnite, you never know which licensed character you're going to see do what silly dance next.
• Nintendo Hard: The Impossible Escape LTM from Chapter 2 Season 6. In a game of 16 players, you and up to a squad of other players have to search the map for four parts to fix a helicopter to fly off of the island in three in-game days, AKA, about 30 minutes. What makes it so hard, exactly?
  • Well, it starts out with you being dropped off at a random spawn point (usually a beach away from POIs, or the Spire if you're lucky), and if you tried joining with your buddies from lobby, you won't spawn together and it's unlikely you'll find each other unless you communicate outside of the game.
  • Items are rare, cars and chests even rarer, you can only use food to heal and shield up.
  • Cars, parts, and helicopters are guarded, and at night, large swarms of wolves will spawn. Starting on the second night, swarms of ghosts that can kill you in about three hits will also spawn near those important areas and items as well. Fog also rises at night to decrease visibility.
  • That's not even accounting for the paranoia of whether or not other players are friendlies or are just dangerously paranoid, selfish, or trolls. It's possible in PvE for someone to hold a part hostage since they can't be killed for loot. There's also common stories of people taking off in the choppers without their teammates or another team stealing the chopper once your team finishes putting all the parts in. Also not helped that the amount of players in a game is small and the island is considerably large, so you can't afford to be picky. Even worse in PvP, especially since there's only one chopper unlike PvE having three.
  • By the way, if you're having a hard time finding parts, prepare to try to find and fight a pack of Raptors to get intel from a Huntsmaster, so you better stock up on extremely limited ammo and get a team to help you kill them. Also, the Huntsmaster's intel might not be of the closest parts, sometimes forcing you to travel lengthy distances for a part when only for you or another team to find a closer one.
  • It's possible to find duplicates, which can be annoying as maybe by the time you bring it to a helicopter, the part you found is already in and you've just wasted your time and inventory space.
  • Parts are three slots wide, so you can’t carry more than one and inventory management will be important. It helps if you have team members to escort you, especially in PvP, since other players will be able to see you on their maps...
  • Important areas and items are often widely spread out throughout the map, so you better find a car, mod it with the big wheels, and fill up the gas tank (hope no one's blown up any gas stations!), because you need to travel fast.
  • Speaking of gas, you may have to be the one to carry a gas can around, because once you get all four parts in, it's suddenly indicated that you need to fill the gas! Otherwise, your chopper may crash before you can even reach the portal... and it's been quite a common thing for players to overlook. Also, you better hope no one blew up any gas cans, because those are also in scarcity.
  • Of course... this is mostly all offset if even at least one person communicates with the team and knows what they're doing. And even then, in PvP, a single Griefer can proceed to disband from the squad and kill the rest when everyone has pretty much already escaped in the Choppa.
• Parody Displacement: Some of the popular "Fortnite Dances" are spoofs of other known dance moves (including Dance Moves, which comes from Scrubs). Controversially, some have actually sued Epic Games for copyright infringement because of the displacement.
• Popular with Furries: The game has a surprising amount of skins that appeal to the furry fandom.
  • Early on, Cuddle Team Leader, Drift (his fox mask version), and Dire were subjected to furry fan-arts in the furry community due to them representing a bear, a fox, and a werewolf respectively.
  • The game now also features Fennix and Dodger, a pair of foxes, as well as Hybrid, a Ninja with a Scaled Up form, and Thunder, a humanoid komodo dragon, for the scalies. Meowscles has also become popular, even though he has an emoji-like cat face set on top of a very muscular body.
  • Blowing the popularity of any furry or furry-adjacent Fortnite character before her is Meow Skulls, an anthropomorphic female cat who's also the sister of the previously mentioned Meowscles, introduced in Chapter 3 Season 4. Her goth tomboy style of dress and much more typically furry design compared to any other Fortnite characters made her popularity and volume of fanart explode.
  • And then, there's Wendell. From the moment this cartoony wolf was first leaked, pretty much every furry (especially canine furries) really hyped him up considerably, even when he (and his squirrel sidekick Walnut) eventually made his way to the Item Shop. His toony expressions alone made him an instant favorite among furry Fortnite players, including Twitch streamers who shared clips of Wendell moments in-game.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • The second iteration of Final Fight (8 teams of 12, unlike the previous version's 5 teams of 20) is not well-liked due to everyone dropping from the same Battle Bus, compared to 50v50 and Final Fight v1 where each team gets their own bus so that they has some sense of territory. It ends up being more like a more disorganized Squads match, with 4 out of every 5 players making a beeline for Tilted Towers. The negative response to this mode led to it being quickly shelved and replaced with 50v50 v3.
  • Disco Domination, which replaced the beloved Soaring 50s in Season 6. Turns out, taking out one of the most popular game modes and replacing it with an objective-based mode doesn't do wonders for the fans.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Tactical Shotgun often gets flack for its horribly inconsistent damage output, which can go from dealing 150-range with a headshot to dealing 9 even at close range, at which point you'd be better off using a pistol.
  • Assault rifles get flack for inconsistent damage output as well, but this example is caused by Bloom, which can cause you to lose gunfights just because you were unlucky enough to whiff your shots and the enemy wasn't. It's gotten to the point where players are running things like Double Pistols or submachine guns over assault rifles just because those weapons are more accurate than ARs, deeming the high distance damage drop for SMGs to be worth it just because they can actually hit the opponent with them.
  • Pump-action shotguns, and heavy/assault shotguns to a lesser extent, are hated for the opposite reason: being very, very strong and having no RNG to influence their damage output, leading to a metagame where the main strategy is simply "close the distance between you and your opponent and have your shotgun(s) ready".
  • When regular SMGs (in white, green and blue flavors) were finally brought back to Battle Royale in mid-July of 2018, their faster fire rate than the now-vaulted Tactical SMGs, combined with the hefty accuracy bonus they had, made them the new go-to for any situation. And then the Compact SMGs were brought in about a week later and proved to be even more broken, easily melting enemies and structures across huge distances. All SMGs were hit with a bunch of nerfs shortly after the latter weapons launched.
  • Makeshift weapons from Chapter 2, Season 6. All of these weapons are extremely weak and unwieldy, frequently losing out on accuracy, speed, and magazine capacity, and can only be found/made in Rare rarity tops. They exist solely to be crafted into either Mechanical weapons, which are the classics, or Primal weapons, which are reckless, wild-firing things all around. The latter category could arguably count in itself for the way all Primal weapons, except for the Bow, have unpredictable shot spread.
• Seasonal Rot: Since Season 5, some Fortnite fans feel that the abundance of gimmicks, constant changes to the map, lack of story at times, and high number of buffs and nerfs have made the game less fun.
• Self-Fanservice: Some furries/scalies tend to give the Beast Men skins who are lacking in a tail their own ones, like Dire and Thunder for example.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Many have tried to win the battle royale with limitations on what they can pick up, such as one rarity, no healing, and even no bullets.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Season 4, Week 7's challenge of opening seven chests in Risky Reels. Because completing seven weeks of challenges grants players with the Blockbuster Skin (The Visitor), almost the entire lobby (even in 50v50) were seen gliding towards the area. Those who failed to get at least one chest either got quickly eliminated or quit the match, greatly reducing the player count within a minute of the game.
  • The cube exploding on 11/4/2018 made all the players enter a white void with a bunch of rifts in the shape of a butterfly. Then the player character reaches out towards the butterfly and it rifts the players out of the void and into the new zone, revealing a new island at Leaky Lake.
  • Really, any of the once-in-a-lifetime events that happen are this trope like the rocket event, the cube first appearing, the cube entering the lake, the cube exploding and taking players into a white void, the Ice King freezing the entire map, the volcano erupting and taking out Retail Row, Tilted Towers, and Polar Peak, and finally the entire Mecha VS Monster fight.
  • The Season X event tops them all by destroying the entire universe! Not even the menu screen, Fortnite's social media accounts, nor even Save the World were safe!
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • Songs for certain emotes in-game is this, some examples being "Orange Justice" being one for Future's "Mask Off" to "Boneless" being one to Innerpartysystem's "American Trash". Justified as these were the songs played in the source videos for almost all of these dances.
  • The "Disco Fever" dance and Disco Domination use the same theme. The song itself appears to be a slower-tempo remix of "Disco A GoGo" from TimeSplitters: Future Perfect.
• Tear Jerker:
  • After Chadwick Boseman's passing in 2020, many players would go to the Black Panther monument to use the waterworks / crying emote.
  • Partway through Chapter 2, Season 7, Bushranger disappeared. A grave rested where he used to be seen on the Island, and going near it would play very somber music. Like with Black Panther's monument, many players in mourning visited this spot to pay their respects, often with the Waterworks emote. Luckily he came back as a sapling shortly after.
• That One Boss:
  • Technically, the Storm King is Battle Royale's only boss so far, so it has to count for this trope, but even without that, he's still no pushover. He's basically taken piece for piece from Save the World and watered down for the island, but this is actually made harder by the fact that you lack any of your super powerful Schematic weapons, and he has stronger attacks to compensate with the amount of players he's fighting against.
  • He constantly throws rocks onto the arena, which turn into Cube Monster spawners when they land. The Cube Monsters and Cube Brutes are a real problem here, as they come in droves and the Cube Crystals have a significantly beefier health bar than their appearance in Fortnitemares 2018, meaning you'll have to divert attention from the boss towards the marauding hordes. And they don't even give good rewards compared to their last appearance, save for ammo, which is precious here due to it being burned up rather fast thanks to many factors.
  • Then there's the Storm King himself to contend with. The only attack he retains from his original appearance is a One-Hit Kill giant forward laser similar to that of one certain giant pig monster, but unlike Dark Beast Ganon's only attack, the Storm King's beam is rather hard to get out of the way of. He also periodically performs an "attack" that deals no damage to you specifically, but rather destroys any structures on the battlefield, including any Mounted Turret stations you may have set up in the back to deal heavy damage, and shelters you may have put up to revive in safety from the mobs.
  • And then there's the manner of defeating him. He has three weak points, but only one of them is ever exposed at one time, after you kill the previous ones. If he has one of his arms exposed, he tends to face the side with more of his minions, making it hard to land a shot on him from far away due to him being a finicky target and the matter of bloom, and hard to land a shot from up close, due to having to juggle the monsters and the beast's attacks. After you destroy all three weak points, then you have to deal with the Storm Horn, which is the only way you can permanently kill it, regenerates all three weak points if everyone doesn't kill it in time, and has more health than all the other weak points.
  • The arena is also rather cramped, due to taking place on the Eye Land area and surrounded by a static Storm Eye, which is rather small and deals a lot of damage by the first cycle or so. You can forage for a treasure chest or two at the beginning of the match, but that's about it. Mixing all of this together makes a very aggravating boss to deal with in the Battle Royale meta.
• That One Level:
  • Downplayed and possibly Reconstructed with Tilted Towers. It's a huge hotspot for players to land in for both its large quantities of loot (due to the multitudes of buildings having lots of floors) and its camping potential. Beginners will have an extremely tough time here, but more skilled players will have a fun time getting continuous kills for a while. Yet many other players think Tilted Towers ruins gameplay since typically, half of the lobby drops there, making other locations lack any challenge and causing some players to get very few kills if they don't land near or at Tilted Towers. Even in 50v50 with Tilted Towers on your team's side, going there can still be a bad idea since your teammates might take all the good loot first.
  • Loot Lake is known to be an extremely difficult area to traverse. Unlike Dusty Divot, which also features a large choke point, the only way to traverse the area is to take the long route around the lake as the water really slows players down on foot and on an ATK. In 50v50, a team would have a large disadvantage should their half circle landed on the lake while the other team is on dry land. It was widely speculated that the cube in Season 5 would explode the lake, but in actuality, the cube covered the lake into a large Bounce Pad arena. It does however explode in Season 6 and in its place is a bunch of islands with a lot of stones and remains of Kevin the Cube.
    • Moisty Mire was one of the least visited areas while it existed, and for good reason: it's a water-heavy marshland that, like Loot Lake, will slow you down if you don't have the materials to build over the water. And there's very little cover, so going here is basically asking to get sniped. Season 5 replaced it with a new desert biome and Paradise Palms, to the lament of relatively few players. Furthermore, when the Chapter 1 map was brought back for Season OG, this location was notably absent, as they started the season with how the map appeared in Season 5.
  • The jungle biome in Chapter 4. First of all, the entire biome is below ground level, making it easy for someone to take sniper shots from one of the cliffs surrounding it. Not only that, but because of all the foilage and the tall trees accessible via ziplines, it can be very difficult to spot enemy players in the jungle itself, making ambushes a frequent occurence.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Chapter 1 Season 4 had the Omega costume's lights, which required reaching Tier 100 and Level 80. The tier requirement wasn't regarded as bad, as Battle Stars were abundantly given from the daily and weekly challenges plus the hidden Blockbuster Battle Stars, but the level requirement was seen as obscenely high and a slog, as the next closest level goal required a much more manageable level 65 (to unlock the Carbide costume's lights), and getting from level 65 to 80 took about 76% of the experience it took just to get from 0 to 65 (the former took 238,000 XP, and the latter needed 311,390). Fortunately for the players, Season 5 brought a change to how Progressive Challenges work (based on accumulated XP, rather than level), and were announced to be continue-able past the season's end, allowing players to finish current and future Progressive Challenges at their own pace.
  • Collecting chests in a specific location. Other than the fact that not all chests appear at once in one match, this quest is considered annoying as the vast majority of the lobby hovers over the named location for a mad dash to open at most one chest during the first few days. More annoying if the location is known for the low loot, such as Wailing Woods. Week 7 of Season 5 replaces this to finding one chest per location (out of five separate locations), easing the amount of traffic.
  • Finding and opening a Loot/Supply Llama in Battle Royale. Have fun searching for an item which can be anywhere on the map with no clues as to the location of the three that spawn per game!
  • Any challenge in Battle Royale that requires you to play with friends or otherwise forces you to socialize with other players will be singularly stressful to contend with if you're the kind of player who prefers to do Solos. And maybe even if you aren't, as they're often more difficult than other challenges and will still require you to rely on other people which, given the attitude of many random players, is not a good thing.
  • The Indiana Jones mission where you need to find the secret room in the Shrine. Opening the shrine is incredibly annoying, seeing as you need to solve the puzzle first, which are randomized mind you, by finding them at each of the four corners of Shuffled Shrines, coming back to the door and put in the corresponding color code. Then you need to survive the Arrows, that ignore your shields too, and pray the giant boulder doesn't kill you in one hit, all while finding the secret room. All that is bad enough, the worst part is that you need to do this during a Battle Royale, a time where everyone is out to kill you and are at the shrine as well, at which point either someone will take pity on you and let you complete the challenge, or someone just kills you.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
  • Many detractors of the battle royale mode criticize it for copying ideas from other games. PUBG fans and the developers accused it of being a rip-off since it too is a 100-player battle royale game and Epic admitted that the mode was inspired by that game. This eventually led to a lawsuit from a subsidiary of Bluehole because of the similarities (but has since long been dropped). Apex Legends fans weren't too pleased when the game added a ping system and teammate respawn mechanic just a month after the release of their game.
  • Even after its removal, the Impostors LTM got this for being a blatant Among Us ripoff, with the graphics and sound effects that actually distanced it from Among Us. Innersloth Studios, the creators of Among Us, expressed disappointment that Epic didn't reach out to them to collaborate on the mode, despite the game being on their storefront. People online roasted Epic over the coals because of this, especially when you consider Fortnite's Battle Royale mode is itself based off of PUBG (which to the credit of Epic here, they did acknowledge this fact at the time, and also that the game mode was never intended to be as big as it is today), but nonetheless still comes off as hypocritical. Despite this controversy, Epic and Innersloth Studios eventually collaborated to have an official Among Us collab in the game.
  • Similarly, emotes such as Dance Moves and Fresh lead to accusations of Epic "stealing and making a profit" off of dances by not just detractors, but by the creators of the moves as well. Epic got sued by some of these creators, but like with the above example, these lawsuits eventually got dropped. However, a few of the emotes Epic faced legal trouble for (specifically Rambunctious, Tidy, and Fresh) stopped showing up in shop rotations.^note While Tidy and Rambunctious did eventually show up in December 2022 on two separate shop rotations, both were swiftly removed from the shop less than a few hours afterward.
    • Interestingly enough, Epic would eventually create the Icon Series rarity and have official collaborations with creators to feature and sell their dances in-game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • In Chapter 2 Season 7, NPCs have less reactions to certain skins (in fact, the only one is Midas and Jules to Marigold), so they don't have reactions to alien skins, despite the season's plot being themed around an alien invasion and perhaps most disappointingly, they have no reaction to the alien skin.
• Unexpected Character: Despite Fortnite's long, long history of crossovers, there are still often instances when one is more unusual than others:
  • To say Tiktoker Khaby Lame being added was a surprise would be an understatement. It would be even more of an understatement when it was revealed he was being added as a Battle Pass skin.
  • The Fortnitemares event for 2023 added Micheal Myers, Alan Wake, and... Jack Skellington. The game's first instance of a Disney character that wasn't from Star Wars or Marvel.
  • Fortnite doing collaborations with more mature rated media was already a surprise given its T rating, but very few expected Invincible of all shows to be one of them. More interestingly, it occurred during Season OG, and not many expected much for collabs due to the theme and short length.
  • When Peter Griffin was added, many expected another Family Guy character to be released as well, with likely candidates being either Lois and/or Quagmire. Ernie the Giant Chicken was certainly not on anyone's radar.
  • Suffice it to say few were expecting a fan song for Alastor from Hazbin Hotel to make it into the game in the Reaper's Showtime emote, least of all before a crossover with official Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss content.
• Vindicated by History:
  • Most skins and emotes that get a negative first reception are suddenly warmed over after their sale ends. This happens so frequently that players lampshade this cycle for every "bad cosmetic".
  • The Bushido skins, Hime in particular, gained popularity after an update that allowed them to fully take off their helmets and sport their impressive hairstyles. Previous skins also become popular once new variants are introduced.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The walking Amazing Technicolor Battlefield that is the Galaxy Skin◊.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The Battle Royale mode often gets hit with this. Sure, it looks like an afternoon cartoon, but behind the facade it's still a shooter where the only goal is to murder everyone else until only one player is left standing, leaving many people (parents in particular) wondering how it managed to get a comparatively kid-friendly rating of Teen/PEGI 12 despite its premise.
  • That said... some of the copyrighted music emotes are from songs that are either not too mild from anything else you'd hear from the radio (ex. "Fly N Ghetto" contains a censored line about weed), have explicitly sexual content (ex. The "Socks" emote is taken from "Work Remix", and even the segment it uses describes a sexual act), and/or contain heavy cursing (ex. "Build a Bitch", is, well, called the "Build Up" emote in-game and uses a non-lyrical part of the song).

Creative

• Misaimed Fandom: An MLK LTM promoted in August 2021 that baffled players and non-players given how Fortnite is known for having an immature fanbase, the dubious usage of a battle royale game for educational purposes and the game's highly commercialized nature clashing with Dr King's anti-consumerist views. However, other video games with creative modes have been used for education, most notably with Minecraft's Education Mode, despite also being notorious for its toxic fanbase at the time. Additionally, educating immature players about racial struggles and why racism is bad was also probably the point…
• Nintendo Hard: Some of the challenges such as the Cosmic Summer event and the Island Games event are difficult to achieve the way you're supposed to if you're not a very skilled player. As a result, there's a sizable chunk of the fanbase who get around these by playing in private lobbies and getting their friends or bots to throw the matches.

• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Deadpool's special weapon for the 2020 crossover event being a vampiric weapon seems rather random, then you remember that Deadpool himself has a Healing Factor ability.
  • The emote based on the memetic performance of "Runaway" by Sunstroke Project from the Eurovision song contest is named "Phone It In". The winner of Eurovision would automatically be the host country next year, so any country that knows full well they don't have the resources to host a massive global singing competition will send an act that is literally phoning it in. What usually happens instead, though...
  • The Slurp Juice Peter drank in order to get his muscular physique expired in 2021, right about the time he was leaked to be a part of the game to begin with.
• Fridge Horror: Travis Scott's event seems... rather psychedelic, to say the least. While this can be chalked up to us as being All Part of the Show/part of the aesthetic, the same likely cannot be said for the inhabitants of the island. For one, Travis Scott is HUGE here, and during one part of the show, he partially explodes, turning into some sort of giant mech-human hybrid. Other things involve all the ground disappearing and the screen getting flooded, turning into an endless watery abyss, a fire rain, giant roller-coaster tracks sprouting out of the earth and weaving through it like roots, high magnitudes of Gravity Screw, and the apparent return of the butterfly rift from Chapter 1, Season 6. All of these apparent Reality Warper shenanigans on Scott's part would likely cause the inhabitants of the Battle Royale island to think that they were catching a glimpse of Nyarlathotep or something of the sort.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!:
  • The Battle Royale mode has become a polarizing subject in the Let's Play community on YouTube and the gaming community as a whole. Due to its popularity, similarity to PUBG (as that was the most popular Battle Royale at the time) and it being Free to Play, many Youtubers and streamers have taken notice of Fortnite and have started uploading vast numbers of gameplay videos to the point where some are saying the game has become far too prevalent. Some popular channels have become almost nothing but Fortnite.
  • Though not as prevalent in later seasons, Outfits and other types of cosmetics can also fall victim to this, with the Skull Trooper, Red Knight, and Power Chord outfits being early great examples of such. These outfits were highly popular less due to their looks, but due to their "OG" and "rare" status since they were released during the days before Fortnite's massive Sleeper Hit popularity and were hardly ever featured in the shop at the time. As such, when Epic finally rereleased these outfits, they suddenly became "terrible" and lost any semblance of value due to no longer being rare.
    • Because of this, there are some fans who prefer that Epic not rerelease older and less-seen cosmetics in order to preserve their OG status.
  • Aura, Crystal, and the female Boundless outfits are derided for being often used by overly competitive and showoff-y players.
  • Likewise, the Star Wand is notoriously popular due to a previous bug causing it to deal nearly triple the damage pickaxes should do, which has also subjected it to jokes.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Peely himself due to his Cuteness Proximity.
  • Players with the “Reaper” skin in Battle Royale are this, since this means they completed their Season 3 Battle Pass and thus have a lot of hours logged. The fact that it's also obviously intended to be a character who also has a heavy amount of Memetic Badass points has not gone unnoticed.
  • On a similar spectrum are the Soccer skins known to be the most "try-hard" or "sweatiest" by the fandom. Unlike the Reaper, who is feared but respected, the Soccer skins are more of "feared but annoying to fight".
• Memetic Loser:
  • Every "Default Skin" is seen as this. They're usually seen as people who just installed the game and are trying it for their first time, and/or are broke/don't have permission from their parents to make in-game purchases.
  • People without mics or people who do have mics but refuse to speak, as it makes communication in team modes difficult. Inversely, people who have mics who pester people without mics are also seen as this, usually being seen as rude, have poor sportsmanship, and/or overly talkative.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Save the World:
    • If you look close enough, most of the Husks wear their own faces as hoodies.
    • To make things worse, Dwarf Husks awfully closely resemble children. Zombified children.
    • And if that wasn't enough, survivor transformations and most of the expeditions require PEOPLE as a resource. Don't ask.
    • The Storm is implied to not only be intelligent and an Eldritch Abomination in its own right, the modern day isn't the first time it's come for humanity. In essence, it feels like an alien invader rather than a force of nature, and its objective and agenda is mysterious, with the only thing absolutely known for sure is that it hates humanity with a passion.
  • Battle Royale:
    • In the Season 5 cutscene revealing the rifts, there's one rift that takes away someone's glider before he's landed.
    • The Cube Monsters rivals the Husks of looking more grotesque and being more aggressive to the players.
    • The T-Pose Emote jingle is a sinister-sounding piece of white noise that sounds like a satanic ritual to some. Though it noticeably deflates when your character starts getting tired.
    • The Demogorgon, a lanky creature with a Flower Mouth for a face, is a skin in Fortnite.
    • The monster under Polar Peak was finally revealed, and it was even more horrifying than people imagined. Thankfully, Mecha Team Leader was able to kill it.
    • Canisters of Joker Gas started appearing in various places around the island. The infamous Monster Clown is loose on the island and no one knows where he is. Later on, the man himself appeared alongside Poison Ivy...
    • The tsunami that appeared after Midas's attempt to control the storm failed. A massive wall of water than closes in on the island, literally pushing players into the center of the circle, looming over them constantly...
    • Someone figured how to make other characters do Kit's exclusive Go Cat Go emote. Kit is a cat in a transforming Mobile-Suit Human, and flesh and blood people doing that particular emote looks... less than pleasant.
    • The Loot Sharks are rather intimidating in appearance, and unless there's loot out for them to eat, will target any players nearby. They have a wide detection range, do 50 damage with each chomp, and can leap HIGH into the air to attack someone, tearing through walls to get at their prey. Many a streamer has been in a building, thinking they were safe, and trying to heal with a shark suddenly comes bursting through the wall and devouring them.
    • Kevin the Cube came close to destroying the island last time, unleashing a tide of darkness and Husk-like monsters. Now there are SEVERAL Cubes. And its heavily implied that they have a leader.
    • The Cube Queen is that leader. And she seems utterly unstoppable. She unleashes a horde of the massive Cube Fiends called Caretakers on the Loopers, and during the final battle with her, its implied that her corruption has taken over the entire island. She rips a massive hole in the sky, revealing a huge invading army of Motherships and a massive, Death Star-sized ship called the Cube's Cradle, all ready to invade this world. Literally the only way to stop her is flipping the island around...
    • The Imagined Order is digging up the Devourer, for purposes unknown...
    • Chapter 3, Season 4 starts out with the chrome substance covering the Scientist, the Origin, and the Visitor and causing them to melt into blobs of shapeless go. The Paradigm is forced to flee as something new rises from the mass they used to be...
  • Imposters:
    • Peely Mode. Now, on the surface, it doesn't seem that intimidating. Peely is goofy and funny, yay! Except EVERYONE looks like Peely, and behind one of those peels is an imposter, dead set on trapping you in between worlds...
    • Imposters can complete tasks themselves. That Cuddle Team Leader you saw cleaning spraypaint off the battle bus as you pass by may actually be one of the Imposters, and follow you out into the hallway to eliminate you...
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Battle Royale, at least in the non-LTM modes. Once the initial firefights that typically cause the player count to drop by more than half are over, everything becomes eerily quiet with players either taking refuge in buildings or setting up for sneak-attack kills. And you know you'll have to get moving before long due to the storm; as you try to find the next safest place to hide someone could sneak up on you and end you with a few shotgun blasts to the head as you quickly attempt to mount a counterattack, or snipe you from afar, killing you before you can see who's firing at you.
  • When Moisty Palms was active, anyone could become a perfect facsimile of certain props when in the area. That innocuous looking sign right there? Jumps out when you pick up some loot and utterly thrashes you. That toilet in the house when you look for some ammo? *Click* Hello. A treasure chest in the exact same location one would normally spawn? Chest Monster that promptly fills you full of holes (or blows both of you up with dynamite, a rocket launcher or a grenade.)
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • An early August 2018 update made it so that the tiny plants around the island that took one hit and gave you a bit of wood now required four hits to break. This made it completely worthless to go for these plants, as their main draw was a little time investment for a little bit of wood, as opposed to a more sizeable time investment for the same amount of wood, which could be acquired in greater quantities for the same amount of effort elsewhere. The old, single hit plants were brought back about a week later.
  • The planned idea of bringing deployable gliders in the base modes has met with criticism of making the game very easy to dodge elimination and the removal of the Soaring 50s mode has received a very negative reception as a result of the mode being very popular with players.
  • Starting with the Chapter 2, Season 1, Epic suddenly went dead silent when it came to patch notes for Battle Royale. Now, whenever a new patch comes out, players have to discover for themselves what was adjusted or added to the game. Unsurprisingly, both casual and competitive players have criticized Epic for essentially being less communicative to the community and for foregoing something that they've been doing consistently for 10 seasons straight. Not helping Epic's case is the fact that they still release patch notes for Creative and Save the World (though STW's notes are more condensed compared to the former), confusing many as to why Epic suddenly stopped doing the same for their more well-known mode. To this day, Epic still has not given a reason as to why they did this.
  • The Astro Assassin skin was originally known as the GEMINI skin and had a robotic rabbit head. However, presumably due to similarities with Raeve Maeve from Paladins, the skin was changed to its BRUTE pilot-esque appearance that it has now. Not only that but the skin was never given a red alternate style despite being shown one in promotional images, which some feel would've made even the new version of the skin more appealing.
  • LEGO Adventurers fans were unhappy with the iconic Johnny Thunder receiving an Adaptation Name Change as the more generic "Sawyer" in LEGO Fortnite.

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