Before Geoff Keighley and his extravagant gaming trailers, there were the so-called Spike Video Game Awards or VGAs. Hosted by TV channel Spike (aka “The First Network For Men” because, as we all know, only men play video games), the 2011 edition gave us previews of BioShock Infinite, The Last of Us, Mass Effect 3… and a new title from Unreal Engine and Gears of War maker Epic Games.

Launched by design director Cliff Bleszinski (remember him?), Fortnite was born out of a company-wide backlog of games after Gears of War 3 finished development. In an interview with Game InformerProducer Roger Collum called it a mix of Minecraft, Terraria and the shooting aspect of Gears of War. One of the ideas carried over from Minecraft was farming, which was in the game “for a short time,” Collum said.

“We thought we would develop the game super quickly,” Collum said of development, which began in 2011. The release was planned for 2013.

The release to the general public didn’t happen until 2017. This was delayed in part due to a larger – but probably necessary – feature set that gave the game progression, as well as Epic’s focus on the free-to-play MOBA Paragon, which ended up surviving for less than two years.

Fortnite was supposed to be free to play, but was initially in Early Access and cost $20. I was eagerly looking forward to it and loved the promise of a building/tower-defense hybrid wrapped in a cartoonish, yet engaging three-dimensional world. And who wouldn’t want to save the world from a zombie invasion using construction tools and improvised traps?

Magicman and I loved the game enough to do a first look, and I continued playing for a few months after its initial release on July 25, 2017.

A fully free-to-play launch has been announced for 2018. Meanwhile, Epic was also working on Paragon and incidentally decided to dedicate some Fortnite development time to another small spin-off project that they hoped would capitalize on the success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and give Fortnite’s fortunes a little extra boost…

That worked pretty well.

(Side note: Two and a half decades earlier, a small game company in Seattle that produced sourcebooks for role-playing games decided to work on a card game that they thought could be played between gaming sessions to fill downtime. That company was Wizards of the Coast and that side project was Magic: The Gathering.)

The explosive success of Fortnite: Battle Royale made the PvE version of the game – retroactively called Fortnite: Save the World – a mere afterthought. Updates were sparse, free-to-play was continually pushed back, and finally Epic announced in 2020 that the game would be fully released, but would be a paid game in the future and no F2P was in sight.

That’s changed with last week’s announcement, as Fortnite: Save the World will finally be free to play, 15 years after it was first announced. The question is, should you play it after all these years?

I admit that I haven’t followed Save the World’s development closely since the end of 2017. I tend to avoid games that are scheduled to be canceled, be it an official shutdown notice or a case of reading the writing on the wall. When I was writing news articles for MMOBomb, we always found it a surprise when we received news from Save the World, as opposed to the numerous press releases we received for Battle Royale.

Updates to the mode were few and far between as Epic focused on the more lucrative mode and, a year later, the Epic Games Store. What I do remember was an enjoyable, if somewhat repetitive, experience. This is to be expected in any online game, but the same feel across all maps and the slow pace of progression was a major downer for me.

However, the moment-to-moment gameplay kept me coming back for several months. If you’ve never played before, imagine the building aspects of battle royale, but with the trap placement/horde mode aspects of something like Orcs Must Die! Spending the day running around collecting materials and building your defenses and the night protecting your base from the hordes is a satisfying gameplay loop and provides a different kind of frantic anxiety than a PvP game.

Still, I would suggest starting it with a friend or three. Communication is important and coordinating your passive (building, setting traps) and active (running to trouble spots) defenses is key to completing levels. Even though it’s probably less toxic than a PvP game, I still don’t want to hear from xX_GamerLord69_Xx about how I’m a terrible player and couldn’t defend the base properly and killed us all.

And then there was inventory management for all the traps, weapons, and other items you had. As a resident inventory complainer, I remember thinking they were minimal items and taking too long to analyze what I wanted to keep, what I wanted to throw away, and what I really wanted to keep in case of an emergency – the usual gamer trap: “I can’t use this item, maybe I’ll need it later!” This is especially frustrating when you finally set up an expensive trap and then the monsters won’t come near it.

All in all, though, if you’ve played Fortnite: Battle Royale and have never tried the PvE game Save the World, you’ll find something that, while familiar, will hopefully be a little less stress and anger-inducing. However, if you’ve never played Battle Royale before, you can still enjoy Save the World on its own terms, like I did before Battle Royale even existed. And since it will soon be free to play, trying it out will be even easier.