Fortnite Devs Talk About Current Pay-To-Play Access, Future Plans, And That Darned UI

GameInformer's got a long interview-as-you-play session with Epic Games' Darren Sugg recently. The pair covered a number of topics regarding Fortnite's first few weeks of consumption by the public at large, tackling a few burning questions while also talking about the game's long-term plans.

One of the more salient points being brought up all over the internet is why people should pay for the game now if it's going to be free-to-play in a few months -- and especially why a beta is available at retail. According to Sugg, 2/3 of people in Europe still only buy physical games, so in order for Epic to get those people into the beta, "we had to produce some amount of physical disks."

Sugg also says that events, such as the unique loot being offered during the current "Founder's Month," are a big reason why prospective players might want to get into the game immediately. He expects new events to come in roughly three- to four-week increments, with new updates every five to seven weeks. The "Survive the Storm" update was just announced today, in fact.

The Survive The Storm update is coming in late Aug. / early Sept.

New mode. New weapons. New threats. Same scared llamas. pic.twitter.com/3RA9pg2qP7

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) August 10, 2017

For the future, more traps and weapons are in the works, but building components and ingredients are more in the conceptual phase than anything that's going to be implemented any time soon. When asked about radically different game modes, such as questing or raids, Sugg says they'll probably expand with more offensive game types, like the type where you seek out enemy encampments and take them out. Another concept is the ability to build tracks, so players can push bomb carts to an objective or mobile gun turrets.

Regarding the UI and menus, Sugg says that if 1.0 represents a finished product, they're at 0.25 right now and that more improvements and tutorials are to come. When told that one of the interviewers is still having trouble navigating the menus after 10 hours of gameplay, Sugg says that the difficulty players have depends on "how familiar you are with like-minded collection-based games."

There's lots more in the video, so make sure to check it out on the GameInformer site.