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Recently, a reader reached out and asked me to talk about VOD review and how to improve from reviewing your own gameplay. This is going to be split into two parts. Part one is reviewing your own gameplay and part two will be reviewing others’ gameplay.
Back in November, we talked a bit about journaling in Looking Back To Go Forward. One of the best ways to get better at anything, Fortnite included, is to observe what you did and be helpfully critical of your work. Most importantly: write it down. Where did you do well? Where can you improve? Where did things happen that were out of your control? How did you handle those? What can you change for the future?
Lucky for us, Fortnite automatically records every game we play and keeps them until a new update is released upon which we lose that old footage. You don’t have to review every game you play, but I think it’s particularly important to review games where:
You performed well
Something happened that you didn’t expect
A situation was particularly technical
Turn on people’s name tags and health meters
Turn on player indicators at a decent range from where you are
Use slo-mo to step through situations and see how they played out, slowly
Take notes
Our goal is to understand what happened and improve that next time. We want to be able to recognize future situations that look or feel similar and react better than we did this time.
It sounds simple but like watching any sport in real-time, it’s hard to get the full picture of what went down until we slow it down and watch it from multiple angles.
Where were we? Where were they? What as our mindset at the time? What was our intended strategy? How did that play out? Did they do something that we didn’t expect? Were the situation and the outcome in our control or did something random happen?
Did we rotate too early? Too late? Give up high ground? Should we have stayed on low ground? Did we use the right weapon for the fight? Did we miss a build or an edit? Did they?
How was our positioning? How could we have made it marginally better? Did things happen that we couldn’t possibly know about?
So much of battle royale games is managing the random number generator (RNG) that is the game itself. Anything could happen at any time (almost). Being prepared for the future by writing down our past in order to make improvements, in theory, should help us mitigate and manage future situations more effectively.
If you’re not using VOD review as part of your Fortnite practice, I encourage you to start. Just watch one video of your own gameplay. You’ll learn a lot! Even if it’s a win and you’re marveling and how you tore through 13 opponents on you way to a win, there’s still a lot you can learn. You won because you did a lot of things right. How much of that did you do and how much of that was luck.
It’s important that we be honest with ourselves when we review our gameplay. How else are we going to get better?
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Final thought: I miss Viking Village and icy ponds.
See you Friday.