Mixer star Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins has revealed why he thinks Call of Duty’s Warzone will benefit Fortnite, with the Gulag being something he’d love to see Epic Games “compete” with.
The battle royale genre has been saturated for some time now, with PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, Blackout and now Warzone each commanding huge player bases.
While Fortnite is arguably the biggest of those, a lot of players, including Ninja, feel that the player base is not being given enough reasons to stick with it. He has recently commented on both the Chapter 2 map and his feelings that Epic are making it too difficult for players to return to the game if they have taken a break.
The 28-year-old has now turned his attention to the matches themselves, as well as the possibility of introducing popular features from other battle royales into Fortnite.
“I wonder if Epic is gonna do anything to try and compete with Warzone’s Gulag,” he said. “Maybe not for competitive, but some sort of way to get back in the game. With Warzone having 150 people and this having 100 in solos and duos… there’s gotta be more ways to keep the numbers up.”
Ninja stated that too many players are dying early on in Season 2 of Chapter 2, to the point where players struggle to find opponents after the first few minutes of a game.
He compared this to Warzone, which has a 1v1 feature to allow dead players to drop back in, as well as starting with 150 players. This, Ninja suggested, allows Warzone matches to be far more action heavy than those in Fortnite.
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“I wonder [about] 125 people in regular solos,” he continued. “126 in duos. But that doesn’t necessarily mean more players will spread out… I think that’s the biggest problem right now with pubs – people don’t try to win as much as they used to.”
He suggested that players are far more interested in kills than they are staying alive, which is a partial cause of the high number of deaths in the opening minutes of a game. Earlier in Fortnite’s lifespan players were more likely to hide in buildings, bushes or towers in order to stay alive, he said.
The final area of critique Ninja gave was relating to the new Chapter 2 map. Blevins suggested that a lack of viable landing spots causes players to land in similar areas, meaning many are killed very quickly.
In the game’s current build, players can revive teammates by retrieving reboot cards and taking them to reboot vans. This idea, originally from Apex Legends, is pretty difficult to carry out.
A 1v1 mode similar to Warzone’s Gulag would make it much easier for players to drop back in, and would result in 50% of players eliminated being able to respawn.
With criticism building about Chapter 2’s second season, we’ll have to see what Epic do to keep the game fresh and enjoyable.