When Epic teased Fortnite's new season a few weeks ago, I was stoked to see the battle royale game get a cyberpunk makeover. But after thinking about Fortnite's approach to map design, I quickly realized that this cool new metropolis would only be taking over one portion of the map. Sure enough, when I booted the game up, the cyberpunkening had come to one small section, Mega City, a dense and highly vertical sector that fills the same role Tilted Towers has in the past.

Mega City is cool, don't get me wrong. It has neon-drenched skyscrapers, grind rails, speedy motorcycles, and ropes that allow you to zip from the top of a building to the street below in seconds. It's a cool area, but it's just a single piece of a map that also includes a remote arctic laboratory, multiple fortresses, a mine, and bamboo forests.

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This is how Epic approaches Fortnite's map design. Its genre predecessor PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has multiple maps and each one feels internally consistent. Vikendi is snowy. Sanhok is covered in dense jungle. Miramar is a sandy desert. But Fortnite has always rejected that model, opting instead to cram a ton of variety into a single playground. PUBG's maps feel like individual regions in a big open-world game, but Fortnite's map functions like an open-world map in miniature. It's like if Aloy could run from Horizon Zero Dawn's jungles in the south to the Frozen Wilds in the north in five minutes.

via Epic

As a design choice, it has major advantages. Fortnite has always felt excitingly dynamic because each place you land feels drastically different from other places on the map. As the game has consistently improved its movement, with slides, grind rails, characters like Spider-Man and the upcoming Eren Yeager who can swing through the air, and a new sword that lets you warp toward your opponent, it has only gotten more fun to travel across the map and wildly different environments ensure that you'll see something cool along the way.

But it also feels like Epic is hedging its bets. Though the ads for MEGA have been very neon forward, players who don't like that aesthetic can still get classic Fortnite on most of the map. That's nice for them, but it feels like limiting the game to one map holds it back from fully exploring design ideas. The extent of Mega City is some skyscrapers, a tangle of grind rails, and streets to race around on. But if Epic committed to doing a full cyberpunk map, it would push it to greater invention. As it stands, it's a fairly surface level futuristic Tilted Towers facelift. But if Epic had to redo the whole map, we could get its take on ripper docs, hovercraft lots and skylanes, various neighborhoods, shops, and more.

We tend to think of artists being most creative when they're presented with a blank canvas and told to go wild. But, great ideas often emerge from constraints. Epic having to push itself to fill a whole map with thematically consistent ideas could produce its best work yet.

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