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Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds may not have invented the battle royale concept, but gave it life and is responsible for making it one of the most successful genres of modern gaming. It sat on the throne of multiplayer gaming for a long time despite being a paid experience, and once it expanded into the world of mobile gaming it reached a spot of success that no shooting game on the mobile platforms managed to see.
However, Fortnite was already in development as all of this happened and eventually launched as well. At first, people mistook it for a cartoony free game that is battle royale for kids, but the free aspect allowed people to give it a try even if they did not take it seriously.
As soon as people tried it, they realized that it’s actually a very solid and different spin on the battle royale genre that deserves to have an identity of its own, and so it did. As of today, it has surpassed the annual revenue earned by PUBG, which no one could have expected from the game’s initial simplicity on release.
Of course, we all know that profits do not necessarily equal quality and you can only play one of the two at a time. So, which one of the two should you play?
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PUBG vs Fortnite Graphics
When it comes to the graphics, it’s a really subjective matter to discuss the two games because of their incredibly different art styles. But let’s try to break them down in a comparison either way.
PUBG is all about realism, whether it’s the weight of your character’s movement, the weapons, or the environment, all of it is designed to feel like a real-life warzone. Of course, the game has some unrealistic events time to time and many cosmetics that make no sense too, but the art-style is always focused on prioritizing realism and does a good job at it too. Based on the capabilities of your device, the game can look really detailed and gorgeous and that’s why it’s beloved by the community.
Fortnite is the literal opposite of PUBG. Everything about it is colorful and full of life, the characters range from normal human beings to living bananas with skeletons, the weapons have unrealistic effects and they even add super powers time to time. The map is extremely varied as well, as different parts of it have different visual appearances, such as the snow mountain or the grassy fields to immediately compared.
If you try to pick pros and cons here, the one thing that Fortnite has over PUBG as an advantage here is the fact due to its lack of realism, it has more possibilities of adding fantasy and fictional events visually because it is created in a very flexible state.
However, at the end of the day it’s a 50/50 preference between gamers in whether they want to play something with realism or don’t mind a bit of a cartoony art-style as long as the game is fun. One cannot be called better than the other in an objective manner, making it a tie.
PUBG vs Fortnite Gameplay
Now this is the main deal here, because the two games ultimately belong to the same genre – third person battle royale shooters. However, when you actually play the two games the differences between them are nothing short of night and day. PUBG, as previously stated, focuses on realism and that means its gameplay will always be a reminder of that too.
Basic movement, every weapon that you use, every vehicle that you use, the environments and cities that you can travel, the details you will find throughout the game’s world – it’s all created to resemble a real-life combat situation and is always limited to it. And what it does, it does great. It’s very fun to jump into the game’s matches and fight your way in the ultimate tests of survival and teamwork, and it’s one of the most solid war shooters ever made in general.
Meanwhile, Fortnite’s cartoony graphics are not just a visual aspect, it translates into the gameplay too. The weapons feel very different to their real-life counterparts which gives developers the complete freedom to alter them as they like to balance different things out. The game also features unique building mechanics which allow you to instantly create structures that allow you to reach higher heights or shield yourself from enemies or even trap them, and while it was a bit annoying at first Chapter 2 has really balanced it out and made gunplay more relevant too.
If we were just comparing these aspects, it would sound like neither outdoes the other. However, Fortnite has a trick up its sleeve that PUBG does not, and that is creative freedom. Its lack of realism allows it to go completely wild and it shows, the game has a creator mode where you can make anything from a faithful shooter, or a racing game, or a stunt skating mini-game, and even short complete adventure games with a story.
And if you don’t want to play community modes, you will still find yourself caught up in events such as using the swords from Star Wars to attack people and deflect bullets, using Wolverine’s claws to slash your way through enemies, attend concerts with a colossal Travis Scott singing until the universe ends – it’s all there and the possibilities are endless.
When you have a game that has endless potential of fun gameplay and even uses those opportunities so frequently, a war game that limits itself to basic shooter gameplay seems a bit backwards and ultimately, forgettable. It’s not to say that PUBG does not get any events, it does have cross-overs every now and then, such as the zombie one with the raid-ish bosses thanks to Resident Evil 2. But the gameplay has never changed in out-of-the-box manners, only changes what enemy you kill.
I’d also like to take cross-play in account, because PUBG limits itself to each platform, and even within that platform it has multiple versions which are also not cross-play enabled. For example, on PC we have PUBG and PUBG Lite. On Mobile, we have PUBG Lite and PUBG Mobile. And none of them cross-play with each other, not even Lite and the main editions on the same platform. However, Fortnite has cross-play enabled on every single device that it’s on. Mobile to PC? PS4 to Xbox One? PS4 to Mobile? Nintendo Switch to PC? Everything is possible, and you get the same game on each platform.
PUBG vs Fortnite Progression
When it comes to the battle royale genre, it wouldn’t be overstating it to say that a good battle pass/royale pass is just as important as good gameplay itself. It is a major contributor to keeping the player hooked to the video game and more importantly – a major contributor in making them spend real life money in the game so they can unlock some of that sweet, sweet content.
When you compare PUBG to other similar war games, such as COD Mobile for instance, PUBG comes on top as the game that does not shy away from going all out. However, when you throw in Fortnite it’s not even a competition. Sure, PUBG gets a lot of cool skins and crosses over with other properties too which means you even get Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield in the item shop. However, those are not as incredibly common as you’d like them to be and most of the time it’s either just original skins that resemble the cyberpunk or dystopian vibes at most – or cross-overs which are not as exciting as they could be and mostly just things like Ethan Hunt’s (Mission Impossible) jacket.
What Fortnite gets on the other hand just beats every other game in this department. The game casually crosses over with properties such as the DC and Marvel universes to name a few, with dozens of characters and special attributes to them that you can unlock. And it’s not just super heroes and comic books, they have even crossed over with John Wick and added official skins that represent those characters. So, the game has the freedom of both adding skins of characters as gritty as John Wick or as cartoony as Gwenpool – everything goes and you will always find yourself in the middle of it.
Even without the cross-overs the game is always implementing new skins and gameplay elements that are out-of-the-box compared to other shooters, and it’s just undeniably much more worth your money when you compare the sheer amount of content that you get. The game also rewards you a lot for getting the battle pass with in-game currency, to the point if you reach level 100 every single season you can always buy the next season’s battle pass without spending any more real-life money.
As a result, while PUBG has the most creative battle pass in realistic shooters, Fortnite does not have that boundary and just offers you a whole lot more for your hard-earned cash.
PUBG vs Fortnite Sound
Both games have very decent sound and can be very helpful for you in terms of hearing enemies come closer to you before they actually are, or hearing shooting from afar and avoiding the risky part of the map. I would argue that PUBG requires sound more than Fortnite does in terms of survival, but that’s not to say that Fortnite’s sound is inferior in any way, it’s just a game that works a bit differently. Fortnite also has music added in certain specific events, such as you running into a licensed cross-over AI controlled character for a fight for example – while the PvP remains untouched as it should be.
The truth is, the sound of both the games are structured in the way it suits the respective ways the best, so it’s both impossible and unfair to call either better than the other. So, this department is most certainly a tie.
PUBG vs Fortnite: The Winner
As it goes without saying, PUBG is still one of the best battle royale experiences that you can have as of 2020, and it’s even more fun if you particularly enjoy war shooter games because the genre otherwise has spread out a lot. However, it greatly suffers from being too same-y and it’s inevitable to move on from it just like how you would move on from the last Call of Duty game onto the next one. The matches are quite long in the main mode and doing the same thing on repeat can get old even with friends, and unfortunately the extra modes are not very exciting as they only offer basic extra rules which you’d expect of any other shooter.
As I’ve mentioned previously in another versus post, PUBG also only has an active playerbase in the main two maps which are Enrangel and Sanhok and the rest are filled with bots – so that also does not help the case of repetitiveness if you play it for too long.
Fortnite is a literal playground in every meaning of that word. The gameplay can be altered in any way possible and the developers do not shy away from taking risks. There are so many changes in every single season and they are always introducing new ways to play around in the game’s map, adding new completely different parts of the map that could have completely different terrain, tons of new superpowers and similar things to play around with through cross-overs, and extra modes that greatly alter the gameplay to the point it can feel like a completely different game.
It’s not the easiest decision to make; but the winner is clear: Fortnite!
I know what you’re thinking – this guy just picked a cartoony game with comic book characters over a realistic and solid shooter experience like Player Unknown’s Battleground. But hear me out: give Fortnite a chance and you might have so much fun with it that you could end up ignoring the graphics. And let’s be real, even with the different art-style if you have a good device you will see how much detailed it still is!
Just don’t give up on the game when the building weirds you out and play a few more matches to give it a chance.
Now that we have the winner between PUBG and Fortnite, you know which one you should play out of the two and we hope you found our analysis fair. Did your favorite game win or do you enjoy the other one more? We’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions! And while you’re hear, make sure to check out some of the other versus posts on our website too.
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