Fortnite Battle Royale is a 2017 battle royale video game produced by Epic Games. Part of the overall Fortnite platform, the game follows up to 100 players competing to be the last player or team remaining. Matches begin with players descending onto a large island, where they gather weapons, items, and resources from scattered locations while attempting to avoid damage from other players and a continuously shrinking safe zone. A building system allows players to use gathered resources—wood, stone, and metal—to create temporary structures that can be used for movement, defense, or combat. The game is played from a third-person perspective, with the camera positioned behind the player character's shoulder.
The game features a live background narrative divided into chapters and seasons, each bringing changes to the island, gameplay, and cosmetic content. Players may purchase an in-game currency, V-Bucks, through the in-game Item Shop, to buy cosmetic items such as outfits and emotes. A seasonal "Battle Pass", also purchased with V-Bucks, features tiers—levels that players unlock by earning XP through gameplay, each rewarding their own cosmetic item. New modes have been introduced since launch, including Zero Build, which removes building mechanics, as well as ranked gameplay and other special formats with different rulesets. Some modes and updates are tied to promotional collaborations with film, television, and music properties.
Development began in mid-2017, following the popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Built using assets from Fortnite: Save the World, the mode was originally planned as part of the paid version of Fortnite, but was released separately as a free title. Epic Games launched the mode after two months of development, later assigning a dedicated team to support its rapid growth. The game expanded to additional platforms, including consoles and mobile devices, and later introduced cross-platform play and moved to a newer version of Unreal Engine.
Fortnite Battle Royale has received widespread attention and commercial success, with hundreds of millions of registered players and significant revenue across multiple platforms. Critics praised the building mechanics, accessibility, frequent content updates, and cross-platform functionality, while having concerns about its monetization system and learning curve. The game has had a broad cultural reach, appearing in live events such as esports and licensed media, and has been involved in disputes related to copyright, platform policies, consumer protection, and digital privacy.
Gameplay
The core gameplay of Fortnite Battle Royale follows the standard structure of the battle royale genre, played from a third-person perspective. Matches typically consist of up to 100 players, either competing individually or in squads of two, three, or four. Each round begins with players skydiving from a flying "Battle Bus" and landing on the island map. The island features a fixed layout with various named landmarks and points of interest. These locations contain randomly scattered chests that hold weapons, shields, and other combat resources. Only five items at a time can be stored in the inventory. Weapons are divided into rarities that dictate how much damage they inflict: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary, Mythic, and Exotic.
The primary objective is to be the last player or team remaining, achieved by either eliminating opponents or avoiding them. In solo play, players are immediately eliminated once their health is fully depleted, but in squad modes, they become incapacitated and may be revived by teammates. Originally, eliminated players were removed from the match entirely, but an update in April 2019 introduced "Reboot Vans" that allow teammates to revive a fallen player. These vans are scarce and typically placed in exposed locations, making the act of reviving a teammate a risk. Throughout the match, the playable area of the island, represented by the eye of a storm, gradually shrinks, and players outside the safe zone take increasing damage over time. This directs the surviving players into tighter spaces, forcing player encounters. Hostile non-player characters (NPCs}, introduced in February 2020, can be defeated for additional or improved loot, while friendly NPCs, added in December 2020, offer services such as selling items, healing players, or temporarily joining the player as AI-controlled allies.
Fortnite Battle Royales main distinction from other battle royale games is the building system. Using the pickaxe, the only item given at the start of each game, nearly every object in the environment can be destroyed and harvested for materials—wood, stone, and metal—which players use to construct temporary structures like walls, ramps, floors, and roofs. These structures can serve to navigate the terrain, block incoming fire, or hinder enemy movement. Lighter materials allow for quick builds but are easily destroyed, while stronger materials are more durable but slower to place.
Fortnite Battle Royale is free-to-play and monetized via microtransactions, allowing players to purchase "V-Bucks," a shared currency also usable in another Fortnite gamemode, Save the World. Players can earn V-Bucks in Save the World by completing missions and daily objectives, then spend them in Battle Royale on cosmetic upgrades—such as outfits, gliders (items from which player characters hang when descending onto the island), emotes (discrete dance moves), backpacks, and pickaxes—in the Item Shop, which features a daily rotation of purchasable cosmetics. The game is structured into chapters, each containing several seasons that typically last ten weeks. Every season introduces a new set of cosmetic items available through a "Battle Pass", which players progress through by gaining experience via gameplay or completing different challenges. A selection of rewards is free, but purchasing the full Battle Pass with V-Bucks grants access to all tiered rewards, and players can also spend V-Bucks to skip tiers. In December 2020, Epic launched the "Fortnite Crew" subscription, providing members with the latest Battle Pass, a monthly V-Bucks stipend, and exclusive cosmetic content.
Epic Games has continuously added new features to Fortnite Battle Royale, including weapons, vehicles, and items. The company can deploy spontaneous software updates called hotfixes to quickly adjust gameplay elements such as weapon stats and item spawn rates. Items may also be cycled out of the game in a process known as "vaulting" if they are unbalanced or unpopular. In December 2018, Epic simultaneously launched Fortnite Creative, a mode allowing players to create anything they wanted, and "The Block", a rotating showcase of community-made creations added to the Battle Royale island. One year later, Epic released the "Battle Lab" mode, which allowed players to design custom battle royale experiences, but this was removed due to the expanded capabilities of Creative mode. In April 2020, Epic introduced "Party Royale," a separate, combat-free map designed for social interaction and live events, where players can use non-lethal items such as paint guns and vehicles. Before September 2019, matchmaking was primarily determined by platform and region, but an update introduced skill-based matchmaking, using internal metrics to evaluate player performance and match them with similarly skilled players. Epic also added AI-controlled bots into regular matches, allowing new or less experienced players to practice mechanics and strategies more comfortably.
Special modes Epic Games has introduced several distinct game modes to Fortnite since 2022.
"Zero Build" was introduced in March 2022. This mode removed the traditional building mechanics and added an "overshield" feature, giving an additional regenerating set of HP. Initially replacing standard Battle Royale during the first week of Chapter 3 Season 2, Zero Build became a permanent standalone option in April 2022. Epic later added the "Zero Builds Trials"—a series of objectives in the "Zero Build" mode that awarded cosmetics upon completion—in April 2022. A "Ranked" mode was introduced for both standard and Zero Build gameplay across all team sizes in May 2023, adjusting matchmaking based on player performance. Ranked mode was eventually extended to newer game types. "Fortnite Reload" launched in June 2024, featuring a map rotation of smaller islands, with 40-player matches, limited weapon selection, and automatic revival upon death (respawning) except in the final moments. It supports one to four-person, Zero Build, and Ranked gameplay. "Fortnite OG" debuted in December 2024, bringing back the original Chapter 1 map with rotating seasonal changes and mostly legacy mechanics and items. "Blitz Royale" was released in June 2025, where 32 players fight on a smaller map with the playable area shrinking rapidly. Every player starts with the same items and can often find more "mythic" and "exotic" tiered weapons as their rank increases.
Beyond permanent modes, Epic has experimented with limited-time modes (LTMs). One of the earliest was 50v50, which divided players into two large teams on opposite sides of the island, giving them time to gather resources and build defenses before the storm forced confrontation. In June 2018, Epic released the Playground LTM, a sandbox mode for up to four players, allowing them to freely manipulate the island and fight with the ability to respawn. Eventually, Epic declared it permanent, but it was replaced by Battle Lab in 2019 when Playground moved to Creative. A preliminary competitive mode, Solo Showdown, ran briefly starting in May 2018, ranking players by final placement and rewarding top competitors with V-Bucks. In 2025, Fortnite Delulu was introduced as an LTM featuring up to 80 players and a proximity chat system—where players can speak to each other through voice chat based on how close they are to each other—allowing solo-queued players to organically team up mid-match, though only four players could win. Crown Jam, a collaboration with Fall Guys featuring 3v3 basketball-inspired matches between players controlling Fall Guys avatars, was introduced on January 23, 2026, and concluded on February 9.
Narrative, seasonal changes and promotional events
When initially released and through the first few seasons, there was no arching narrative to Fortnite Battle Royale; the island map changed with seasons but without explanation. A firmer narrative started with the transition from third to fourth season in Chapter 1. Leading to the end of season three, players saw a number of shooting stars cross the skies, followed by a giant comet that neared the ground; upon the start of that season, the comet had hit one of the locations on the island, leaving a giant crater, among other changes. This coincided with the introduction of superhero- and supervillain-themed cosmetic items. More recent seasons have used custom created global events that occur across all Battle Royale series at the same, either as a story event, or season or chapter-ending event that explains significant map changes in the following season. The first such event involved a countdown culminating in the launch of a rocket in June 2018. The aftermath of this event created cracks in the sky, which eventually expanded into a "rift" that served as the narrative basis for Chapter 1, Season 5.