‘Fortnite: Battle Royale’ Receives Quality Of Life Improvements, PC Voice Chat In New Update


The rapid-fire updates to Fortnite: Battle Royale continue. Epic Games released a new patch Wednesday morning to make some quality of life improvements to the early access PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC multiplayer shooter. This includes the first shot at in-game voice chat on the PC with plans to bring it to consoles later.

Fortnite: Battle Royale does not receive any major new features in the 1.7.2 patch as Epic Games focuses on smaller improvements and bug fixes to gameplay, weapons, performance, and controls. For example, players who have been knocked out of a Squads match can now switch between their teammates while spectating. Meanwhile, bugs to fix issues with jumping indefinitely, triggering jump pads while down, and the crosshair hit-markers to not show up have all been addressed too.

The weapon changes are seemingly minor but do affect the amount of ammo spawned into the game world. Rocket Ammo sees a 25 percent decrease, perhaps making the late-game less about rocket spam, while Medium Ammo stacks have been increased from 10 bullets to 20.

Loading times are another area touched on in Fortnite: Battle Royale. The amount of time it takes to load into a map has been decreased while general improvements to frame rate have been made as well.

Voice Chat

[Image by Epic Games]

The exception to no major new features is the addition of in-game voice chat on the PC. This has been a much-requested feature since Fortnite: Battle Royale first added Squad and Duos modes when the game became available for free and the development team was able to squeeze it in at the last minute. Players have had to resort to using a third-party application on the PC and party chat features on Xbox LIVE and PlayStation Network, which is good for pre-formed groups but not necessarily convenient for matchmade groups.

Epic Games’ first shot at in-game voice chat on the PC supports Push-to-Talk via the “Y” key by default with the option to change the key binding or use voice activation instead. Additionally, squad voice chat is on by default, but it can also be disabled. There does not appear to be any proximity chat available at the moment.

There is no timeline yet on when in-game voice chat will become available on the PS4 and Xbox One. Epic Games does state it is working toward bringing it to consoles and will have more information soon.

Updates to Come

As previously covered, Epic Games has a long list of new features and improvements planned over the next four to six weeks for Fortnite: Battle Royale. This includes progression, cosmetics, leaderboards, console-specific UI improvements, and a controller revamp, plus more.

[Featured Image by Epic Games]

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