Fortnite has recently surpassed PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on all fronts, but there’s still a few features that the more realistic battle royale title does better than its Pixar-style counterpart. One of these features is the replay mode, which has added a whole other sense enjoyment. Killed by a seemingly random grenade, or sniped from the middle of nowhere? The replay mode in PUBG allows you to revisit the game you just played and see exactly where you were killed from, along with everything else that happened across the map.
All of this is now coming to Fortnite Battle Royale. In the reveal video from Ali-A above, you can see the replay mode in action, with a plethora of options that will make even professional videographers shimmer with glee. There’s plenty of angles and cameras that can be used, a variety of effects, and it will no doubt result in some beautiful Fortnite edits on YouTube from content creators that wouldn’t be able to produce such content otherwise. Catch a glimpse of a beautiful shot in-game that you want to revisit? Now you can with replay mode. Fortnite is a gorgeous experience and now you can take photos from anywhere across the island, share them on social media, set them as your wallpaper, do anything you want with them.
But replay mode means so much more to Fortnite than just amateur content creators unleashing their hidden talent. With the first competitive season expected to start within the next couple of months, the new replay mode will no doubt be the foundation for any sort of caster mode Epic will introduce. We can expect in-depth analysis during games, pro players and teams can look back on replays and figure out where they went wrong, while aspiring professionals can use their replays to learn from their mistakes
Picture this: Ninja, representing Luminosity Gaming, is in a final 1v1 against Myth from TSM. They’re in an epic build battle, clambering to the skies, before Myth runs out of ammo and his last remaining weapon is a sniper. Ninja builds above him, tries to get the drop and blast him in the face, but Myth no-scopes and takes Ninja out to earn himself a victory royale.
That’s an epic moment in and of itself, but with the new replay mode, we’ll be able to watch it go down from all angles. Casters will be able to predict players next moves, analyse what they should’ve done but didn’t, and ultimately slow the footage down to a fraction of a second and see just how lucky Myth was that Ninja’s shotgun shells missed him.
This replay mode is undoubtedly the first step to turning Fortnite into the next big esport and can lead to many exciting opportunities for casual players, pro players, content creators and more. But ultimately we don’t know exactly what the mode will contain, aside from a few shots of it in action during Ali-A’s video. So what does it need? Quite simply, the more options there are available for players to use, the better. Plenty of angles, effects, speeds and more will be required for the replay mode to do everything current content creators already do with programs like Premiere Pro and Sony Vegas.
If they release the replay mode alongside custom games, then we will see some incredible content, to the point where roleplay videos in the style of Red vs Blue would be possible. Players could create enormous structures and do timelapse videos similar to what we currently see in Minecraft, enormous obstacle courses could be set up, players could play around with the physics and discover fascinating ideas that simply aren’t possible in the confines of a normal game, with players trying to kill you and the circle closing in.
The possibilities for something like this truly are endless. Epic Games' history is looking a little spotty after the shuttering of Paragon and their apparent abandonment of Save The World, but if their Battle Royale track record is anything to go by, we can be sure they’ll implement this before too long and that they’ll do it well.
