Fortnite’s newest patch hasn’t made people happy

When it comes to games like Fortnite that heavily rely on a weapons and item meta, it’s easy to make fans unhappy with even the slightest adjustment – whether it has a positive effect on the meta or not.

Naturally, not everything does – have a positive effect, that is. In this case, it’s not that difficult to see why fans (especially pros) are struggling to accept the newest addition to the game – the Infinity blade. Added with the v7.01 update, the blade works in a similar way the glove of Thanos did. Only one is available per game and it gives players 200 health and shield on pick-up. Two different attacks – one close range and one leaping – allow for absolute carnage. The 1 health/second recovery rate is nothing to scoff at either – not when you can simply leap away with the secondary ability until you’ve recovered enough to come back and clean house.

© Epic Games

Sounds like a pretty fun LTM, to be perfectly fair… except that it’s not because the blade is in every game mode now, and not just available in limited mode. To make matters worse, this update went live on the first day of the NA Winter Royale Finals. In other words: The worst possible timing.

Players who manage to pick up the sword first have a very good chance of wreaking absolute havoc on the lobby with it, before someone takes it off them… if they can, that is. With regenerating health and massive amounts of damage, it isn’t an easy thing to do.

With a $1 million tournament payout, many pros are very upset by the timing of the update as it affects gameplay in a major way. As for Epic, they have released a statement on the bugs and flaws of the new sword, but not on its ridiculous power per se. Did we mention it increases your base movement speed to 130% as well? It does.

For a company that is normally quite dedicated to paying attention to fanbases (at least, where game modes and such are concerned), it’s quite upsetting to see them simply waltz over what are very valid protests. We’d be upset too, if a potential $1 million tournament was completely messed up by a thoughtless update.

The second round of the Winter Royale is taking place today, so it remains to be seen how it all ends. Pro players as well as popular streamers have been neither subtle nor quiet about it all, taking to Twitter, forums and Twitch to make their complaints heard.

On a less negative note – the rest of the update was far less problematic. A limited time mode was added – Close Encounters is all about jetpacks, shotguns and twitchy aim. A few bugs were fixed and the game’s new Creative mode was enabled, along with a few fixes to it, but that only affects players who didn’t buy the Battle Pass to begin with.