The folks at Epic Games are "huge fans of the Battle Royale genre," according to creative director Donald Mustard, and so—surprise!—the studio is adding a Battle Royale mode to its base-building FPS Fortnite. The new mode will drop 100 players onto "one giant map," and give them one simple objective: Be the last commander standing.
"We love Battle Royale games like PUBG and thought Fortnite would make a great foundation for our own version. A few months ago Epic’s Unreal Tournament team began experimenting with the mode while the original Fortnite team kept updating the core game," Mustard explained. "To maintain game balance we kept the PvP mode completely separate from the PvE mode. The new Battle Royale mode was so much fun we decided to share it with everyone to get feedback."
Fortnite Battle Royale will be rolled out to early access players on September 26, although Fortnite players can get into the Battle Royale public test right now by simply selecting the mode at the opening menu. Epic warned that "the servers will probably break and there will be other crashes and bugs" during the test phase, so be prepared to hit the occasional snag. It also posted a code of conduct for all FBR players:
- Respect other players. Be graceful in victory and defeat. Discriminatory language, hate speech, threats, spam, and other forms of harassment or illegal behavior will not be tolerated.
- Play fairly and within the rules of the game. Don’t cheat, AFK, grief, exploit bugs or glitches, team up in groups larger than the game mode allows (e.g. in solo matches do not work with other players, respectfully kill them instead) or impersonate others.
- Keep account information safe and private. Giving access to your account puts you at risk. Do not share your account information or the account information of others.
- Good luck and have fun!
(Nothing in there about stream sniping though, so have at it, I guess.)
Epic is also currently offering a 25 percent discount on the Fortnite standard and deluxe editions, dropping them to $30 and $45 respectively until September 18. Full patch notes for the 1.6 Battle Royale update are up at epicgames.com.
