LEGO Fortnite to take on Minecraft with Epic Games
Epic Games takes on Microsoft’s Minecraft, launching LEGO Fortnite as a direct rival with its own unique twist on the survival crafting genre.
Fortnite, the gaming giant, is set to go head-to-head with Microsoft’s Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history with a staggering 300 million copies sold.
Epic Games, the developer behind Fortnite, is launching a direct competitor, LEGO Fortnite, to challenge Minecraft’s cultural dominance and massive player base.
Accessed through Fortnite, which is free-to-play on various platforms, LEGO Fortnite introduces a unique game mode, marking an ambitious move by Epic Games.
While the Fortnite battle royale mode has been its primary attraction, LEGO Fortnite takes a different route, drawing inspiration from the world of Minecraft.
Minecraft, renowned for its survival gameplay and creative building elements, has become a cultural staple, especially among younger audiences.
Acknowledging the influence of Minecraft since its official release in November 2011, Epic Games brings its own twist by incorporating LEGO products into the game world, with structures and characters based on the iconic LEGO brick design.
Gameplay footage reveals significant changes in the game world, showcasing LEGO-inspired building, crafting, and survival elements. However, there are clear nods to Minecraft, such as building fences around animals, growing crops, and gathering environmental resources to construct structures.
And that’s without mentioning the similarity between LEGO bricks and Minecraft blocks, the basic units of structure that make up the game’s world.
Speaking of the world of LEGO Fortnite, much like Minecraft, when the sun goes down, you can expect an increase in enemies to defeat, like skeletons, wolves, and a whole manner of other creatures, including what looks like a giant lava monster.
The game’s designers ensured that all the settings and characters who appear in the game could be built in the real world with LEGO pieces.
“We are starting to build a real bridge between the physical and the digital world, which in a way ... has never been done before,” said Julia Goldin, chief product and marketing officer at LEGO.
Players build shelters for defence and customise home bases, recruiting villagers to gather materials, survive the night, and craft the ultimate blocky haven adds a unique dimension to the adventure.
The journey extends into deep caves, offering opportunities to discover rare resources, hidden areas, and formidable enemies.
It’s an immersive gaming experience with scheduled updates already planned for early 2024.
Players can look forward to a range of new world-building features, gameplay enhancements, and a plethora of LEGO-style outfits to keep the experience fresh.
Available on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC, LEGO Fortnite holds an E10+ rating from the ESRB.
LEGO Fortnite invites players into vast, open worlds where they can embody their favourite Fortnite characters — Brite Bomber, Cuddle Team Leader, and Raven — reimagined in iconic LEGO style.
Despite Fortnite’s massive player base of 70 million monthly players, Epic Games sees LEGO Fortnite as an opportunity for expansion. According to President Adam Sussman, the goal is to appeal to a broader audience.
“This is absolutely about expansion,” said president Adam Sussman.
“This is also an expansion in terms of having these experiences appeal to a wide variety of audiences, ranging from kids to teens to adults.”
Integrated parental controls and safety features ensure a secure gaming environment for players of all ages.
LEGO Fortnite, crafted inside Fortnite and powered by Unreal Engine 5, features Chaos physics and destruction that enables players to interact realistically with bricks, mirroring the physical world of LEGO.
The game’s expansive playable space, 19 times the size of the Fortnite Battle Royale Island, is seamlessly streamed using World Partition.
In the original Fortnite Battle Royale, players win by eliminating competitors and remaining the sole survivor on the island.
The LEGO game has two options, with the “survival” mode pitting contestants against skeletons and menacing wolf-life figures and the more innocuous “sandbox” option lacking such threats and geared towards younger users.
One surprising detail of LEGO Fortnite you’ll encounter upfront is how robust and generous its server system is. You can create a server in seconds and invite friends to your world. By default, worlds aren’t persistent.
Friends are considered “visitors” who can craft and build alongside you. However, if the host leaves the world, visitors will be kicked out and forced drop everything in their inventory.
A world can become persistent if the world owner gives a friend a “world key.” Players with keys to a world can play on it even if the owner is offline. The owner can hand out up to seven keys, with a maximum of eight players possible on a server at once.
It’s similar to how Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, handles its official Realms servers in Minecraft, but what’s wild is that Fortnite is letting millions of players set up persistent worlds entirely for free, making LEGO Fortnite one of the most accommodating and accessible survival games around.
To celebrate the launch, colossal LEGO brick-built Supply Llamas have emerged in New York, London, Tokyo, and Sydney. Standing 12 feet tall and comprised of 234,623 LEGO bricks, these structures offer fans a chance to engage in family-building activities during the launch weekend.
Beyond the gaming realm, Epic Games and the LEGO Group plan to unveil additional LEGO-themed games inside Fortnite in early 2024. This collaboration extends to creating digital twins of physical LEGO elements, bridging the realms of physical and digital play like never before.
Thursday’s announcement marks the first significant project between Lego and Epic since the company announced in April 2022 that it, along with Sony, would invest USD$2 billion in the North Carolina company.
Niels B. Christiansen, CEO of the LEGO Group, emphasises their dedication to developing “digital play experiences that are designed to be fun and safe and have the potential to bridge the worlds of physical and digital play to inspire kids.”
“Together with Epic Games, we are building digital worlds designed with kids in mind from the outset – we hope other creators and brands are inspired to do the same.”
Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder of Epic Games, sees LEGO Fortnite as “a new way [for players] to express themselves through worldbuilding and is an important step forward in the evolution of the Fortnite ecosystem.”
“We look forward to continuing to partner with The LEGO Group to build immersive digital play spaces that are fun for kids and all types of players.”
Adam Sussman, president of Epic Games, predicted broad interest for the game. “This is really a product that is going to attract lots of kids but we also think it will attract teens and adults as well,” Sussman said.
LEGO Fortnite will compete with massively popular video games such as Minecraft or Animal Crossing.
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“For the industry, it’s great to have many hits, not a single hit,” Sussman said.
“When something is very popular, like this particular genre, the walls are very wide, (and) there’s massive opportunities for innovation.”
—with AFP
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