Game tech: Get ready for a World Cup battle with Fortnite

SHOOT! Shoooot!’ As fans of the World Cup, that’s something we’ve been shouting at the TV a lot in recent weeks.

Next year, we may be shouting the same thing — but for a very different sport.

Epic games have officially announced the Fortnite World Cup, which will take place in 2019 and feature more shooting than every football world cup combined.

The timing is especially fitting, with footballers Antoine Griezmann, Dele Ali and Jesse Lingard celebrating their goals with Fortnite dances in Russia.

Fortnite will take a refreshing approach to international eSports competition. Epic are limiting entries to solo and duo play, so no room for squad play. More importantly, however, the Fortnite World Cup will be open to everyone and qualification will be by merit only. That means anyone could prove victorious and we might see some real success stories and overnight sensations through qualifying. (Just keep Thierry Henry away from the mouse.)

Epic has already pledged an astonishing $100 million in prize money for Fortnite tournaments between here and the World Cup event next year.

These will take the form of online tournaments, community-run competitions and official tournaments. In all cases, anyone will be capable of winning and progressing to qualification for the World Cup itself.

In most eSports, sponsorship and big names can eat up the spots for international tournaments. While the talent almost always rises to the top regardless, it does leave some eSports feeling a little corporate and restrictive. In fact, big eSports often feel most like Formula One events these days, with too many teams lacking real identity and expression.

The Fortnite World Cup will hopefully be different.

Thanks to the huge success of the core game, Epic can afford to really invest in the players for this event and make the World Cup solely about finding the best players and giving them a platform to be world champions.

That doesn’t mean we can’t predict the likely winners, of course. Anyone who has ever visited fortnitetracker.com will know the world’s top players are already ranked on that site, from statistics collected by the game. But as football has taught us in recent weeks — the World Cup isn’t always so predictable.

SPEED RUNNING

Extra-time plays an important role in the World Cup, but it’s the last thing speed-runners want to face. Speed-running is the art of finishing games as quickly as possible, with players going to extreme lengths to shave seconds from a world record.

Twice a year, an event called Game Done Quickly (GDQ) takes place to raise money for charity, with expert speed-runners doing ‘live’ runs of their favourite games to raise funds. The Summer GDQ event recently raised over $2m for Doctors Without Borders, with gamers donating in real-time as speed-runs took place.

The star attraction of this year’s Summer GDQ was Final Fantasy VI, a game that traditionally takes upwards of 40 hours to complete, being finished in just 7 hours. The ruleset for this particular ‘run’ was to complete the game at 100% and recruiting all characters, using no glitches.

The knowledge needed by the runners in question is astonishing. They know the game’s code inside-out, to the point where they can predict the ‘unpredictable’ by understanding what sequence the game has loaded from data sets in the background.

In the end, the Final Fantasy VI speedrun didn’t actually meet the ruleset requirements, as the runner in question forgot to recruit a character in the last dungeon. But nobody cared — they were too busy celebrating the $2m he had helped raise for a worthy goal.

UNKIND CUT

Speaking of worthy goals, there have been a lot of those at the World Cup in Russia, but only one from Germany.

Aside from a beautiful Toni Kroos freekick, the Germans exited the tournament with a whimper. But no problem — they were doing brilliantly at FIFA 2018 instead.

According to German newspaper Bild, Germany coach Joachim Low had to cut off the internet connection at the team’s hotel because the players were staying up until the early hours playing FIFA and Call of Duty. Then again, Call of Duty might have been practice for the (penalty) shootouts.