Fortnite: Guided Missiles Vaulted, Devs Address Peeking & Weapon Swapping

Guided Missles

In a recent post on Reddit, the team over at Epic Games first shared that based off of feedback they decided to vault the Guided Missile until further notice. "We've gotten a lot of feedback around the Guided Missile, in particular concerns over fairness and strength of the weapon." Epic Games also added, "We share your concerns, so we've put the Guided Missile into the vault while we figure out the next steps for for its future."

We've seen a lot of hilarious plays concerning the Guided Missiles, though we can understand the player frustration. As one might expect from this weapon type, they are massively overpowered in a game that is so reliant on "emergent gameplay."

Weapon Swapping

Weapon Swapping has been tinkered with quite a bit since launch and some of the most recent updates led to exploits that many have complained about regarding shotguns. Here's what they had to say in their post:

We recently introduced weapon equip times. This change was geared towards balancing quick switching between different weapons with low rate of fire (effectively bypassing the drawbacks that make these weapons fair).

After reviewing your feedback, we'll be making a number of changes in a hotfix later today:

• Snipers and Crossbows do not benefit as much from quick switching, so we'll be reverting the equip time changes for those weapons.
  • We will be keeping the delay for the remaining weapons with the new behavior - Shotguns, Revolver, Hand Cannon, and Rocket Launcher. Note: All other weapons do not have equip times.
• Weapon equip animations will be improved in a future update. These are unfortunately somewhat misleading - it's possible to fire sooner than the gun appears ready, so they feel more sluggish than they really are. You may notice this on a few weapons.

These two changes are an iterative step in taking another look at our weapon swapping and improving it for the long run. Please share your feedback as we continue to work on these changes.

Peeking

One of the byproducts of their most recent update also affected players by creating a new bug that affected players and their cover over edges and certain structures. The results? Not so pretty. Here's what they had to say:

"In v3.4, we identified an unintended behavior with shooting that affected a small number of players. However, when implementing a fix in v3.5, we unintentionally introduced a bug around peeking over structures and edges. The result of this issue is that you would accidentally end up shooting your own structures. We will be rolling back this change in v3.5.2 this week, and we'll be taking a little more time to evaluate how we fix the original issue."

It looks like their next update will be a hefty one, we're just hoping it doesn't fall into chaos like last time.

(source)