Fortnite, released last July for the PS4, Xbox One and PC, is best described as a game that’s kinda like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). But now it’s truly setting itself apart with a mobile port.
The mobile version of Fortnite, announced on Thursday by Epic Games, is ambitious: It’ll feature the same 100-player battle royale gameplay that its console brethren is famous for (and which PUBG initially made a phenomenon). Even more impressively, the iOS and Android games will feature cross-play with the PC and PS4 versions.
“Same gameplay, same map, same content, same weekly updates,” a post on Epic’s site read. “In partnership with our friends at Sony, Fortnite Battle Royale will support Cross Play and Cross Progression between PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, iOS and eventually Android.”
If you’re not familiar with the battle royale concept, it’s where you and a bunch of other players — 100, in the case of Fortnite — are dropped into a map and battle until there’s only one person left.
Conspicuously absent from cross-play is the Xbox One version, while a beta for the iOS port of Fortnite begins next Monday.
Patch 3.2, released Friday, adds a new game mode, a new skin called Burnout and bug fixes all around. The new game mode, called 20v20v20v20v20, lets you play the game with five teams of 20 people to see which team wins. With this new mode, you stand a better chance of getting chests to make the game fast-paced and more deadly than in other game modes.
Obviously inspired by PUBG, Fortnite has become a giant unto itself. Fueled mainly by its free battle royale mode (the Save the World mode, in which you team with other players to kill monsters, currently costs $40, £33 and AU$60), the game was reported last month to have hit 3.4 million concurrent players, beating PUBG’s record of 3.2 million. Fortnite had 45 million downloads as of January.
First published March 8, 8:41 p.m. PT.
Update, March 9 at 1:58 p.m. PT: Adds information on a patch released Friday.
