Fortnite

Don't tell your kids, but Fortnite comes out on Android devices this summer.

Fortnite's super fun Thanos event comes to an end tomorrow, Epic has announced.

Gaming headset sales have skyrocketed - and it's down to the battle royale craze.

The phenomenal popularity of Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has seen massive 185 per cent increase in revenue at Turtle Beach, which accounts for nearly 46 per cent of the gaming headset market share.

Turtle Beach boss Juergen Stark told Variety battle royale has fuelled a surge in popularity for his company's headsets - a surge so big it will spend more than $4m this quarter on air-freighting new stock into the US.

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Hot on the heels of Thanos' quickfire nerf in the all-conquering Fortnite, developer Epic has buffed the playable Mad Titan.

There's never really been an easy time to debut an online-focussed multiplayer game on Steam, but the past few months have suggested there's never really been a more brutal one. PUBG and Fortnite rule all, leaving high profile casualties such as Lawbreakers in their wake while many more smaller games have suffered. And into that, roll7 - the developer of the brilliant OlliOlli, its sequel and Not a Hero - has made its first ever multiplayer game in the future sports title Laser League.

Thanos hit Fortnite yesterday via the new Infinity Gauntlet Limited Time Mashup - and just a handful of hours later Epic nerfed him.

If you're a Twitch Prime member with a fondness for Fortnite, you may rejoice once more: another batch of exclusive Fortnite goodies will be made available as part of Twitch Prime subscriptions on Wednesday, May 9th.

The Fortnite Twitch Prime Pack #2, as the offering has been imaginatively titled, contains four exclusive items for Battle Royale mode: there's the Trailblazer Outfit, notable for its many khaki hues, as well as the True North Back Bling, and Tenderizer Pickaxe.

Most thrillingly for fans of frantic arm-frollicking, the new pack also includes the Freestylin' dance emote. This is one of several unreleased emotes that players managed to unearth recently by rummaging through the game's innards. Personally, I'm more excited by Chicken - which will hopefully turn out to be one of these.

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Thanos, the big purple baddie of Avengers: Infinity War, officially arrives in Fortnite today.

Now Fortnite is the biggest video game on earth and all the kids across the land rush home from school to play it, our government and mainstream media has finally caught on - with predictable results.

UPDATE 11.30am: Fortnite season four's big list of patch notes is now live. It's enormous, so allow us to summarise the biggest changes for you.

Fortnite, probably the biggest game in the world at this point, begins its fourth season of content tomorrow: 1st May 2018.

Brace yourselves people, it's finally happening! After weeks of teasing and speculation, massive chunks of rock are now thundering down from the skies over Fortnite's Battle Royale map and smashing to the earth.

We know most esports pros are young, but not this young.

Update 24/04/2018, 11pm: As if UFOs popping up all over the place yesterday wasn't enough to convince everyone that an earth-rending conclusion to Fortnite's long-teased meteor disaster is imminent, emergency broadcast systems have now been activated in-game.

Epic Games has released its latest Fortnite update, heralding another round of balance changes, bug fixes, and tweaks, alongside new additions like the Light Machine Gun. It also brings a selection of gifts for players, by way of an apology for last week's extended server downtime.

Scanning down the list of new additions, the Light Machine Gun is undoubtedly the highlight of today's Version 3.5 content update, although perhaps less exciting than some of the game's other recent treats - such as the sadly temporarily shelved guided missiles. The Light Machine Gun is a Battle Royale mode exclusive and includes a fast rate of fire and 100 round magazine designed, says Epic, to keep squads pinned down from a distance.

If that's not quite enough to get your pulse a-quickening, 3.5 also paves the way for the new limited-time Battle Royale mode 50v50 V2. This was originally scheduled to unfold last week but was delayed as a result of the game's widely reported account server issues and extended downtime; however, the new mode begins in earnest today.

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Epic has pulled the guided missile weapon from Fortnite Battle Royale just two weeks after adding it to the game.

You might have noticed Fortnite has had a rough 24 hours or so. Whether you're big into the hottest game on earth yourself, or your kids rushed home from school only to find their favourite video game didn't work, millions were left stranded yesterday, cast adrift and perplexed at the prospect of a Fortnite-less evening.

Fortnite's regularly scheduled update is here, and it's a big 'un, introducing the new Port-a-Fort grenade, a fully fledged Replay system, the new Thunder Route 99 area for Save the World, new cosmetics, and a wealth of tweaks and bug fixes. Less positively, it also breaks Guided Missiles.

The obvious highlights, though, are the new, recently teased Port-a-Fort grenade, and the Replay System. Port-a-Fort functions pretty much as everyone had deduced, acting as a throwable instant fort. Epic's latest patch notes add a few additional details, however, confirming that, when detonated, the Port-a-Fort will unfurl into a three-story metal fort, with a 1x1 base and tires inside for easy ascent. Additionally, it's of Epic rarity, drops in a stack of one and can be placed in a stack of up to five in an inventory.

Replay, meanwhile, is exactly what it sounds like, offering a means of creating cinematic replays on PC and consoles - complete with different camera types, angles, and speeds, and even adjustable focus, aperture, and exposure - to commemorative your best Battle Royale moments.

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Developer Epic Games has been teasing another gleefully unconventional addition to Fortnite's Battle Royale mode - the new Port-a-Fort device.

When Bluehole first announced it was adding a new Event Mode to PUBG I curled my lip at the idea. If you've invested as much of your time into a game as I have with PUBG, it's easy to fear change.

Footballers play Fortnite. That's not surprising - pretty much everyone plays Fortnite right now. But it's kind of crazy to see Fortnite bleed into the real world of football - in the form of goal celebrations.

This week's big Fortnite news - and there is big Fortnite news every week - is that Tilted Towers might be getting nuked. Well, not nuked exactly, but hit by a meteor, a biographical event from which it is unlikely to emerge unchanged. Meteors often explode with a strength measured in relation to nuclear blasts, and there is a lovely decisive finality to the phrase, so let's go with it. Tilted Towers might be getting nuked. And it should get nuked. Fortnite should definitely nuke Tilted Towers.

Fortnite Battle Royale fans have been scrambling to make sense of mysterious new in-game phenomenon, all seemingly related to the strange meteor that's been hanging in the sky above the map for at least a week now.

Epic has launched Fortnite's new 3.4 content update, introducing Vending Machines, an Easter Egg Launcher, and a new limited-time event in the form of High Explosives v2.

According to Epic, today's 3.4 update marks a change in the way that it will release new Fortnite content moving forward. From now on, the developer will alternate between content-focussed updates and larger patches that include new content alongside more complex fixes and changes - with one or the other arriving every week.

Update 3.4's new additions include a Vending Machine for Battle Royale mode - "Materials go in, loot comes out", as Epic puts it. Vending Machines can be found all across the map, and each offers three random item and rarity combinations for purchase.

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Epic has added a message to Fortnite's loading screen reminding students not to play in class, following complaints by teachers that the newly-released mobile version was distracting students.

As ever, it's all go in Fortnite; developer Epic has revealed that guided missiles and an Easter-themed questline are coming to Fortnite, and that an exclusive new pickaxe will be available to Twitch Prime subscribers from tomorrow.

Free-to-download multiplayer behemoth Fortnite Battle Royale now has a premium starter pack.

Two weeks ago, Fortnite earned Twitch its biggest ever audience - 635,000 people - when Canadian rapper Drake played alongside streamer Ninja.

Brilliant! There's a pub in Huddersfield which offers a £30 bar tab to anyone who can get a Victory Royale in Fortnite, there and then. Reckon you could do it on a projected screen with everybody watching?

Can mobile phone technology really deliver a convincing take on a game designed for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4? Some might say that Nintendo's Switch has already proven the point in several cases, but Epic's Fortnite on iOS is one of the best examples we've seen yet of a convincing convergence between mobile and console technology - in this X vs X face-off, it's fascinating to see just how close Fortnite running on iPhone X compares to the same game running on Xbox One X. Older iPhones? Well, you get a recognisable experience, but technologically, it's just not in the same ballpark.

We've already seen PUBG running on mobile hardware - and to be fair, it's a reasonable approximation, but while the map is comparable, the visual cutbacks are such that in many cases, it looks like a different game altogether. Not so with Fortnite: from the moment you fire up the game on the iPhone X, it's genuinely surprisingly how much this looks and feels like the established console release. The menus are mostly the same, the visuals remain similar and the map is identical. If you've been away from the console or PC version for a while, you might not even pick up on the differences at all.

And then there's the cross-play. Fortnite on mobile has to offer a very similar experience to the established Battle Royale game on the other systems because it's possible for mobile gamers to join in with PC, Xbox and PS4 sessions - which is exactly how we got our comparison clips together for the video below. I joined forces with myself on Xbox One X, then went searching for a quick elimination. By removing my Xbox persona from the game, the spectator mode automatically switches to my teammate - me again, this time playing on iPhone X. The result? The same action captured twice in real-time, once on the iPhone, once on the Xbox One X in spectator mode.

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Fortnite: Battle Royale is getting a replay editor, developer Epic Games has announced.

Fortnite streamer Tyler "Ninja" Blevins currently makes around $500,000 a month.

I have Fortnite on my iPhone SE. The complete thing? Well, the Battle Royale part, anyway: the part that is currently taking over the world. And it works! It works surprisingly well. It's a little more basic to look at and I'll need a while to get properly comfortable, but I suspect Fortnite might well conquer the touchscreen much as it's conquered everything else.

Overnight and this morning, Canadian rapper Drake played Fortnite with streamer Ninja and helped smash Twitch's concurrent viewers record.

UPDATE 3/4/18: Fancy a bit of Fortnite from bed? A battle royale while on the bus? A last man standing while on the loo? Now you can - without needing an invite.

UPDATE 12TH MARCH: Fortnite Battle Royale cross-play is also coming to Xbox One.

Update, 8/3/18: Fortnite's new 3.2 update is here, and Epic has offered a full breakdown of what you'll find once you fire it up on your video games machine of choice.

Of no surprise at all, given that it was announced yesterday, Fortnite Battle Royale's new limited-time Teams of 20 event is the headline addition. As its name suggests, it brings a temporary five-teams-of-20 ruleset into play.

However, that's not the end of it; update 3.2's other assorted odds and ends include this rather flash new biker-themed "Burnout" skin for Battle Royale mode:

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Propelled towards mass popularity by virtue of its superb Battle Royale refresh, Epic Games' Fortnite has recently been enhanced still further with the inclusion of an optional 60 frames per second mode - a potential game-changer for a fast-paced shooter like this. Now, we've seen a range of 'performance' modes in the past that target 60fps on Sony and Microsoft's enhanced consoles, but generally, they fail to deliver. The good news here is that Epic's work is the real deal - and it's by no means exclusive to the more powerful consoles, with owners of the standard models getting an equally impressive boost.

Based on information gleaned from social media and patch notes, the developer's approach in delivering this impressive buttery-smooth experience involves a combination of new Unreal Engine 4 graphics technologies paired with some intensive CPU optimisation. The results pay off as looking at frame-rates across both base and premium consoles, the new mode locks at its 60fps target for the vast majority of the duration. Consistency is generally excellent, holding up well throughout both traversal and intense gunplay, with all platforms running smoothly with the minimum of hitching.

It's not quite perfect though - moving into the more graphically complex towns can see some minor drops and a little tearing at the very top of the screen, but beyond that, the impact on gameplay is limited to brief moments of stutter that quickly pass. Fortnite at full frame-rate also passes muster as a premium experience on all consoles too - 60fps is 60fps, after all - although small dips in performance occur a little more often on the base Xbox One across a general run of play. It's only a subtle difference though, and we'd still take the new mode over the older 30fps standard.

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UPDATE, 1/3/18: Fortnite's 3.1.0 update is now here, bringing with it the usual bug fixes and improvements. As expected, however, it also introduces a few new goodies, including Battle Royale mode's previously teased Hunting Rifle and Lucky Landing point of interest.

The Hunting Rifle, which stands in for the temporarily delayed jetpacks that were teased earlier in the week, is effective at medium to long range - and only holds one round in its chamber. For the curious, it looks a little something like this:

Meanwhile, the new Lucky Landing point of interest can be found on the on Southern edge of Battle Royale mode's island map, and seems like a perfectly pleasant place to spend the afternoon. Aside from all the murder-bullets whizzing through the air, obviously.

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Epic appears to be teasing the imminent arrival of jetpacks in Fortnite Battle Royale, judging by the game's latest welcome screen.

On firing up the game last night, players were treated to an update screen which, as well as showing the already announced Fortnite Season 3 Battle Pass and Royale Dragon Glider, gave a sneaky glimpse of an entirely new item: the Jetpack. "Take the fight to all new heights", read the blurb, beneath a message indicating that jetpacks would be "coming soon".

That flavour text certainly implies that jetpacks won't merely be cosmetic in nature when they arrive, but it's unclear whether the item might offer full-on flight, or - as some users are speculating on the Fortnite subreddit - more of a portable jump-pad-style height burst. Obviously though, jetpacks will remain a mystery until Epic decides to reveal more.

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Fortnite's massive Season 3 update is here, and developer Epic Games has offered a full rundown of everything it brings - including a look at the new Hoverboard and Hand Cannon, plus some of the Battle-Pass-exclusive cosmetics in video form.

Season 3's biggest Battle Royale additions - most of which have been teased previously - include building improvements designed to make construction smoother, faster, and more intuitive, plus an increase to 60 FPS on PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, and Xbox One X.

Save the World mode, meanwhile, gets a Lunar New Year questline with new weapons and heroes (including Valentines Ninja Snuggle Specialist Sarah), as well as new music. The latter takes the form of an all-new, hour-long orchestral score, created by film composer Marco Beltrami (Logan, The Hurt Locker) and Pinar Toprak (the Krypton TV series) - and there are remixed versions to be heard in Battle Royale's lobby, launch, and log-in menus.

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Epic has revealed more on Fortnite's upcoming third season, including details of its improved building features and the Season 3 Battle Pass.

Building is, of course, one of the core features of Fortnite, setting it apart from other similarly styled games. Epic's upcoming building improvements seem intended to pick up the pace of construction in order to keep the flow of combat moving.

Season 3 will introduce a new feature called Turbo Building, which must be toggled on in the options menu. This makes it possible to hold down primary fire to quickly and continuously place a selected piece. It essentially lets players "paint" that piece into the world, which is handy for constructing simple structures - such as the staircase shown in the video below.

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Epic has released its latest Fortnite update, bringing with it a number of additions and improvements, including performance gains on consoles, devastating Impulse Grenades, secret treasure shrines, and more.

Fortnite's most timely addition in the 2.5.0 update comes in the form of new heroes and weapons, themed around the Lunar New Year - more specifically, the Chinese New Year - which has just begun. These goodies are available exclusively in Save the World mode.

Not to be outdone, Battle Royale mode gets its own exclusive new feature: thematic Shrines hidden across the map, each promising untold treasures to lucky adventurers. Battle Royale also gets the new Impulse Grenade which, on detonation, sends out a massive shockwave capable of launching unfortunate bystanders straight into the air.

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Epic has posted a huge update on the state of development for Fortnite, highlighting some of the major improvements and new features planned for the coming months.

Epic Games has shared more details of its upcoming Valentine's event for Fortnite and Battle Royale, due to commence on February 14th.

First up, Fortnite's Battle Royale mode will receive a selection of striking, vaguely Valentine's Day themed skins. Two have been revealed at present: a be-winged, toga-wearing statue-man, and a kind of human-sized female punk bear.

Whether there will be others skins in addition to those, Epic does not say. What it does reveal, however, is that a new weapon will come to Battle Royale as part of the update: the Crossbow. This, says Epic, will allow you to "hunt your prey the old-fashioned way".

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Fortnite, like PUBG, is a game of a million different stories, but if you leap from the sky and aim straight for the house on Loot Lake you're often going to see one story in particular.

When Epic added a battle royale mode to Fortnite in September last year, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds publisher Bluehole was pretty upset.

UPDATE 17/1/18: Fortnite Battle Royale's big map update will go live tomorrow, 18th January.

Epic Games has announced Sneaky Silencer, a new stealth-focussed limited-time mode for Fortnite's Battle Royale.

This far in, I think we can officially say: Fortnite is weird. The game that originally launched offered a brilliant suite of construction tools, but the game's pretty but rather brainless PvE meant there was little reason to build anything that fancy. The fact that any and all buildings would disappear at the end of a single Horde-style level meant that you felt you were wasting your time if you tried to experiment or make something elaborate and interesting. Form definitely followed function here.

Fornite's Battle Royale mode just got a new 50 vs 50 mode which is online now - yes, right now.

Fornite's latest update is a whopper, fixing a lot of pesky bugs and adding some much-needed new content to both Battle Royale and Save the World.

The new update adds smoke grenades to Battle Royale. Smoke grenades can be found in all container types, but can also be found randomly as floor loot, providing a handy magician's escape or distraction for your enemy.

Two new leaderboards have also been introduced to Battle Royale: a global leaderboard, which is measured by wins and spotlights the top 50 players for the selected match type, and a scoreboard, measured by the amount of total experience gained.

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Last month Epic Games filed civil complaints against two alleged Fortnite cheaters. The pair were accused of being associated with the cheat provider Addicted Cheats, allegedly acting as support personnel for the site and using aimbot software "with the deliberate intention of ruining the game for other players and players who watch streamers".

Fortnite's new 1.9 update is now live, bringing with it a sizeable number of tweaks and improvements. Its most notable addition, however, comes to Battle Royale mode in the form of new placeable launch pads, enabling you to spring into the air, re-deploy your glider and drift about whenever, wherever you please.

It's an item that has the potential to dramatically alter the rhythm of the game, adding sudden, long-distance terrain traversal to Fortnite Battle Royale's rapidly burgeoning bag of faintly ridiculous tricks. That leaves ample scope for quick getaways or sneaky infiltration into enemy territory - as long as you don't forget that you're awfully exposed while you drift through the air in the middle of a match, like a murderous Mary Poppins.

There are caveats to your new portable flight-makers however; although launch pads can be used an unlimited number of times, they can't be picked back up once deployed, and they can be destroyed like any other trap.

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Jeffrey Manchester typically robbed McDonald's. He typically robbed McDonald's because in America, McDonald's restaurants, wherever you go, are typically the same kind of building. Manchester's genius - and it was genius, albeit of a scrappy, low-key nature - was to realise that in these near-identical McDonald's buildings, near-identical rituals were often unfolding. If you found the right moment in the day to rob one McDonald's - and the right access point to utilise - you had stumbled on a crime you could export across the country. McDonald's has developed a easily replicable system for selling burgers. Because of this, Manchester had developed an easily replicable system for robbing McDonald's.

Just a week after it promised to come down hard on Battle Royale participants that refuse to play by the rules, Epic Games is suing two alleged Fortnite cheaters.

Fortnite's Battle Royale mode has garnered over 10 million players since its launch two weeks ago, Epic has announced.

Epic Games has assured players of Fortnite's new Battle Royale mode that it's on the case as far as tackling in-game cheating goes, and that it has already banned "thousands" of players.

Fortnite Battle Royale has introduced duos and supply drops in the game's latest update.

I've finally had some brilliant moments in Fortnite. I've had some brilliant moments, unexpected and thrilling and hilarious. For weeks, I dipped in and out of a game that I dearly wanted to love, a game made with obvious craft and care and wit, but a game whose once-voguish elements - resource gathering, crafting, loot boxes! - failed to come together in any meaningful way. The art, a sort of goofy atomic-age panorama, as if Mad Magazine had been conscripted into a militia, was hard not to warm to and the PvE campaign zipped along, but I was left unsure as to why I should put any time into building complex structures to defend against zombie hordes when the match would be over in the blink of an eye and all that hard work would vanish forever, and I was suspicious of the numbers that you pumped out of enemies, one bullet at a time. Those numbers looked so great, chunky and bright as they cluttered the air, but they also looked like set-dressing rather than anything with genuine meaning to the player. Fortnite simply wasn't as much fun as it looked like it was. It often seemed like it was pretending to be a game.

Fortnite's back on the map after the successful launch of its Battle Royale mode.

The developer of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has hit out at Epic's Fortnite for "replicating" its game.

In an eyebrow-raising press release, Bluehole exec Chang Han Kim slammed Fortnite's new Battle Royale mode for its similarities to PUBG. Kim said his studio was "concerned" and - ominously - stated it would "contemplate further action".

It's a surprising position to take; despite Battlegrounds' huge popularity, it is far from the first game to offer Battle Royale-inspired gameplay. It's not even the first competitor from a major publisher - GTA Online recently launched its own take, for example.

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Fortnite's Battle Royale mode is launching as a free mode for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.

The 100-player PVP mode in Fortnite will be completely free for everyone from 26th September. There's no need to have paid for the base game.

It's a canny move - gazumping the launch of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on console and beating its paid-for model by launching without charge.

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UPDATE 8.45pm: Fortnite developer Epic has confirmed that PlayStation 4 and Xbox One players were able to play together in the game - but said it was an error.

A Battle Royale mode is coming to Fortnite on 26th September.

Borderlands studio Gearbox will publish Epic's sandbox survival game Fortnite on a disc in Europe on 21st July.

Remember when zombies were cool? I think to myself, mashing the right trigger to slap down a few more with the big pointy stick I crafted earlier. That's about the time this game was announced.

Remember when Epic Games flew the Xbox 360 flag with Gears of War? Those were the days. Now we get Paragon (open beta), a not-bad MOBA; Fortnite (alpha), a base-building survival game in development for six years now; and a new, somewhat openly developed Unreal Tournament (pre-alpha).

Oh, and one other game, just announced: Battle Breakers. A turn-based tactical role-playing game for mobiles and PC, with cross-platform play.

Battle Breakers looks like typical mobile fare, with your team's heroes stood on hex grids on your side, facing off against enemies standing on hex grids on their side. There's an anime style and tone to the whole thing, with loud noises and flashy abilities. Do I sound old yet?

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UPDATE: Microsoft has responded to Tim Sweeney's Guardian piece, insisting its Universal Windows Platform is "a fully open ecosystem".

It's been a funny few years for Epic Games. A generation ago it was firing on all cylinders: Gears of War struck like a thunderbolt in 2006, followed by everyone and their dog licensing Unreal Engine 3. Then there was the incredible success of Infinity Blade on mobile devices. I, and probably you, sat eager for what big new game would come next.

Independent Polish Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly has returned.

Epic's upcoming construct-and-defend sandbox game Fortnite has been confirmed for Mac.

Epic's Bill Bramer made the reveal onstage at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference today, where he confirmed that the Mac version's beta will go live this autumn. An Epic rep since confirmed to Eurogamer that this is a closed beta.

To commemorate the new platform, Epic revealed a new gameplay trailer - below - showing off how its cartoony carpentry game is shaping up.

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Epic Games has shown off a half hour of new gameplay footage from its upcoming build-'em-up zombie defense game Fortnite.

Epic Games' multiplayer building and shooting game Fortnite is launching its closed alpha from 2nd December to 19th December.

Epic's upcoming building action game Fortnite was announced as a PC-exclusive affair. Does this mean Epic is no longer interested in developing for consoles?

Epic Games' colourful base-building monster-survival action game Fortnite finally appears ready to step out into the open, three years after it was announced.

Epic founder and programming legend Tim Sweeney has predicted that we'll see photo-realistic graphics within the next 10 years.

Doors open in the video games industry for someone like Cliff Bleszinski. He's famous in these parts. He left Epic Games in October and got away from it all, put some trunks on, went on holiday and spent time with his wife. Now he's had his break, what does he plan to do?

New IPs, we're told, aren't really feasible at the tail-end of a generation, so it's heartening to sit down and discover that a sizeable part of the games industry is sticking its tongues out at the likes of Yves Guillemot and Peter Moore; 2013's looking like it's going to be an absolutely stellar year for Actual New Games.

Epic Games president Mike Capps has retired.

Epic Games design director Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski has departed from the studio he helped make famous after a two decade stint.

Epic Games detailed its upcoming PC Unreal Engine 4 open-world zombie game earlier today in a panel at PAX Prime in Seattle, Washington.

Fortnite will be the first game to use Unreal Engine 4, developer Epic Games announced at Comic-Con earlier today in San Diego.