Fortnite Battle Royale
The lawsuit details that Lucas, cheats at the game and "promotes, advertises and sells software that enables those who use it to cheat." The lawsuit also names Lucas's secondary website in which visitors are encouraged to purchase the hack and/or Fortnite user accounts preloaded with hacks. Epic filed suit against a minor in 2017 who had used cheats in game and advertised these cheats in their YouTube channel videos. The case was ultimately settled out of court by February 2021 with undisclosed terms. Several of the security issues raised around the game are heightened with younger players who may not easily recognize such illicit schemes and put themselves at risk to privacy invasion.
Tools to merge multiple Epic accounts as well as unlinking console accounts from an Epic account to attach to another were released in February 2019. The first full patch adding in cross-platform play support across all consoles was released in March 2019. Epic announced in May 2020 alongside its reveal of the upcoming Unreal Engine 5 that ports of Fortnite for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are planned to be available at the time of consoles' releases in late 2020. These will initially run on Unreal Engine 4, but the game is expected to transition to Unreal Engine 5 by mid-2021 when the engine is released. J Balvin performed a live concert in the "Party Royale" game mode on October 31, 2020, premiering a new song titled "La Luz." Anyone who attended the concert could get a special J Balvin style for the Party Trooper outfit.
In November 2018, Epic partnered with the National Football League to make character skins for each of the 32 teams in the league available to purchase for a limited time. This was the result of the influence of Fortnite on NFL players, who had frequently performed Fortnite dance emotes as touchdown celebrations. For the first five seasons, all ports of Fortnite Battle Royale supported cross-platform play with other versions, but with limited interaction in regards to the PlayStation 4.
The game initially launched without any seasonable schedule, but starting with the release of Chapter 1 Season 2 in December 2017, Epic has provided new content, which includes new cosmetics, new gameplay elements, and changes to the game's map, on a roughly 10-week basis. This also introduced the use of the battle pass for players to obtain some of this new content by completing challenges and gaining experience. The main gameplay for Fortnite Battle Royale follows the standard format for the battle royale genre. The game normally is played either with each player on their own, or in a squad of two to four players, with up to 100 players participating each round.
When playing in solo modes, players are immediately eliminated when they exhaust their health. In squad modes, downed players Gaming can crawl around while losing health; they can be eliminated immediately by an opponent or revived by a squadmate to help them up. Initially, when the game launched, eliminated players were out of the match, but starting with updates in April 2019, squadmates can attempt to respawn a downed player at various "Reboot vans" scattered around the map, which are few and far between and in the open, making it a risk to respawn a squadmate. Over time, the game's safe zone , decreases in size, and players caught outside the zone will take damage.
Fortnite Battle Royale has created a larger loose narrative that is exhibited through changes in the game map, which generally correlated to the start and end of the in-game season. This tied into several new cosmetic skins related to superheroes and super-villains that were available that month. Epic has the ability to create custom events that occur across all game servers simultaneously as well; the first example of such was a countdown leading to a giant rocket's launch in June 2018 which, in the aftermath, left cracks in the skies that have grown since that event.