Epic Game developers who work on the popular battle royale Fortnite have opened up about the possibility of introducing a respawn mechanic to the game.
As it stands, players who kick the bucket in the 100 player free for all right now die with no chance of coming back. That is, after all, kind of the point of a battle royale. Once your number’s up, that’s it for the game and you’ll have to drop into a new round to try again.
This could all be about to change, however, as a number of Epic designers revealed during a recent Reddit AMA that a respawn mechanic is being considered for Fortnite.
One producer said during the AMA:
We’ve been considering this mechanic for a while and have been exploring it. Want to make sure we give it the time it needs and fully understand its impact on the game as a whole. Look for further updates during Fortnite Season 8.
If Epic does go ahead with this, it’ll be a huge change for the battle royale genre and could fundamentally alter the pace and flow of the game. Of course, nothing is set in stone and there’s every chance respawns could be implemented as part of an entirely separate mode to the standard battle royale fare.
It is worth noting that the recently released (and super popular) Apex Legends has a respawn system in which players can collect tags from their fallen teammates before delivering them to a respawn point so they can jump back into the game.
It certainly makes sense that Epic would have one eye on what Respawn is doing with Apex, given that it seems to be the one battle royale game with a serious chance of taking Fortnite’s crown.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.