‘Fortnite: Battle Royale’ Updated With Stats, Report Player Option, And ‘BattlEye’ But No Leaderboards Yet
Fortnite: Battle Royale received a massive new update Thursday morning for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The free-to-play shooter is attracting lots of players and recently crossed the 10 million users milestone. Epic Games is keeping busy by adding new features like stat viewing and reporting cheaters along with gameplay tweaks and a load of fixes with the 1.7.1 patch. Unfortunately, the release of leaderboards has been pushed off a bit.
Update: The 1.7.1 patch may have introduced a bug that causes server crashes. Epic Games states it is currently investigating in the official forums.
Stats can now be viewed in Fortnite: Battle Royale. These are accessible from the game’s home screen and shows stats like wins, kills, matches played, and time played in solo, duo, and squad modes. This does include all stats earned prior to this update.
Leaderboards did not make this Fortnite: Battle Royale release but Epic Games is working to add it as soon as possible. Perhaps in the next the update. Other features like cosmetics are further off while the developers get the base game settled.
Two new anti-cheat features have also been added. BattlEye, the de facto industry standard anti-cheat service, is now active in Fortnite: Battle Royale. Additionally, a report button has been added to the end-of-match screen to report potential cheaters to Epic Games.
The fight against cheaters is a constant battle for developers. BattlEye is a good addition but it won’t catch everything as cheaters adjust their tactics. This makes the report button a necessity with the hope it won’t be abused.
Meanwhile, there are dozens of gameplay fixes and tweaks included with this Fortnite: Battle Royale update. Some of the major changes include the Battle Bus movement speed being increased by 50 percent along with skydiving terminal velocity. Epic Games hopes this makes staying on the Battle Bus a little longer a viable strategy instead of jumping out at the first possible moment.
Fortnite: Battle Royale players will need to adjust to some renamed weapons too. The Semi-Auto Rifle is now known as the Assault Rifle (Burst), the Semi-Auto Handgun is now just a Pistol, and the Semi-Auto Shotgun has been changed to the Tactical Shotgun.
How Duos and Squads players get rewarded for downing an enemy and recover from being downed is another gameplay area touched on. Eliminations will now be awarded to the player who downed the enemy and not the player who finished them off. Additionally, downed players will no longer be protected by the shield. However, the shield level will still be there if revived.
In two weeks since we’ve launched, over 10 million of you have played Battle Royale. We can’t say thank you enough. https://t.co/v39jBGe9qd pic.twitter.com/pkC7fhdl4K
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) October 11, 2017
Finally, Fortnite: Battle Royale players should notice some new names on the in-game map. The Dust Depot, Salty Springs, and Tomato Town areas have now been labeled.
Check out the full patch notes for all the changes and fixes with Fortnite: Battle Royale.
[Featured Image by Epic Games]
