Lego Fortnite feels like Minecraft for the metaverse era

Remember when Fortnite was just about building? Before its celebrity cameos, its attention-grabbing live events, before you could play battle royale in Zero Build, and before the game let users make up their own endless variety of modes. Fortnite was a simpler game - you constructed a base, defended it from enemies. And in some ways, today's big launch of Lego Fortnite feels a return to those simpler times.

Where the original Fortnite Save The World mode was a tower defense title, Lego Fortnite - in its current iteration at least - borrows mostly from Minecraft. You chop down trees and mine rocks for Lego resources, which can be crafted into Lego pickaxes, swords, or Lego building chunks. Said chunks - clusters of Lego bricks arranged into archways or staircases, campfires or even full buildings - can then be used to construct your own settlements. Finally, over time, you can grow and level up these settlements to welcome in a group of friendly characters, who can be assigned some of the more menial jobs such as farming and harvesting.

All of this plays out in a world which looks similar enough to Fortnite itself - its fresh Unreal Engine 5-powered iteration, that is, not last month's Fortnite OG - where Lego characters and monsters roam. UE5 means your constructions are as permanent (or destructible) as you make them - able to be edited, customised, or blown to smithereens in impressive style - individual Lego elements tumbling away in remarkably believable fashion.

The world of Lego Fortnite can be explored in a Sandbox mode without dangers, or in a Survival offering where hostile creatures wander the map, or lurk in caves underground. You'll need to armour up to take on the toughest of these and protect your own creations - at one point I saw a house I'd been building smashed as an enormous dinosaur-troll-thing charged through it towards me, bricks flying in all directions.

Lego Fortnite is designed to support up to eight players adventuring together, and dividing up resource gathering across each Lego Fortnite world (the mode's procedurally generated maps are 20 times the size of Fortnite's famous battle royale Island). Playing in Survival mode, you'll need to keep track of your health, stamina and temperature - with different biomes more suitable for habitation than others. Whether you're in Survival or Sandbox, you can choose to build using a gallery of Lego chunks, or place pre-made structures such as whole houses or farm buildings. (And in a nice twist, gaining animal resources are geared towards positive interactions with your sheep, cows and chickens, which happily plop out wool, milk and eggs when interacted with.)

So far, so mostly Minecraft. But, as Epic Games was keen to emphasise, the Lego Fortnite experience - and overall collaboration - that launches today is just the start. It's perhaps unsurprising, considering the depth with which Lego is being integrated into Fortnite overall, with more than 1200 existing in-game skins getting Lego counterparts that owners will receive at no added cost (and these counterparts are now on show when you browse the game's Item Shop).

"This is just the beginning," Epic Games president Adam Sussman told me, after I'd finished my Lego Fortnite play session. "We're starting with this, it's a great experience, but we're gonna learn from what players in our community are saying to us, and we're gonna continue to add elements and features and build up from there.

"We already have a roadmap of things for the first six months that we're going to be putting into this game that I'm really excited to see come to life, and that we'll continue to adjust and edit based on how we see our players experience the game and the types of community feedback. There's so much opportunity ahead there. But on top of that there'll be other experiences that Lego is partnering with us on bringing into Fortnite as well."

Several more Lego-themed games will launch inside Fortnite starting early next year, Epic Games has now confirmed, while thousands of physical Lego bricks and pieces will be added to Fortnite for creators to use in their own fan-made Lego modes. It's an enormous addition to Fortnite - even by Fortnite's own ever-chameleonic standards. And it's one that has prompted further changes in the game's own suite of player safety tools.

"We have the opportunity to expand to an entirely new audience of players that we want to bring into our ecosystem," Sussman said. "And along with that expansion comes a commitment to continuing our leadership, and player safety. I have a four, eight and 10-year-olds, and I've seen when they're playing other experiences [outside of Fortnite] they play content that is not appropriate for them - but they wouldn't necessarily know that when they launched the content, nor would I as a parent know that they're trying to play this content."

"One of the things we talked about early on in the partnership was that the internet was never built with kids in mind," Candela Montero, Epic Games' senior director of global public policy and external affairs told me. "Companies had to step back to then try to evolve the internet in a way that could accommodate youth that is now so digitally savvy, and digitally native.

"We wanted to make sure this next iteration of the internet, or you could call it a virtual world, or metaverse, didn't go through that and was built and designed with players of all ages in mind from the outset. That's something that both [Lego and Fortnite] connected on very early on and was foundational to all of the discussions about the partnership."

Fortnite already had a range of parental controls in place - most notably the concept of Cabin accounts for players under the age of 13 which have features such as real-money purchases and chat disabled. Further controls adjust settings for more granular options, such as the ability to require a parental PIN code when sending or accepting friend requests. And anyone under the age of 18 by default sees a version of the game with text and voice chat disabled.

More recent changes include the addition of voice chat reporting and the introduction of age ratings to every experience within the game, as well as - initially - the gating of many cosmetics in modes with lower age ratings. Epic quickly announced a rethink of that last part due to the negative fan reaction sparked by seeing so many in-game items now with warning labels attached, and blocked from modes with 12+ age ratings.

"We took a pretty overly conservative approach to how we looked at cosmetics generally, to ensure there was nothing going into a lower-rated experience that would exceed that experience's rating. Looking at them again, we realised we took a radically conservative approach," Montero conceded.

As of Fortnite's most recent update, only six skins now retain those warning labels out of thousands available in the game in total. A further update in mid-December will see warning labels removed from more pickaxes and loading screens, too. Finally, next year, a longer process will result in skins adapting to fit age ratings, with the reaction to the initial process and also conversations with rating boards still in mind.

"We don't want kids just to be safe and bored, we want them to be safe and excited, to have a lot of fun," Lego's chief product and marketing officer Julia Goldin told me. "But it's not [always] obvious how to create that."

Goldin said Lego's partnership with Epic Games was born out of several dovetailing factors - the game's natural fit with building, yes, but also the way it helps push the boundaries of Unreal Engine, as well as Epic Games' ability to run live experiences at massive scale.

"It also helps a lot that a lot of Lego designers are super passionate Fortnite players, and a lot of Fortnite designers are super passionate Lego builders," Goldin noted.

Lego Fortnite launches today as a free-to-play game - one of three major new modes debuting within Fortnite this week, leading the charge ahead of Psyonix's Rocket Racing tomorrow and Harmonix's Fortnite Festival the day after. Each adds a whole new experience to the now multi-genre entity that is Fortnite, while playing within the game's overall rules on monetisation.

"We have very consistent principles around monetisation within the ecosystem and those aren't going to change," Sussman said. "Everything is free-to-play and there is no pay-to-win, pay-to-accelerate." Right now, that means Lego Fortnite's only method of making money are the digital minifigures you get when you buy Fortnite character skins. But Sussman also mentioned the possibility of a bespoke Lego Fortnite season pass, or cosmetic digital Lego building elements as something that could come down the line.

And how about physical Fortnite Lego sets? Fans have already been coming up with custom concepts of their own - and it has not gone unnoticed by Lego itself. "Clearly there's appetite," Goldin said. "Anything is possible. We plan our portfolio over the years to come - and again, it's just the beginning. We wouldn't rule out physical sets in the future, but nothing concrete yet."

Lego Fortnite arrives following record high engagement for Fortnite following its hugely popular OG season (which is already confirmed to return in some form in 2024). Interestingly, Sussman noted that the launch of Lego Fortnite (and Festival and Rocket Racing) were deliberately choreographed to land after the OG season to maximise their potential success. "This was quite intentional," Sussman told me. "About a year ago, we thought it would be a sequencing... of these events and that we would launch these new experiences at a time when we hope to have the largest possible pool of users active in Fortnite."

More than eight years on, it's an astonishing stat for Fortnite - after a month which saw 100 million players log in. Where will Lego Fortnite - and the other Lego games coming next year - take things next? It's a fascinating prospect. For now, there's cows to be patted and caves to explore. And tomorrow, Rocket Racing. And then the day after, Fortnite Festival. Maybe not such simpler times after all.