Fortnite's "OG" Season is hilarious

2017-18 hardly qualifies as nostalgic. Just me?

Fortnite: Battle Royale’s “Chapter 4 Season OG” is launching out of nowhere and it’s weirdly hilarious to me. The concept? Remove all of the bloat, map changes, weapons, items, etc. and return the game to something resembling its “prerelease beta” state in 2017-18.

I mean, I get it. That was my favorite time to play Fortnite, but it was less because of the limited gear and more because the game was new and everyone wasn’t such a damn try-hard. This was the one time that you could hop in half-lost, still learning the game, and maybe score a couple of respectable kills before you were inevitably demolished by someone doing in-house quarantine before it was trendy.

Nowadays, Fortnite isn’t such a forgiving place. In every match, you’re up against almost 100 other players, so odds are about a dozen of them are going to be people who have been grinding the game for hours a day since, well, 2017. Sure, you might cut down a few other newbies, but you’re going to be decimated pretty quickly — you won’t even get close to that victory royale.

“Fortnite OG” basically admits to something gamers have been discussing for a long time while developers and publishers have attempted to shush them — that when it comes to live-services games, where the content is ever-changing and ever-expanding, there are going to be the “golden times” people look back upon more fondly than the current-day game. It’s just inevitable.

For a lot of Fortnite players, that was those chaotic and poorly-coordinated drops into Tilted Towers. Oh, wow! The announcement page on Epic Games’ Fortnite blog includes a screen grab of Tilted Towers? Imagine my surprise.

All that said, I can’t make fun of Fortnite players for being excited about Season OG. I would absolutely kill for a similar treatment in Team Fortress 2, which I maintain is a hodge-podge mess ever since hats and other cosmetic items were introduced. The game doesn’t even maintain a consistent art style these days, and hasn’t for — crap, has it been over a decade already?

As fun as live-service games are, it’s always a shame to know that the best years are behind them — Gaia Online was a blast in the 00’s but went downhill in a hurry. Splitgate came and went in quick fashion, which is an absolute shame given it beat Halo at its own game. Destiny was fun before they started “vaulting” old content. The list goes on.

But would you believe it, there’s an even better way to know when a game’s going downhill than listening to some keyboard warrior like myself: that’s right, I’m talking about player count.

According to ActivePlayer.io, Fortnite’s player count sank by 2% in July, a further 1% in August, 3% in September and yet another 3% in October. Sure, 223 million players is still an absolute crapload, but let’s be real — executives need that new super yacht, and a 9% player count loss over four months is not a yacht-funding number.

The solution? Nostalgia bait! What do you know, they’re already up 3% thanks to Fortnite OG. Look, I can’t argue with success, but I sure can laugh at it.