The Season 5, Week 3 challenges are live in Fortnite: Battle Royale, and one them, in particular, might be giving you some trouble. One of the non-combat challenges this week asks you to draw on your combat skills to shoot clay pigeons launched from trap shooting setups all over the map, making this one a little bit harder and a little more involved than some of what we’ve seen in the past. Not only do you need to figure out where to go, you need to do something when you get there. Which is the right direction for the game.
I’m not saying that this challenge is as hard as winning a Victory Royale, or even particularly difficult in any real way. But it’s still a marked difference from the vast majority of other challenges like it that we’ve seen in the past. Nearly all of the “do X things” challenges have been as straightforward as they come: you just had to visit locations or search items. Shooting clay pigeons actually requires you to participate in an activity where failure is possible. That’s a big difference from a design point of view, and much closer to the concept of a “challenge.”
We saw this start at the beginning of the season with floating lightning bolts. At first glance it seemed like just another item hunt, but then you realized that every one of the lightning bolts actually required the player to build up to them, making this sort of a stealth building challenge. And then we saw it in week 2, where players had to sink shots on basketball hoops across the map. Again, not the hardest thing in the world, but it was something that you could try and fail to complete. Hence: challenge.
Shooting clay pigeons is the most involved yet, however. It requires a little bit of familiarity with the game’s basic shooting mechanics, and it also gives you an opportunity to play around with concepts like first shot accuracy and bloom. You can note the little scoreboard near each of the trap setups as well: this is a mode geared towards friendly competition, particularly in playground mode.
I hope we see more like this: the challenges are one of the best ways that Epic has for guiding us around some of the new features in the game and encouraging players to approach the battle royale concept differently. So far that’s mostly meant map exploration, but it’s clear the team is flexing out a little bit more.
Also, if you’re struggling to hit the things, just use a shotgun. Makes quick work of them.
