Epic Games' popular game mode, Fortnite's Battle Royale, is known for its constant updates. These modifications aim to maintain a balanced gaming environment for its enthusiastic player base.
These tweaks come in the form of regular content updates, occurring every few weeks, along with new season updates that appear every couple of months. These continuous modifications help to keep the gameplay competitive and fresh.
In the fifth chapter of the gaming saga, some notable points of discussion arose amongst the players. Several overpowering (OP) items and weapons became highly discussed topics in the community.
Items such as snipers, the Ballistic Shield, and Medallions were the talk of the town. They dominated the meta, resulting in significant divides among gamers and ultimately leading to their nerfing.
To the surprise of many players, Epic recently issued a drastic nerf to the scanning abilities of Recon NPCs. These characters, commonly used for scanning, saw their abilities significantly reduced. Additionally, the scanning abilities for POI Banners were entirely disabled.
A user identified as Leading-Pop5059 voiced his confusion about the change publically. He questioned the point of the Recon NPCs now that their scanning abilities have been significantly reduced. He also wondered who had requested such a change.
The same player reported a hotfix issued on February 23rd, which appeared alongside a screenshot. In this report, HYPEX, a trusted creator and game-leaker, stated that both NPCs and POI Banners would no longer mark nearby enemies and chests.
Interestingly, Epic did not completely disable the scanning for Recon NPCs. Instead, they significantly nerfed their ability. Recon NPCs can now only scan the nearby area every 10,000 seconds, as opposed to every 45 seconds.
Many players shared their confusion and frustration at this drastic change. Comments varied, with one player challenging Epic 'not to nerf everything into the ground' while another calculated that 10,000 seconds equate to 2.78 hours, meaning that the scan would only happen once per game.
Several players, however, suggested that the change could be due to a glitch. They mentioned an issue where scanning was bugged, hence the drastic alteration to scanning abilities.
Players debated the nature of the glitch. Some argued it was due to the absence of audio-played during scanning, resulting in players being unaware of being scanned. Yet, credible game-leaker HYPEX, suggested the glitch was due to an issue causing darkened lighting issues for some players.
As of the time of writing this article, Epic Games has confirmed to have resolved the bug causing darkened lighting issues. However, the scanning abilities are still disabled for Recon NPCs and POI banners.