Fortnite is coming for the FPS

Fortnite in 2024 is a battle royale shooter, an arena shooter, a racing game, a rhythm game, a survival game, and later this year, it's gonna be a first-person shooter. Epic has officially opened up testing for a "First Person Camera Mode" in Fortnite, now usable in Fortnite creative mode and UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite).

As regular Fortnite players know, creators are already using camera trickery to "fake" janky first-person views to often good effect, but this official implementation goes further.

"Workarounds, begone", Epic's blog post on the feature begins. "The new First Person Camera Mode device enables you to create polished first-person experiences rendered from the player character’s viewpoint!"

Epic hopes Fortnite creators will use the tool to make modes in "popular genres like first-person, team-based or tactical shooter games, or add new levels of immersion into horror and cinematic adventure games."

The first-person module is currently "experimental," so folks aren't allowed to publish anything that uses it yet. I can see why after messing with it this week: first-person Fortnite is promising, but it's very early. As Epic warns, most guns don't have first-person reload animations yet, so your arms just disappear off-screen during the process. The first-person animations that do exist look pretty good, and the shooting isn't bad either. You can sprint, jump, and aim-down-sights like you'd expect.

You can see where Epic is probably going with this: Once the feature is ready for prime time, I imagine "First-person Battle Royale" will be an official Fortnite playlist right next to Zero Build and standard BR, and if it proves popular, it'll be there to stay.

But I wonder what constitutes popular enough to support first-person mode indefinitely. It's clear from Epic's blog post that supporting first-person is a manual process—new animations have to be made for new guns and tools going forward. I wonder if that's a task the studio wants to hoist on itself, like how it's now dedicated to creating Lego and Fall Guys versions of regular Fortnite skins. I do know that if this new way of playing Fortnite is gonna catch on, it'll need more TLC. Even with custom animations, first-person Fortnite still feels more like a mod than a full-fledged FPS. Gun skins and character arms don't look great close up (since they weren't designed for that), the forced FOV is a little claustrophobic, and the scale of Fortnite's environments looks strange from a different viewpoint.

The first-person Fortnite module is available now to try in private islands and UEFN. Players will be able to publish levels in first-person when the module enters beta later this year.