Epic Games has revealed that more than 45 million people are now playing Fortnite Battle Royale around the world, as friendly fire is disabled.
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After days of speculation developer Epic Games has confirmed that the new map update for Fortnite Battle Royale will be out today – Thursday, January 18.
There’s no specific start time, so it could end up being very late in the day, but at some point on Thursday the map update will be released for free on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
It will be the first major map addition since the game launched last year and will feature a new city, an underground mine, and swamp and mountain areas – all of which you can see in the official trailer below.
The map extras are all part of Patch V.2.2.0, which will also include a major change by disabling friendly fire. Although Epic say this is currently only a trial and won’t necessarily be permeannt.
You can read the full patch notes here, but they almost promise that load times have been halved on consoles; as well as including an offer for a free 5 tier head start in Season 3 when you purchase the Season 2 Battle Pass.
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Fortnite wasn’t originally planned to even have a Battle Royale mode, but one was released as a standalone mode following the success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (something PUBG’s creator was not too keen about).
Since Fortnite is both free-to-play and multiformat it’s become even more popular than PUBG, with 45 million players and a record 2 million concurrent players over the weekend.
That makes it what Epic themselves have cautiously proclaimed, ‘the biggest game in the Western world’.
The new trailer below outlines some other current stats from the game’s first 100 days, including 5.69 billion gliders deployed, 31.63 billion pieces built, 574.35 billion shots fired, and 125.8 million total wins.
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