Fortnite: New superhero abilities are fun but present serious balancing problems

Fortnite Chapter 2 Season 4 has launched with reasonably high success, as the game has managed to engage with millions of players across a half-dozen platforms, despite initial apprehensions about the Marvel crossovers. However, the new superhero powers present some issues to the game that raise serious questions about game balance.

---

Is Fortnite fun because of its balance, or in spite of it?

It would be fair to say that Fortnite has pretty much never been a balanced game, and it’s not really known if balance has ever been a primary concern when designing weapons and locations for Fortnite. Fortnite manages to be fun and engaging to players regardless, and it’s not quite clear what role balance plays in this.

Sure, the competitive community is always going to ask for more balance, or for the game to lean more on the aspects which competitive players can control. But a purely balanced Fortnite would ultimately lose a significant portion of what makes it unique and interesting to begin with.

Competitive players, especially those who are winning consistently, will almost always want their game to further reward skill and diminish luck, but Fortnite rarely adheres strictly to this philosophy.

---

Sometimes, it’s fun to be the bad guy

But sometimes it’s fun to be stronger than everyone else, to be an unstoppable force sent out to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting. The problem is when the fun achieved by one person being so much stronger than everyone else rarely outweighs the negative experience of being beaten by someone who simply has much stronger gear than you.

This is why Fortnite, unlike many free-to-play games, doesn’t allow you to simply purchase better gear with real world money, and why the differences between weapons by rarity can be as little as a few points. Even if a legendary SCAR is better than a blue AR, the boost in stats won’t be enough to beat a player who plays better than you.

However, when weapons are strong enough to warp normal gameplay, or support unexpected strategies that lack counterplay, it becomes apparent that they are too strong in comparison to other weapons. In Fortnite, that means things like the superhero powers, some of which simply offer the user far too much power.

Maybe Fortnite prefers to keep the game a little unbalanced, or maybe these will be amended in the future. We’ll just have to wait and find out.