After we talked about Fortnite: Battle Royale last week, Greazy-E installed it on the PS4 here in our office and a stream of people from the building found themselves drawn inexorably toward it. Except Kiko. Kiko is staying out on principle.

A phenomena that started at Mike’s house and then filtered into our celestial realm here is to spectate the match out and watch your lineage. Maybe it’s technically the reverse of a lineage, but still. It’s so engaging that there has to be a way to make it part of the game proper.

Having spent more time with this bizarre entity, my head is spinning. First of all, I wasn’t aware that Fornite: Battle Royale was a completely separate free download. I’d sort of assumed that the entire purpose was to act as a candy coating to get the client on your box, but no: it’s some kind of multiphasic cluster lure. If you choose the base game from the main menu, it tells you you have to buy it. Which, you know, Gabe did. He wanted to support them for the other game, because there really isn’t any monetization substrate in Battle Royale. It’s almost purely about asserting the raw fact of its existence.

Also, I suggested it was “interesting” last time, but the way the endgame shifts when it’s about resources and construction is beyond fascinating and constitutes a far more interesting denouement - a word I spelled correctly the very first time.

At this point, I really just want to see if Epic is prepared to do what needs to be done here. The headroom in Battle Royale is vast. There’s no ceiling on it, from introducing their third faction from the PVE mode, to emphasizing the substantial trap component, to getting vehicle functionality in there, to carving the island into two massive teams… It’s like this. Right now the conversation is about cloning or whatever. They could change that very quickly, if that’s what they wanted to do; if they were here with the intention to stay.

Hey! Tomorrow at 3pm PDT, we’ve got a sponsored stream for Asmadi Games’ One Deck Dungeon, with the designer of the game Chris Cieslik. My friend Eric Benson and I have played the fuck out of it, and I’m looking forward to having Chris explain to me all the ways I’ve been playing it wrong.

(CW)TB out.