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The Inner Game of Fortnite – Why Choosing Your Skin Matters
Skins in Fortnite are fun but sometimes expressing your individuality comes at a strategic disadvantage. When you’re trying to hide, you’re trying to hide. Having a skin on with some kind of bright element, whether that’s on the skin itself, a shiny back bling, or a giant blue popsicle pickaxe may actually give you away to your enemies.
There’s a reason that the defaults are a green/brown/camo set of colors. They blend into the environment well. Colors in skins and backblings that you should generally avoid: reds, oranges, yellows, and large amounts of white. They attract the eye too much and stand out against most of the environments in Fortnite’s map. I’ve been able to eliminate other players because of a bad skin sitting in a decent hiding spot a lot.
Epic loves to sell bright, shiny skins that look really fun. Don’t take the bait! Take the Ripley skin below, from the Battle Pass. It’s going to be really easy to see this guy anywhere he is on the map, even if he’s far away. He’s a big blue boi!
Then take Lynx, my long-time favorite skin. It’s a female frame so the hitbox is smaller, I think (but this is unconfirmed), in all black. It’s much easier to blend into the shadows with her than it is with Ripley.
Probably my favorite skin that I wish was more strategically useful is Lil’ Whip. But he’s really bright. Biologically, our eyes are most attracted to the color red, so I say away from any skin that has red or orange in it. Yellow also tends to attract our eye. So Lil’ Whip is a real bad choice but he’s a great skin and I definitely bought this whole set.
Let’s look at the various stages of the Prisoner set. Stages one through four are shown below, from left to right.
Stage one is clearly the best pick, strategically. The other stages look cooler, in my opinion, but given a situation where you’re hiding in the shadows, the orange lava flows on the skin are going to give you away where the stage one skin just might keep you alive.
Finally, consider another battle pass duo from this season: 8-Ball vs. Scratch:
8-Ball is black, ninja-like, and easily conceals in a shadow. Scratch looks cooler, in my opinion, but he’s fully white! He’s going to be much easier to see running across the map, and we barely have any snow in this map compared to the entire southwest corner from the Athena map (the map name in the code in Chapter 1). Side note: I wish we could pick from any pool ball color for this skin. A purple or dark green in this skin would be rad.
Picking the right skin is important. It can actually help you win more by not attracting the eye of your opponents. Choose wisely.
Sub-Skill Drills – Stair Pulls
One of my favorite edits is to place a stair between my opponent and myself in a close quarters situation and then to edit the left side and pull it back. It’s an easy edit to do and a stair between you and an opponent gives you more horizontal coverage than a wall, depending on where they’re standing relative to you.
So let’s practice this in our warmups. First in Creative, then getting 2-3 kills with this in Team Rumble before going off to play:
Make sure you have a shotgun or an SMG out before you make the edit so you’re ready to go if you’re playing on controller. If you’re on keyboard and mouse, you’ll just switch to your preferred gun after the edit.
Without an opponent, practice placing a wall in front of you. Then edit it and just drag back the left side of the ramp so it flips 180 degrees and only half of the ramp remains.
Place your crosshairs under the newly edited ramp, ready for the kill.
Do this 10-20 times in Creative to really get that motion down. Remember, if we go slow and do it correctly when it’s safe, we’ll be better at it when we’re under pressure and have to perform. So really focus on good reps.
Then hop over into Team Rumble to get your aim warm and try to get 2-3 elims with this stair edit against the other team. This edit will serve you well in build fights, box fights, and general open map fights.
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That’s it for today, thanks, as always, for reading and subscribing!
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See you Wednesday.