Fortnite remains one of the most popular and influential games out there, and it’s no longer just a game, but instead a platform of sorts for all manner of different types of games and experiences. Epic’s Tim Sweeney believes Fortnite is basically an early version of the metaverse, and he recently spoke about this belief and how he sees the game growing and evolving over time.
“It’s going to evolve a lot,” Sweeney said. He spoke to researcher Matthew Ball about this recently, ahead of Fortnite’s seventh anniversary in August.
Fortnite as it exists today is limited by the available technology with which to build it. For example, Sweeney said the game’s battle royale mode is limited to 100 people because “computers in the data center were just too slow” when the game released. And Fortnite is divided into a number of different islands for a similar reason: The technology stack required to create one seamless experience is not there.
“So a lot of the things you see in there are not the permanent end state of what we see this medium being, but are just current crutches that we’re using to hobble by as we work towards the ultimate capabilities of the thing,” he said.
Sweeney said players can look forward to “really significant changes” to come, one of which is an “interoperable economy” that spans games beyond Fortnite. This will be “really freeing for people,” Sweeney said, though he didn’t elaborate on any potential partnerships or how this would work.
He went on to say that the Fortnite networking model today is “extremely limited,” saying the model from Unreal Engine 5 today is “remarkably similar” to what it was for Unreal Engine 1 in 1997. It has been improved over time, of course, but it still has tons of room to grow, Sweeney said.
“A Fortnite battle royale session is 100 players. There might be at peak hundreds of thousands of these servers running and there might be at peak over 10 million concurrent players online all at once, but they’re each in their own separate sharded copies of the world and they can’t see each other in that space. They can’t go anywhere to find each other all at once,” he said.
For Unreal Engine 6, Sweeney said a major aim is to improve the networking model to help support lots of concurrent players and the ability to move players between servers seamlessly. The scale could support a billion concurrent players in the future, Sweeney predicted.
“That’s got to be one of the goals of the technology. Otherwise, many genres of games just can never exist because the technology isn’t there to support them,” he said.
The end result for the user could be a “much larger simulation” for players than exists today. This could in turn lead to a combination of Fortnite’s existing content into “a seamless world as players want.”
“Some experiences will be better by themselves. If you want to build an awesome bespoke story-driven, single player or a co-op game, you might build it off in its own little corner of the world, no connections to the outside, but an awful lot of what we’re doing would be a whole lot better if it were all seamlessly connected,” Sweeney said.
Fortnite continues to grow and evolve
He likened this to Disney’s theme parks, which are connected by transport systems but exist in one big world. “You can go anywhere in this connected world and participate in any experience there. And what are creators doing instead of creating their own little isolated islands? They’re taking over a portion of space in the world and they’re defining the game roles there in different parts of space,” Sweeney said. For what it’s worth, Epic recently invested $1.5 billion into Epic to create… something in Fortnite, and fans are intrigued to see what that could be.
What’s more, Sweeney said he would like to see Fortnite embrace actual game code written by fans. “Things become really interesting when every creator’s code can interoperate with every creator’s code,” Sweeney said. “Everybody’s out creating their own really interesting objects and creating them using protocols that are provided by the system to enable them all to work together. So you might be riding a mount or an animal built by one creator and your friend might be driving a car built by another creator. You might be carrying a weapon built by a third creator, and you might be in a world maintained by dozens of other creators, and you might be moving seamlessly from place to place with all of these interactions happening.”
Sweeney said Epic could have achieved some of its goals already if it adopted Roblox’s setup where there are a “bunch of sharded islands deployed as quickly as possible.” However, Sweeney said Epic’s aim is to “build for the long term,” noting that he believes “an awful lot” of his vision for Fortnite will come to fruition by 2030.
Sweeney also spoke about Epic’s aim for Fortnite to contribute to the creation of a bigger and more robust metaverse. Fortnite of course has already done numerous crossovers with characters and people from other franchises, and things will only accelerate further, Sweeney believes.
The band Metallica recently came to Fortnite
“It’s going to take on a life of its own and really quickly transcend what it is today. It’s become very clear over the past few years that we’re in this steep growth curve that’s being driven by that,” he said. “This medium is emerging at an astonishing rate, and I think people have no idea how awesome it’s going to be by the end of this decade. But when you look at all the best capabilities of the top game engines, look at all the work being created for top movies in the film industry, all the work of all the car makers and of all the other storytellers and creators of all different kinds of games, and envision what the world is like when all of that comes together into a socially connected united economy which everybody can participate in, that’s going to be a whole new world. And that’s what we’re very excited about.”
The full interview is packed with loads of interesting insights from Sweeney, along with Neal Stephenson, the author who coined the term metaverse in his book Snow Crash.
For more, check out GameSpot’s rundown of Fortnite Chapter 5, including the start date, leaks, rumors, and more.
