Beep beep! Respawn vans are pulling up in Fortnite
Second chances
The next update for unimaginably popular mega-hit Fortnite Battle Royale will bring in the ability to revive your teammates at various spots where Reboot Vans have been parked. No longer will you have to go on alone after your friends are wiped out by someone in an eerily unblinking, scuffed up panda head. Here’s a man in a banana costume explaining how it all works.
Basically, if a squadmate gets killed but you slip through the enemies’ fingers, you can bring your friend back at a Reboot Van by grabbing the Reboot Card that they drop.
Doing so will paint something of a target on you, though, as the Van lights up and starts honking as though you’ve set off a particularly obnoxious car alarm. It’ll then go on cool-down, preventing others from using it for “a duration of time.”
Your teammates won’t have any items when they bounce back, so they’ll need to leech off whoever revived them or scramble to find whatever hasn’t already been picked over, but at least you’ll have the numbers in your favour again.
Yes, this is basically the same system that they have in Apex Legends. Perhaps they got there first because their studio is literally called Respawn Entertainment. Still, if Matt’s Apex Legends review is anything to go by, this is a good addition for Fortnite. “I’ll find it hard to go back to a battle royale game that lacks [the system],” he wrote.
Calling the system “Reboot” does raise some interesting questions about Fortnite’s lore. Are all the characters, in-fiction, nothing but pixels within a machine, ready to be wiped and restored on a whim? Do they know they’re living inside a cruel simulation? Is this why they don’t seem at all bothered by cataclysmic events like volcano explosions?