‘Fortnite’ Patch Notes: 11 Of The Biggest Changes In ‘Chapter 2’

Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

Fortnite Chapter 2 is here. It’s been a long road getting here, including 30+ hours of staring at a black hole, but the game is now back online with massive changes. We've gotten accustomed to big drops of new content every ten weeks or so in this game, but nothing has ever been quite on this scale before: there’s a new map, new default skins, new items and...a ton of other stuff. We’re still sifting through exactly what’s different, because this one doesn’t seem to have dropped with any patch notes, unlike every other patch in this game’s history. Epic appears to want us to discover this stuff ourselves, which is exactly what we’re going to do.

So without official patch notes, we’ll make our own. While we’ll be figuring out stuff for the rest of the day at least, let’s take a look at the biggest changes that we can see here at the beginning of the season.

New Map: This one is sort of hard to miss. But after 10 seasons we said goodbye to the old map in dramatic fashion, and now we’re setting out to explore the new one. The in-game mini-map is grayed out when you first drop in, and you have to do it gradually.

Water: Water is a big focus of this map, and we’ve got some nice improvements to go along with that. We’ve now got boats and the ability to swim and even dive a tiny amount. There are also some nice water effects and physics, though you won’t see those at lower graphics settings.

New Default Skins: You see this one the second you open up a match: we’ve got new default skins, saying goodbye to the ones that we’ve played with for over a year. Don’t worry: the characters remain, but they’re wearing different clothes.

Better Graphics: I’m fairly certain I noticed some lighting improvements in there along with the better water effects. There definitely seems to be a bump up at the highest level, but I’ll be curious if Digital Foundry or some other tech experts take a look at things.

Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

UI Changes: Nothing major here, and everything should still be pretty navigable if you’ve played before. But we’ve got tweaks to the basic UI, including a progress bar at the bottom of the screen and skin icons next to players.

New Weapons, but less weapons: The game is promising a streamlined arsenal for the beginning of Chapter 2, which is a relief: the Junk Rifts and Batarangs were getting a little bit exhausting. There are a few new basic weapons, too, but they all fall into fairly recognizable categories.

Support Skills/Items: We got a lot more options for medic-style players at the end of last season, but these additions are even bigger than those. We now have both the ability to carry your downed teammates to safety and a new “bandage bazooka” that allows you to heal your teammates at a distance.

New Progression Systems: Progression has always been a shifting beast in this game, between season level and battle pass level, but Chapter 2 brings with it major changes. You now earn experience for all sorts of things besides killing people, like harvesting materials or opening chests. There are also medals tied to specific actions that you can use to fill out a “punchcard”.

Hiding: Fortnite has never really been about hiding, despite the fact that I always spend a lot of time hiding. Players like me now have options that extend beyond squatting in a bush, including the ability to hide in environmental haystacks and dumpsters.

Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

Upgrade Your Weapons: This should take some of the RNG out of things. You can now upgrade your weapons using materials, giving players different avenues towards building the perfect endgame loadout.

Fishing: You can fish for weapons, now!

We’ll leave it at that for now as we look for more changes. There should be a ton of stuff coming in soon, so and it will take a bit of time to sort through it all.

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