For the first time in its two-year history, Fortnite finally has a new map.
Epic Games retired Battle Island with a terrific season-end event that saw it get devoured by a black hole, leaving behind a blank canvas for the developer to begin anew. Its replacement is called Apollo and, if you hadn’t already heard, the gorgeous vista is home to a great many new features. The swap has been a long time coming for many veteran fans, who had grown weary of air-dropping onto the same island for so long, a staleness that its creator had attempted to ward off with constant events and environmental changes.
Boasting a wealth of bespoke Points of Interest, new features like fishing and improvements to core gameplay such as weapon upgrading, Apollo appears to have already struck a chord with the player base, though its implementation hasn’t gone off without a hitch, it seems.
Streamers TimTheTatman and SupherPK – among a host of many others, I’m sure – have started reporting a bizarre occurrence in-game that causes their avatars to simply keel over and die for no apparent reason. You can find video evidence of the phenomenon below.
Also strange bug where you just randomly die for no reason ??? pic.twitter.com/OMTDsJK8Qs
— LG SypherPK (@SypherPK) October 15, 2019
THERE ARE DEADZONES IN THE MAP LOLLLLLL @FortniteGame pic.twitter.com/7hAB449WJf
— timthetatman (@timthetatman) October 15, 2019
The look of utter disbelief on both streamers’ faces says it all – this isn’t normal.
While the root cause isn’t clear, early signs appear to suggest that the bug is a result of some wonky kill box mapping for Fortnite‘s new battleground. For the unaware, developers often intentionally implement such areas as a means of preventing players from reaching out-of-bounds zones not meant to be reachable and that would certainly somewhat explain what’s going on here. Of course, given that both accounts shown above were of players well within the confines of the map, it seems Epic simply got a little overzealous with protecting its borders.
We expect the mild irritant to get a fix in Fortnite‘s next update, likely sometime next week. Stay tuned.
