Interview with Fortnite: Survive the Storm Exec Producer Zak Phelps at PAX West 2017
With a host of zombie games across all platforms and styles, it is important to find a way to stand out among the competition. Fortnite, from Epic Games, is a combination defense, wave, and scavenger/building experience with a more lighthearted soul. Regardless of the fact it’s full of zombies, the game uses cartoony graphics and lovable characters in an amusing setting to make it an experience more enjoyable to gamers of all ages. In fact, Fortnite seems like the bigger brother of EA’s Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare when it comes to presentation. Fortnite had a fantastic booth at PAX West 2017, – complete with pinata-smashing cage – where they showed off their latest update, Survive the Storm. Executive producer Zak Phelps was on hand to spare a few words about Fortnite and the new update, check it out below.
Fortnite is a co-op survival sandbox game where players must scavenge materials from everything in their surroundings and use them to build a protective fortress, a focal point for your team to defend against the waves of zombies known as Husks. The new update, Survive the Storm, is a limited time event that offers an all new, more difficult survival mode with increasingly powerful husks. There will also be Mutant Storms, adding a new level of difficulty as they can cause random effects such as cutting your max health or making Husks more powerful, and all new hydraulic weapons to craft for leveling the oncoming horde of the undead.
Fortnite is currently playable in Early Access on PC, macOS, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and will open up as a free-to-play game in 2018. Survive the Storm is the latest update to the game which launched on August 29th and will run for a limited time. Players can select how long they wish to engage in the update, ranging from three to 14 days.
