After playing PUBG‘s genuinely awesome new map earlier this week, I decided to embrace my battle royale fever and play some Fortnite as well. Relearning that game’s particular rhythm and playstyle has been fun but there’s one problem: I hate the in-game map.
I consider myself a cautious battle royale player. I try to pick quieter areas to drop into, fight small battles and play an extended mid-game that gets me into the top 10 with a fair amount of consistency. Luck is always a factor, too. One of the tools essential to my strategy is a solid in-game map that I can easily read and manipulate on the fly. Fortnite Battle Royale‘s just doesn’t meet my needs.
This is what the map looks like in PUBG:
The colour scheme is drab but the roads and houses are very visible. The off-white icons pop out from the background and make it easy to spot even the smallest locations. I can scroll my mouse wheel to zoom in and I can click and drag to move my view on the zoomed-in map. It’s a highly functional and straightforward map whose legibility and usability have served me well.
Here’s the map in Fortnite:
OK, this isn’t the worst map. In fact, it’s rather nice to look at due to all of the vibrant colour adding a lot of character. The Moisty Mire looks dark and brown and awful. Tilted Towers sticks out like the sore thumb that it is. Fortnite‘s map does a good job of giving the player a sense of the world, but it’s not great for figuring out where to go.
Smaller locations in Fortnite aren’t as important as they are in PUBG, but they’re still useful for looting purposes and yet are hard to immediately locate on the map. When I zoom in, something you couldn’t do for a while, unless there’s some kind of secret ritual that I’m unaware of, I can’t click and drag the map to move my perspective.
I need to zoom out, move my cursor, and zoom back in. The map might be charming but it’s not great for someone like me who often refers to her map in order to plot out actions.
I know a lot of this will change as I get more familiar with Fortnite‘s game world. I’ll be able to intuit where to go and the best places to build my own hideouts so that I don’t need to worry as much about consulting the map. Fortnite‘s fast pace of play will likely preclude me from needing to look at it all that much at all.
But for the moment, as I re-adjust to that rhythm, the map frustrates me. It’s a pretty picture but an insufficient map.
Comments
10 responses to “Fortnite’s Map Is Annoying”
I understand you are a PUBG lover, but you got to understand that PUBG map is so dull, and provides no reference to what the building actually look like while standing on the ground.
Something that fortnight also does well is give you a view of the map will in the bus. Which allows you to see specific building you may want to land at. Although PUBG does this as well, the colours and contrast in fortnite just allows visual descriptions to be so much easier than just shouting, “Go behind the rock at 200, next to generic building 1”
Play more and learn the locations of the smaller lot spots, the problem isn’t the map, its you’re lack of knowledge and commitment to learn before writing a non-article. So typical these days that people prefer everything splayed out in front of them over putting some effort in and learning for yourself.
So basically what you’re saying is “learn the entire map off by heart so you don’t need it anyway”? The whole point of maps is to figure out where to go and where things are because you don’t already know.
The map for this game has minimal use and that use is basically to let your squad know where you’re dropping so they can go to Tilted Towers. everything else comes from playing and experience, theres nothing wrong with exploring and dying, honestly it’s only going to make you a better player. I would also argue that “knowing the map off by heart” will also make you a better player, I’m far more responsive to a callout “Enemies coming out of Factories NE” over “Enemies NE” and relying at my map or compass to find NE.
not only that, there are tons of unnamed locations that the community has given nicknames, places you’ll learn about by playing the game instead of whinging about it.
Ok, but you’re still essentially saying “the map is useless” or “the map doesn’t need to be good”. So it’s hardly a counter point to “the map is bad”.
I’ve played quite a bit of Fortnite now, but I could hardly tell you which buildings are which in Tilted, let alone where every little house is. I use the map the same way I use the PUBG map – deciding where to drop, planning where to go next, marking exactly where enemies are. All of those things are made difficult in Fortnite by its low res, over the top and clunky map. Sure, I manage fine without it. But I don’t understand why you’d argue that some part of the game shouldn’t be improved.
The one thing I can agree with you on is that you should be able to drag the map around once you are zoomed in, which like you said, was a recent feature made available. Apart from that, I don’t see any real issue with the map. You can zoom in and get a detailed view of the smaller locations, and once you’ve had some time checking them out, you can ascertain their value and whether they are worth visiting. You can view the map while in the waiting zone, zooming in and out and even marking where you would like to go, and even see where the bus enters and exits on the map and which route it takes. Moisty Mire looks dark and brown because it’s in the name – and it’s still a more pleasant colour and more representative of the location than the entire freaking PUBG map. Tilted Towers stands out as much as El Pozo does, it’s a location with more infrastructure than anywhere else on the island. Which makes it a tempting location, but it’s somewhere I routinely ignore and you can do so to. And smaller locations are useful in Fortnite, and just like PUBG, don’t have names. My personal recommendations are the buildings to the west of loot lake – each usually has at least one treasure chest, theres usually a number of weapons, you can put up a floor trap easily and they are great hiding spaces. The motel to the north of loot lake has quite a few weapons, usually one or more treasure chests, and is great for looting. There’s a couple small buildings nearby as well which are great for looting. And the trailer park, just east and slightly north of retail row usually has a few treasure chests, a number of weapons and is secluded enough to generally get a few things without getting your ass shot.
This non-article is frustrating because you have only one sentence that could be considered a genuine grievance, and we know how fast the team is iterating and adding to the game. Heck, on this very website I read how a teacher asked them to implement a change and it was done almost immediately.
Go play it some more and then come back with something more meaningful to say.
Pubg map is terrible. The main reason I switched to fortnite, and you know, that game actually works.
Fortnite map is lush, with easily recognisable locations. You always know where you are.
There is nothing wrong with it at all.
P.S. the best place to land is flush factory. Has about 8 chests in close proximity, and the factory district right next to it has about 10. Running from flush you have the high ground on it, meaning you can easily kill whoever is there and take the loot they found for you.
How is the PUBG map terrible?
I play both, and overall agree with the sentiment of the article.
I actually think smaller buildings in Fortnite are more useful than PUBG (thanks to chests), but at least you can see them on the PUBG map. I often want to find little houses/shacks in Fortnite but can’t see them because the map is so busy and over the top.
Ultimately they’re completely different games, and the map in Fortnite isn’t nearly as important as in PUBG anyway. You don’t need clearly defined terrain because you can build over anything, and you don’t need the smaller gridlines because judging distances is mostly irrelevant.
Yeah, i thought the same thing when i first switched from PUBG to fortnite.
But in reality there are many less little loot spots and the map is smaller in general so you can easily memorise an area after dropping there a couple times. Plus you can usually SEE the next little loot spot to go because its all generally pretty close.
Honestly i find the zoom function they just added to be annoying because they added it to the button you used to use for targeting a point on the map (on controller this is. I play on both xbox and PC with different friends)
Get good