'Fortnite' Teases New Sword Weapons

Fortnite's latest reveal teased that swords appear to be coming to the game, an item that will be the battle royale game's first melee weapon.

The teaser below showed a familiar scene where a sword was stuck in the ground until someone came and yanked it out to wield it. What that means for Fortnite players though is that they, too, should soon be able to use these swords, assuming the teaser means what people think it does.

Coming soon... a weapon fit for a King 🗡👑 pic.twitter.com/n3kMDCS5IH

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) December 10, 2018

Swords are certainly on the way in some capacity, but how they'll be implemented remains to be seen. With so many guns and defensive measures in Fortnite, the swords are going to have to be pretty powerful to incentivize the use of the close-range weapon when everyone else has rifles, explosives, and traps to prevent players from approaching them with a sword. Some battle royale games make risky melee weapons a one-shot kill, the Bowie Knife in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's Blackout mode being one example, but making swords deal high amounts of damage seems like a likely outcome in Fortnite. Another teaser shown below that was released at the start of Season 7 showed a sword that looked like it was imbued with some kind of energy, so don't be surprised if the swords have an alternate attack with longer range.

Fortnite Creative is live!

Buy the Battle Pass for a week of early access and start exploring with your squad. pic.twitter.com/XafkLGkHA7

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) December 6, 2018

There's also the chance that these swords could be implemented through a new Limited Time Mode as well to get players used to them. Different LTMs have restricted what weapons players can use in the past, so it wouldn't be unheard of to have a mode where only close-range weapons like swords and shotguns are used.

The reveal of swords coming to the game's battle royale mode isn't a totally unexpected turn of events seeing how the trailer for Season 7 that's shown above featured the weapon type. Files were datamined not long ago and showed that there were multiple sound files for swords in the battle royale mode with different sounds playing depending on how far away the swords were swung and what impact they'd make.

Fortnite gave no further indication of when swords might be added beyond the teaser above.