Courage, Myth and TimTheTatman among critics of Fortnite’s BRUTE Mech explanation

Matt Porter

A number of popular Fortnite content creators have been reacting to Epic Games’ bizarre reason for not removing the B.R.U.T.E. mechs from the battle royale title.

Since its release at the start of Season 10, fans and personalities have been begging Epic Games to give the robots a major nerf, or ideally remove them from the game entirely.

Finally, the developers addressed players on Thursday, August 15, but their response was less than satisfactory, explaining that the mechs allowed “everyone to have a shot at that first elimination or Victory Royale moment,” claiming that the players who previously struggled to find kills are getting more, and that experienced players are still finding the same amount of eliminations on average.”

BRUTE mechs have been an incredibly unpopular addition to Fortnite.

Unsurprisingly, Epic Games’ admission that the mechs were there to help bad players win matches didn’t go down too well with the community, with popular content creators who shot to stardom thanks to the popularity of Fortnite voicing their anger at the blog post.

Tim ‘Overwatch account underneath the tweet of the post, writing: “I’m coming home, dad.”

The streamer than revealed his in-depth thoughts on the announcement, tweeting that he loves Fortnite but “these choices with the mech boggle my mind. Hope that some balance is found soon, hard to enjoy the game at the moment.”

TSM pro player Ali ‘Myth’ Kabanni echoed Timthetatman’s thoughts, using Twitter to argue against the idea that Epic should continue to add items just to stop it from growing stale.

“I don’t even know what to say about the most recent post Epic made,” wrote the 20-year-old. “I don’t want items in the game just for the sake of keeping things ‘fresh’. I’m not a game dev, but I’m not sure if turning out content that’s unproductive is a good plan for the long term.”

Sypher ‘SypherPK’ Ali was also unhappy with the blog post, using his stream to argue the mechs were overpowered – no matter how few eliminations-per-match Epic claim it has. 

The 23-year-old raged: “If you added a gun in the game that has a button that randomly one person in the game dies, without a chance of counterplay, that button would still exist, right? And you can say that the button only accounts for 1% of deaths in the game.

“The thing is, that doesn’t matter. Every kill or death with the BRUTE is one too many! The BRUTE has very limited counterplay, and it allows players who don’t usually get kills to have that opportunity!”

While some streamers made their annoyance clear, others like Jack ‘CouRageJD’ Dunlop and Ben ‘DrLupo’ Lupo simply decided to ditch Fortnite for the night, and move on to other titles.

100 Thieves member CouRage responded to the tweet by advertising his own stream, telling people to “tune into me playing Minecraft,” where he was attempting to name a pig after Timthetatman, while DrLupo went off to play Dungeons and Dragons, a game which has “no mechs.”

While it’s possible that Epic Games may see all the outrage from the community and decide to adjust course, their blog post seems to indicate that they plan to stick to their guns regarding the mechs – a move which could see even more streamers shift away from the game for good.