It’s basically your bog-standard battle royale competitive mode, which is why I’m surprised it’s taken Fortnite five years to implement it. Fortnite technically already has a competitive mode in Arena, a tournament-style playlist with separate rules from Battle Royale and Zero Build, but Epic has decided to discontinue Arena at the end of the season in favor of the new Ranked.

Ranked will be playable in all three variations of Battle Royale (solo, duos, squads) and just one Zero Build mode (duos). Epic’s announcement blog (opens in new tab) doesn’t mention why Zero Build is limited to Duos, but it could be an effort to avoid splitting the playerbase of Fortnite’s less popular mode in a way that impacts matchmaking times. You’ll have a different rank for Battle Royale and Zero Build.

Here’s how the ranking divisions break down:

• Bronze (1, 2, 3)
• Silver (1, 2, 3)
• Gold (1, 2, 3)
• Platinum (1, 2, 3)
• Diamond (1, 2, 3)
• Elite
• Champion
• Unreal (Leaderboard rank)

Interestingly, once you’ve reached the rank of Unreal, you can’t be knocked out of it for the remainder of the season. Instead, your Unreal rank is displayed against all other Unreal players (similar to Overwatch 2’s “Top 500” division). Epic will maintain an official online Unreal leaderboard (opens in new tab) (link not live yet) for players to “flex” their rank publicly, but you can opt out of showing up on the leaderboard by changing in-game privacy settings.

Other key details:

• Your Fortnite ranked progress is determined by two factors: match placement and number of eliminations
• Teams are ranked according to their highest-rated player
• Teams equally gain and lose ranked points as a unit

That’s as specific as Epic is getting about Ranked for now, but I want to hear more about those two win conditions. How heavily match placement should or shouldn’t be valued over kills has been an ongoing discussion among the Apex Legends community, where new ranked rules made it possible for one streamer to reach the max rank without scoring a single kill (opens in new tab).

Respawn says this is the system working as intended (the goal of battle royale is survival, not a high K/D), but Epic may choose to favor other skillsets in Fortnite. Epic gave no word on when patch v24.40 will release, but if Fortnite follows its usual schedule, expect it to come later this month.

According to Cain, in 2004 he was approached by a former graduate school classmate who had moved on to working for the DoD. “He wanted to know if I could take Temple of Elemental Evil and write an API (a programming interface) so that an external AI could run the game,” Cain explains in the video.

The contract paid for Cain and ToEE’s original lead programmer, Steven Moret, to produce this version of ToEE in the waning days of Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines’ development. Cain says that they never actually witnessed the DoD’s AI first hand⁠—he and Moret would work on the compatible version of ToEE, ship it off, then receive notes from their client to adjust it. “We made it so that an external program could control the basic functions of Temple of Elemental Evil,” Cain elaborates.

In order to test their API in-house, Cain and Moret made a simple AI that largely made choices at random, with positive reinforcement from gaining XP, and negative reinforcement from character death. In the video, Cain recounts an anecdote of even this simple test AI surprising him with its capacity. After popping off for lunch, Cain and Moret returned an hour later to discover their program had “made a party, wandered around Hommlet into buildings, talked to people, managed to acquire a follower and equipment, left the Hommlet map, went to another map, and was fighting giant spiders.”

“If that’s what a random AI can do in an hour,” Cain continues, “I can’t imagine what an AI with state memory and learning algorithms can do.”

Though the developer is hazy on the exact timing, it looks like Cain and Moret delivered the final iteration of ToEE for robots in the first half of 2005, some time in the midst of Troika’s untimely demise. Cain never heard about it again, though he characterizes this version of ToEE as Troika’s fourth shipped project alongside the original game, Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines.

My big takeaway? Somewhere under the Pentagon or Area 51, there’s a hard drive with an AI on it that’s just ludicrously good at CRPGs, some kind of fiend with D&D 3.5e. Some say it’s still playing The Temple of Elemental Evil to this day, honing its tactical mastery and inching ever closer to bursting out of its subterranean gaol and unleashing the final Attack of Opportunity on the meatbags who created it.

Also? God bless it, for a six-month period between ’04 and ’05, American tax dollars went to supporting one of the best RPG studios to ever do it. Is this patriotism I’m feeling? It wasn’t enough to save Troika, but god damn it, Uncle Sam tried. As I write this, I notice Tim Cain has uploaded a 20 minute deep dive on the development of The Temple of Elemental Evil (opens in new tab). He may never run out of these. 

Back in the summer of 1994 everyone was getting excited about Doom 2. Everyone was wrong. The only game that mattered was System Shock.

It was a defining game for me, and for the handful of others who played it. Doom 2 was fun, but System Shock was changing our perceptions about what gaming could be. It was the big step forward from Ultima Underworld, with a physics system, realistic textured environments, complex AI, and a towering, terrifying story of isolation and persecution aboard a malevolent space station. This was the first showdown with megalomaniac computer SHODAN, and it’s something I’ll never forget.

Some gamers were confused and disappointed by the low-key opening. The squalid medical bays seemed rather lacklustre compared to Doom 2’s gothic techno-fortresses, and beating a haywire service bucket to death with a stick didn’t seem quite as thrilling as hitting the high notes with a point-blank shotgun blast. There might not have been a great sense of urgency in the opening hours, but this wasn’t about the big adrenal release. System Shock was the slow build, the growing realisation of the scale of disaster and horror. You really were in the midst of something utterly terrible.

Even though System Shock never had the capacity to deliver a living, chat-enabling NPC, you almost always expected to meet one. Indeed, everything else about this game was so spectacularly ahead of the curve that it seemed inevitable that there would be someone just around the corner—2004’s Alyx Vance, or something. Indeed, you even started to get messages from just such a character. And though you never did meet—could never have met—her story was convincing enough and affecting enough to have you cursing the malign power of SHODAN and her robots. There was worse to come.

Even with its graphically crude presentation, System Shock delivered the most believable, detailed environments we’d ever seen. Each of them was perfectly pitched—the great air-locks of the spaceport section, the clunky jungles of the bio-spheres, and the surprising elegance of the executive suites. More than BioShock’s Rapture, the System Shock space station gave a strong impression of being a working thing—a device for living in space.

The structure of the game emphasised this: you were back and forth madly between the various zones, trying desperately to break SHODAN’s control and, ultimately, save both yourself and the planet full of people that the deadly station was cruising toward.

This was a story of escalation. You start off knocking over zombies and poking about in the trash of a ruined space station; soon you’re exploring the innards of a supercomputer with destructive intent. You run a gamut of feeling, from bafflement to horror and revenge. And finally, there’s the vertiginous sprint through the collapsing station, into the brainstem of the beast—into SHODAN. After years of playing FPS games that finish on a low, you might be forgiven for thinking there were no great FPS endings out there. System Shock tells us otherwise.

Crucially, SS made you feel vulnerable. This is not the story of the superhuman warrior of the Doom games, this is the tale of a human being. Sure, you can plug into the computers to play out cyberspace subgames, but you’re still a person who can walk, lean, crawl, climb, fall, and die all too easily.

System Shock might lack graphical sparkle by today’s standards, but its realism and humanity reached levels as high as any game has managed in the last couple of decades.

The interface seems crude now, mostly because it is devoid of mouselook. The visuals, too, are hard on modern eyes. But the powerful musculature of the beast remains: the story, with its perfect pacing and savage crescendo, still beats anything we can play today. If BioShock had retold System Shock’s tale, beat for beat, it would probably have earned even higher scores.

The man we have to thank for it all was Doug Church. Truly, Church is one of the fathers of gaming. His vision of what was needed to create intelligent FPS games was what inspired Warren Spector to create Deus Ex, and Ken Levine to create BioShock. Without Church’s insistent vision and profound grasp of the possibilities that gaming provided, we would not be living in the same gaming world today. Thanks Doug, I think you saved us all.