Fortnite
It looks like we’re somewhat on our own. where patch notes are concerned here at the dawn of Chapter 2, Season 2 in Fortnite: Battle Royale. This is a trick Epic pulled last season, as well: make a ton of changes but don’t release official patch notes, letting everyone just get out there and find them for themselves. We’ve got a little more this time around in the form of some redacted patch notes, but there are still a lot of questions. I’m sure there are more changes than this, so let’s jump in and try to figure it.
This Redacted Letter: Here’s what we’ve got in lieu of actual patch notes, it seems. I think this went out to people that were activated as agents on Discord as part of the ARG epic was running:
New Battle Pass Interface: You’ll get something totally different when you click on the battle pass tab this time around. We’ve now got a sort of secret lair with our agent friends inside, adding a narrative layer to the challenges and unlocks that we’ve had with us for so long. It’s cool!
Map Changes: Wouldn’t be a new season without map changes. We’ve got four new locations: the Shark, the Rig, the Agency, The Grotto and the Yacht, and Erik Kain will have a rundown for you on all of those soon.
Henchmen: All the new locations come stocked with Henchmen, building on the First Order troopers from the Star Wars event. Henchmen are no joke: they will kill you if you don’t come prepared, and they add a real wrinkle to landing at these new locations. Each location also has a boss henchman that will drop a keycard to a secret vault full of sweet loot, so there’s some real risk/reward here.
You can fool these henchmen in a couple of ways: either by putting on a disguise in a phone booth, or sneaking around Metal Gear-style in a cardboard box.
Unvaulted Items: So far, we appear to have remote explosives, Heavy Sniper Rifle, Suppressed SMG and the Grappler, now upgraded to mythic: all pretty spy-themed. On the flip side of the coin, we’ve vaulted the damage trap, bolt-action sniper rifle, SMG, and some rarities of rocket launcher.
Decoy: I found this when snooping around the yacht: it’s a throwable that puts down a decoy version of yourself, particularly handy for henchmen.
Teleporting Toilets: Sometimes when you wander into a toilet, you wind up somewhere else! This happens to me sometimes.
Shakedowns: When you down an opponent—henchman or human—you can shake them down for info. We’ll need to play around with this a bit more, but it seems like it will reveal the locations of surviving squadmates if you perform this on a human. On a henchman, it will give you the location of their boss and treasures in the area.
Throwable consumables: We can throw consumables now! A cool little twist. The game has been slowly increasing the sorts of support options available to players, and this is sort of the latest there. between this and the bandage bazooka you can start playing as a medic in a much more concerted way.
No Helicopters, yet: Helicopters have been teased and make an appearance in the early trailers, but they’re not in the game yet. I’d expect them to arrive in the course of the season, however.
