Fortnite Battle Royale will have the “same gameplay” on mobile devices

Enlarge / Mobile Fortnite matches will start just like this, except without the "space bar" control tip.

For years now, gamers have gotten used to popular, big-budget console and PC games coming to mobile phones in the form of cheesy, heavily scaled-down "companion experiences" like match-three games or mindless screen-tappers. So it was a bit surprising late last night when Epic Games announced that the upcoming mobile and tablet versions of Fortnite: Battle Royale would be "the same 100-player game you know from PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Mac. Same gameplay, same map, same content, same weekly updates."

As if to emphasize the identical nature of this mobile port, Sony will enable Cross Play and Cross Progression between the PS4 and mobile/tablet versions, as well as with the existing PC and Mac versions (which used to require some workarounds to play with the PS4). It's an interesting move from a console maker that continues to stand in the way of cross-console play between the PS4 and Xbox One or Switch. Fortnite briefly and accidentally proved such cross-console play was possible back in September, and Epic Games later said players "deserve" such features.

Epic Community Manager Nick Chester clarified in a tweet that players will be able to opt into cross-platform matchmaking queues or stick with players on the same platform. That's probably a good thing, because Chester also confirmed that mobile players will be stuck with touchscreen controls initially, with controller support planned for "later." Though we haven't seen Fortnite's planned mobile control scheme yet, we'd imagine it will end up being a significant handicap compared to players with controllers or a mouse/keyboard setup.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments