[2019] Fortnite Battle Royale AMA - 2.22.2019

Hey folks,

Welcome to today’s Fortnite Battle Royale AMA, we’re pumped you could make it! Let’s introduce who will be answering your questions today.

Today’s Devs

• EpicEricSW - Design
• DanDaDaDanDan - Engineering
• RZElive - Production

 

You gave us some great questions to start off with. So let’s dive right into those questions/answers.

 

Q: “Could you add the option for all consoles (including Nintendo Switch) to lower graphic settings and removing things like motion blur and shadows?” -[kairich420](https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/at67ja/fortnite_battle_royale_ama_2222019/egz0by6/(

A: We are adding an option to disable motion blur (off by default) in Season 8.

Disabling shadows currently provides a gameplay benefit. This is not our intention and we are tweaking the way shadows are rendered to both brighten them and also make characters stand out better. This is going to be an ongoing effort starting with v8.0 and we will evaluate other options if this doesn’t end up working.

 

Q: “If you complete 13 overtime challenges, you get the battle pass for free & it’s originally 950 vbucks, will we have the option to purchase the bundle if we want to? and will it be full priced if we’ve already earned the free pass. Thanks!” -j5cob

A: Yes, the Season 8 Battle Bundle will be available at a discount for players who earn a Season 8 Battle Pass via the Overtime Challenges.

 

Q: “Ranked.. when?” -ByTKG

A: We believe the key pillars for competition are:

• Compete whenever you want
• Measure and communicate your skill
• Be challenged

Pop-up cups are a first small step in this direction, expect lots of iteration.

 

Q: “Do you intend on improving the gameplay sound?” -Zetroes

A: In the last few weeks we've started reviewing our gameplay audio and found there's a lot of room for improvement. Season 8's update will contain:

• Improved Weapon firing sounds:

  • All player weapon fire sounds are now 2D stereo, giving them a much fuller and natural sound.
    
  • All 3rd person weapon sounds from other players are now mono and run through the new reverb, which gives much better point spatialization while still sounding 'in the world'.

• Reverb

  • There is now a global reverb available.
  • We are setting it up as an 'opt-in' feature, so we will be adding the reverb to categories of sounds as we go.
    
  • Currently, weapon related sounds are set up with reverb. In the future, we will be able to have different reverb settings for different areas of the map.

• ADS / Crouch Foley

  • New sounds have been added for going into and out of ADS on each weapon, as well as sounds for going in and out of crouch. This gives a better sense of player ownership of actions.

• Improvements to upstairs / downstairs footsteps for better tactical awareness.

• Improved hit notification audio

  • Improvements to sound and mix of 2D hit notifications when players land shots on enemies. This includes a new clearer "shield break" sound.

• Cleaned up the "weak-point" harvesting crit sound

  • We increased the dynamic range and shortened the length of this sound; it is still clear but much less fatiguing.

• Fixed an issue preventing footsteps from being heard in some situations.

• Even more improvements coming later in Season 8!

 

Q: “What is the reason for not separating SEA servers? We have to play on 150 ping in pop up events” - Toxikitz

A: We are hosting our Asian servers in Tokyo and Singapore.

The majority of players in the general region are best served by our Tokyo data center, and we dynamically route players to Singapore if there are enough players in queue who have better ping to that location.

Generally, this allows us to more dynamically deal with fragmentation as platform * playlist * region results in a lot of buckets and regional populations swing by as much as a factor of 30-40 between daily peak and valley.

Having said that, we recently made some changes to our matchmaking wait times to help improve the experience of players with a better connection to our Singapore data center and have some other changes in development to further improve the situation. We are aiming for them to land in March.

 

Q: “Can you add a button to the item shop to confirm purchases, to prevent accidental purchases?” -Footstick

A: We are working on ways to eliminate accidental purchases. In the meantime, we have a refund token system to help.

 

Q: “Who has the most wins at Epic Games headquarters?” -GranttH

A: [EPIC] Tense (Mitch Meara): 577 in default playlists

 

Q: “What was the hardest location to replace/get rid of?” - dmh11

A: Dusty Depot since that was the first time we had to make the decision to take the plunge and change something at a larger scale. Generally everything we change has a bittersweet aspect to it for somebody.

 

Q: “Just one word for season 8?” -Getsumi

A: Bananas

 

Got more questions? Let us know below in the comments!

Edit: Thanks so much to everyone who showed up! We loved being able to answer your questions and interact with all of you. We plan to do future AMAs for Battle Royale, as well as separate ones for Creative and Save the World.

• Save the World AMA: Wednesday, February 27 from 4-5 PM ET

• Creative AMA: Date TBD

Season 8 Launches on Thursday, February 28. See you there!

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