‘Harpoon Gun’: Why ‘Fortnite’ Isn’t Doing Patch Notes Anymore

Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

This morning, developer Epic Games dropped something snazzy into Fortnite. There’s a harpoon gun now, a powerful gun that resembles a grappler without a mobility component, and people are already starting to think it might have a large role to play in box battles. And yet, as has become the developer’s custom, it dropped without warning or even notice: it wasn’t until players started picking it up in-game that we even knew it was there.

This is something that the developer started doing with the start of Chapter 2. Before that, we could expect a multi-page list of all the changes in the game: what was vaulted, what was added, balance adjustments, bug fixes, you name it. Instead, we got nothing. Just a note to drop in and have at it, exploring at our own pace. AT first it seemed like a little trick to increase the mystery surrounding Chapter 2, but now it’s starting to seem like policy: Epic doesn’t tell us what it’s changed, we just need to find it. Today’s harpoon gun update would have been considered a content update under the previous systemâ€"at least I thinkâ€"but instead it’s just what it is, a new weapon.

To think about why we’re doing this, think about the black hole that kicked this whole thing off. For a long time, Fortnite had become fairly rote: a new season every 10 weeks, a new item every week, a live event at the second-to-last weekend, special events on holidays, etc. The constant stream of content that had served the game so well for so long had actually begun to work against it: when we get the thing we want, over and over again, it starts to lose potency. Expectation breeds complacency, and that’s what happened with Fortnite.

Enter the black hole: all of a sudden we had no clue what was going to happen. The entire map got sucked into a swirling vortex of nothingness at the center of the world and everything just shut down, leaving us staring at a void and guessing. It was a brilliant subversion of expectation, and it belies Epic’s strategy going forward. The team seems to not want us to expect things, and not want us to know what’s going on. Mystery and surprise breed excitement, something we saw a lot more of in the early days of Fortnite.

So while it can be sort of frustrating, it’s definitely intentional. It’s a way to avoid things falling into a rut like they did in Chapter 2, to keep us guessing not only about what’s coming next, but what’s already in the game. And I think it’s working.

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