Frankly, I’m surprised this didn’t happen a little sooner, but Fortnite has now introduced a new mode in Early Access that makes it a much more traditional shooter and competes with an entirely new genre, similar to Call of Duty, with Fortnite twists.

That mode is Fortnite Ballistic, available to try out now, where you play 5v5 games in first person. With Fortnite still trying to maintain its T-for-Teen rating, players explode into little confetti cubes when killed.

The game isn’t just about killing, but more about planting a bomb while the defenders try to prevent it. So Counter-Strike, although of course there are many other games that have used this format. The rules:

• No respawning during rounds
• Ends when a bomb explodes or a team is completely dead.
• After six rounds the sides switch.
• The first team to win seven rounds wins.
• The game uses a CS-style economic system with starting weapons and the ability to purchase upgrades and equipment throughout the game.
• If you survive a round, you keep your equipment and shields, but no consumables.
• You can share items with your teammates.
• There are ranked and unranked modes.

There is only one map and it starts with not many weapons and items. Epic plans to add more maps and gear over time, as this is still technically an early test. I have no doubt this will be quite popular as Epic looks to conquer another genre with its Fortnite juggernaut, although there are few games harder to gain traction than something like CSGO. Valorant…maybe they have a better chance there.

We’ll see how players react to this, and I’m excited to see if FPS players from other games might stop by Fortnite to try this out. It’ll apparently feel very simple for a while, but hopefully Epic doesn’t wait too long to expand the mode, as a single map will likely become outdated pretty quickly, even if it’s a completely new way to play Fortnite.

Elsewhere, Chapter 6, Season 1 continues, and the game has also relaunched OG Fortnite as a permanent addition. Combined with all the other game modes, this becomes a sprawling, all-encompassing network of games rather than something unique, and it’s easy to see that the long-term plan here is to keep going until even more genres are covered. We’ll see how Fortnite CSGO fares here.

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