‘Fortnite: Battle Royale’ 50v50 Return Delayed As Hot Fix Patch Released

Fortnite: Battle Royale was supposed to see an updated version of the 50v50 mode Thursday. Unfortunately, the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC multiplayer shooter experienced issues severe enough to push the face-off between two massive teams to next week.

Epic Games announced the delay via Reddit where the studio explained issues with account services forced the delay. Fortnite began experiencing problems with login and other account related activities Wednesday afternoon which eventually resulted in the servers being taken offline to for emergency maintenance for a couple of hours during the evening. The issues rolled over into Thursday before the game was fully functional again around 3 p.m. ET.

Delaying the return of 50v50 was made to “preserve your play experience this weekend,” according to Epic Games. Playing it safe to ensure the game stayed operational during the weekend was the safe choice given Fortnite’s struggles to keep up with an ever-expanding player base. The return of the much-requested limited time event would have only flooded the server queues.

As previously covered, Epic Games is introducing several changes to 50v50 to make the mode more conducive to two large teams.

These changes include putting the teams on separate buses that approach the island from different directions. New markers will be added to the map, such as where the final storm circle will land and a dotted line to indicate “battle lines” where players are more likely to encounter enemies.

The first 10 minutes of a 50v50 match will be spent gathering resources and setting up defenses. Then the two teams will have five minutes to fight followed by another five minutes where the storm shrinks to the final circle. Additionally, resource farming has been increased 75 percent while ammo spawns at double and triple the normal rate.

New Patch

We’ve just released the v3.5.1 update! This introduces fixes for some issues discovered in the recent v3.5 patch. You can learn more about these fixes in the updated patch notes. https://t.co/0nmoI7jQQu

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) April 13, 2018

Fortnite: Battle Royale also received a hotfix patch Thursday morning to fix a handful of issues introduced with the 3.5 update released Tuesday. These include:

• Fixed an issue where players could fire weapons before the equip animation had finished if they were sprinting.
• Fixed several client crashes that were related to the new Replay System.
• Fixed an issue that broke player’s walking / sprinting animations if they were firing a Guided Missile while walking/sprinting.

That last item heralds the return of the Guided Missile. The weapon was disabled temporarily by Epic Games due to the animation issues.

Fortnite community complaints about the recent implementation of the weapon fire delay remain, however. Epic Games has not yet responded to these complaints.