Epic kicks off Fortnite’s new era with Lego Fortnite

07.12.2023 - 14:15 / theverge.com / Andrew Webster / Lego Fortnite

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

In what’s becoming increasingly common for Fortnite, the game is fusing with one of the biggest pop culture properties around. This time around, it’s Lego. But the launch of Lego Fortnite is also much more involved than the typical tie-in — and the start of what seems like a new era for Fortnite.

Lego Fortnite is a survival crafting game that’s available inside of Fortnite starting today. It’s sort of like a Lego version of Minecraft, only instead of downloading a whole new game, you just select a tile from the Fortnite menu the same way you would when you hop into battle royale.

I was able to play around 30 minutes of the game earlier in the week, and it’s very impressive, if somewhat familiar. Players are given a large, procedurally generated map to explore — Epic says that it’s 19 times larger than the battle royale island, which just got a refresh — and you can play in a creative mode, where you build whatever you like, or a survival mode, where skeletons, wolves, and other baddies come out, and you also have to worry about things like hunger and deal with extreme heat.

So far, so Minecraft. The big appeal here, though, is not only the Lego aspect but also that it’s available freely within an already very popular game. In fact, Lego Fortnite is just the first of a trio of games coming out inside of Fortnite this week; it’ll be followed by Rocket Racing on December 8th (from the creators of Rocket League) and Fortnite Festival on December 9th (from the studio behind Rock Band and Guitar Hero). The idea is that Fortnite will become more than just the game where players fight to the death on a colorful island. It will be a platform full of all kinds of games, sort of like a more tightly controlled version of Roblox.

“We’re trying to demonstrate a different way to think about a gaming ecosystem, that can hold both the smallest of creator games to the biggest of our first-party games, and anything in between,” Saxs Persson, Epic’s executive VP, tells The Verge. (He was also previously the chief creative officer and VP at Minecraft studio Mojang.)

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According to Persson, Lego was the right initial game to further several elements of the Fortnite ecosystem. One is the ongoing desire to build a metaverse, or a virtual space with persistent identities. When Lego and Epic first announced their partnership, the stated goal was to “build a space in the metaverse that’s fun, entertaining, and made for kids and families.” Persson says that’s where the minifigs come in. Epic says that, right now, more than 1,200 Fortnite skins