Fortnite: Epic Discusses Building Improvements, Performance Issues and More

It’s hard to believe that with all of the incredible success Fortnite has seen thus far that it’s not even technically full out yet. Still set as an Early Access title, the team over at Epic Games has proven time and time again that they are all about their player base. With their incredible attention to their community and super active involvement with fans on social media, Fortnite players know that their play experience is in good hands.

To continue on in the spirit of transparency, the studio has just released a new developer update to address patterns they’ve noticed with performance, how they plan to improve building, and so much more.

Upcoming Weapon Balance Changes

The work of balance changes are never done, fully released game or no. The team has already briefly touched on this in the past but are now breaking down the upcoming changes in detail so fans know what to expect: 

• Evaluating shotgun equip time. The equip time was originally added to help combat rapid weapon switching. However, since the shotgun switch delay was added, equip times have less of a purpose.
  • We’ll be improving the Pump Shotgun so it’s a bit quicker to bring up, and we’ll be evaluating the other shotguns moving forward.
• Clingers are a bit more effective than we’d like. 
  • The behavior has been adjusted so that the second Clinger will fall to the ground in this scenario (v5.30).

Building Effectiveness

Since building is such a huge component to the world of Fortnite Battle Royale, it’s understandable that the team would want to keep a close eye on ways to make it better. This particular mechanic has seen many changes since it first debuted, and now the studio is showing off even more plans they have for those Victory Royale Bob the Builders: 

“We took our first steps into tweaking building with the material health adjustments in our v5.0 update. Last week we re-adjusted those knobs to more distinctly separate the types of building material, (metal stronger than brick, and brick stronger than wood) with the goal of creating more opportunities for tactical decision making.”

They added, “We will continue to evaluate adjustments to building as the dust on all these changes settles. Following the moving storm changes with Season 5, we’re evaluating other potential ways to modify circle behavior, including how the storm might interact with player-built structures in the final circles.”

Performance

Though overall performance will always be at the forefront, this week they are tackling 50v50 specifically. “Keeping performance up to our standards is something that needs constant attention. Adding a new feature (for example, ATKs) comes with a performance cost, and we need to make sure everything we’re adding is efficient. Often we need to make savings in one area in order to cover the cost of new features. We monitor performance closely between releases (and before releases) to ensure we can detect and fix perf issues as soon as they’re found.”

They also added a ton of graphs, seen here, that show off the dips in performance for this specific mode – even comparing how the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions stacked up against one another. 

“We’re working to improve your experience in 50v50 mode, where we tend to have a lot of players gathering in one area at one time. The graph below shows percentage of missed frames on Xbox One and PS4 (this is a comparison of actual number of frames rendered and the ideal number of frames rendered at 60fps) – lower is better. As you can see, performance in 50v50 steadily improved with every release except for the initial 5.0 release, where the addition of vehicles caused a temporary regression.”

Competitive

The world of eSports continues to grow at a rapid pace but as the Summer Skirmishes has shown us, Fortnite still has a bit to go before it’s ready to play in the big leagues. Because of that, the team also addressed their plans for more competitive play in the future: 

“Our weekly Fortnite Summer Skirmish events have proven invaluable as a testing ground, providing a high-stakes environment for some of the best players in the world to showcase their skills. We have learned a lot from experiments with scoring schemes and formats, attempting to find the best balance between simplicity, entertainment, server performance and competitive integrity.  Expect for us to continue operating and supporting competitive events after the conclusion of Summer Skirmish as we lead into next year’s official Fortnite World Cup.”

They added, “In recent weeks we began using a version of Live Spectating functionality similar to what was featured in the E3 Pro-Am but this time operating on live gameplay servers. Improvements have been made to allow for Gameplay POV cameras to more closely mirror the action when following a specific player. This will allow us to provide more high-quality coverage of the action along with map overheads, scoreboards, and drone cameras. We will be making extensive improvements to these features over the coming weeks and look forward to highlighting the performances of our competitors.

They know people want it but they also know that there is still work needed to get the game where it needs to be professionally, “We are aware of a strong desire from competitive players for more opportunities to compete directly against one another within the same match. Development recently began for a robust competition system which will allow for all players to compete with one another and be recognized for their accomplishments. The first version of this feature is expected later this Fall.”

You can see the full dev update right here including networking, screen freezing, Playground updates, and tons more.