yellow fortnite balloons
Fortnite has never been short on challenges that ask you to find a certain number of a certain thing around the map. Gnomes, ducks, posters, whatever--it's a classic challenge format, and we've seen it any number of times. At first blush, yesterday's 'Pop 10 Golden Balloons' challenge looks a lot like this, and on a certain level, it is. There's a twist this time around, however, and it changes the way the challenge and the game around it functions: unlike the gnomes, the balloons can only be popped by one player each game. Once it's popped, it's popped.
It's effectively the first competitive challenge that we've seen in the game so far. Some challenges have had multiplayer elements--throwing tomatoes at people and the like--and they all have an element of people trying to muck it up for others. But this is the first one that I can think of where another player's success actually means your failure: it's kind of like a battle royale in miniature, which is an important thing for the game to recreate. Winning a battle royale is out of reach for a huge number of players, and smaller challenges like this offer a way to feel successful without a victory royale. A challenge like this ups the ante a little bit, offering up a greater challenge than just going to a location and completing a task.
(Update: The fireworks challenge also worked this way, I had forgotten. So it's more of a season-long concept.)
Like the treasure chest-opening challenge, this one also has a natural difficulty curve built into it. Yesterday diehard challenge completionists were fighting tooth and nail over the things, but today I was able to find an unpopped balloon even six or seven minutes into the match. I felt excited to see it, which is not usually something I feel when I run into one of many Macguffins scattered around the map on a different week.
We write a lot of Fortnite guides here at Forbes, and it's been fascinating to watch every week as Epic's relationship to what might otherwise be a pretty straightforward game system continues to change. The thing is, challenges actually constitute core gameplay here: for many people, it's the primary way of interacting with the game, and it forms a key weekly rhythm even for players that might not really notice a new item added or anything like that. A battle royale game is inherently unstructured, and challenges offer a bit of structure.
This season we've seen some good progress made: this week's Stormwing challenges are genuinely interesting and challenging, as well. And we've also seen these new secret challenges with the prisoner, which are using the basic "challenge" setup combined with a progressive skin to actually tell a simple narrative on a much more involved level than the game has tried before. I'm excited to see where we go with this next season because Epic seems to finally be realizing how central these things are to the game.
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