Fortnite’s ambition grows yet again. A new extraction shooter (think Escape From Tarkov) is in the works over at Epic Games, according to leaker Loolo. Specific details are currently scarce, and Loolo warns things may change along the way. This mode, allegedly titled Project Arnold, had previously been rumored to be canceled. However, if the news holds up, this mode’s core gameplay loop will likely be exactly like the extraction titles that have come before. These games about infiltrating a map filled with PVE and PVP challenges, securing weapons, grabbing loot, and extracting without getting taken out by any would-be assailants. Every new deployment presents a chance to get stronger, grow your collection, and battle it out with others trying to do the exact same thing. That’s speculation on our part, but is largely how the genre operates.
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This news follows shortly after Epic Games’ announcement of Ballistic, a five-versus-five FPS built in the shadow of games like Counter-Strike, Valorant, and Call of Duty’s Search & Destroy mode. Together, the two new Fortnite additions illustrate a clear strategy, Epic Games is once again attempting to establish a chokehold on the audience that helped bring Fortnite to prominence in the halcyon days of 2018. Fortnite Battle Royale was a success right out of the gate, but the game was propelled into the mainstream in part due to popular creators such as Ninja, CDNthe3rd, and DrLupo showing fans what was possible in the sandbox-style environment.
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The virality provided by those streamers kickstarted an empire. What began as a base-building survival game with a simple PVP component has now become an industry juggernaut, complete with its own in-house LEGO companion game, track racer, and rhythm-based experience to boot. Still, as the game grew and absorbed the lion’s share of gaming’s casual fans, dedicated shooter fans have partly been reabsorbed into many of the aforementioned games, as well as others such as Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Valve’s fresh MOBA shooter Deadlock. Epic Games is clearly doubling down on this audience.
That’s a lot easier when most of Unreal Engine can be accessed from inside the skeleton of Fortnite itself. Fans have previously cooked up similar projects on their own already. Take this remake of the classic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare map Shipment, for example. If a fan can make a fully functional recreation of one of the best shooter maps of all time, the sky is the limit for Epic Games’ ability to bring a whole new kind of shooter experience to Fortnite.
It will likely be a while before we have anything more concrete about the future of this Extraction mode(if it ever comes to life at all), but for now fans can get their classic FPS fix by jumping into Ballistic when it hits Early Access on December 11th. If that mode is a hit, who’s to say what might happen in the future. Perhaps Fortnite could aim even bigger and make a Halo successor worth playing.