Fortnite
If Fortnite has seemed relatively quiet recently, it’s because there simply hasn’t been all that much to report since the arrival of the new map in the new Chapter 2 era.
The new map is cool, but as of yet, there have not been any further changes or “plot developments” this season, other than rare blips like an island being taken over by zombies for a Halloween event, or something small and temporary like that.
But while I can understand this season taking it relatively easy in that regard, just letting players feel out the new map without starting to change stuff already, another piece of the puzzle is the bizarre fact that Epic has done away with the concept of public patch notes all season long.
Patch notes are a staple in pretty much every major video game now. Many games will update a game every few weeks or months and then detail all the big changes in a public patch notes list, often with accompanying explanations of why changes were made. For a live service game like Fortnite which makes changes and balance tweaks constantly, patch notes were a staple every single week.
Now, that’s all disappeared.
The last public patch notes I can find for Fortnite are from September 11th, last season, and we haven’t gotten any since. Not only is Epic not sharing information about nerfs or buffs in this fashion anymore, a lot of the time they’re not even announcing new weapons they’re putting in the game like the recent Harpoon Gun. They simply show up there.
Fortnite
I am racking my brain to understand the strategy here and the reasoning for this weird lack of transparency. Maybe the idea is that if people don’t know what changes are or aren’t being made, they can’t complain about them, but if so, that’s a terrible philosophy. You can’t know if suddenly your favorite weapon feels more sluggish and hits less hard because you’re playing worse, or because it’s been secretly nerfed behind the scenes. There’s a reason almost every major game gives out detailed patch notes for major and minor changes these days, because fans really want to read them.
What’s now happening instead is that unless you follow a dozen different Fortnite dataminers on Twitter or are Googling articles people like me write, you don’t know what’s being changed in the game at all. The changes are able to be found in the backend data with enough digging, creating “unofficial” patch notes, but you really have to go out of your way to find those, and it’s likely some stuff may be getting missed in this system.
I’ve asked Epic directly what the deal is here, and why they’ve just stopped doing patch notes in a game that probably needs them more than most others, and I will update if I hear back. For now, fans will have to be content with cobbled-together versions of changes week to week, but for now, Fortnite just feels dead and silent where the only publicly announced updates these days are usually just new skins in the store. It all feels very weird, and no one is sure why it’s happening.
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