Fortnite Teases Major Update in Chapter 4 Season 1 Trailer: New Unreal Engine 5 Features, Crossovers, More

Andi C., Tech Times 04 December 2022, 09:12 am

Fortnite's brand new chapter teases new maps, items, and collabs following a period of server downtime.

Following the conclusion of Fortnite's Fracture live event, the game is currently under maintenance in preparation for Chapter 4, Season 1. Fortnite's downtime is expected to last for up to 12 hours and will end on Dec. 4, according to Talk Esport.

Despite the waiting time, Epic Games build up the hype for players as they reveal new major features and items in store for the next season in a recently released trailer.

Fortnite Collabs Featuring Mr. Beast, The Witcher, My Hero Academia, and More

One of the most awaited arrivals of every Fortnite season is their star-studded collaborations with different pop culture trends, and the upcoming Chapter 4 Season 1 is no exception.

According to Sportskeeda, players will be able to access this season's Fortnite collaborations with big names, such as a Mr. Beast skin. Additionally, the game will feature collabs with Final Fantasy collab, Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher, Izuku Midoriya from My Hero Academia, and more.

Although it is currently unknown how players can get access to the items or cosmetics, it may be likely to become battle pass exclusives.

Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 1 New Unreal Engine 5 Features

Epic Games reveals a major upgrade for Fortnite's gameplay as it will finally receive Unreal Engine 5 features such as Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution.

Nanite

Provides highly-detailed architectural geometry.
Buildings are rendered from millions of polygons in real-time, and each brick, stone, wood plank, and wall trim is modeled.
Natural landscapes are highly-detailed too. Individual trees have around 300,000 polygons, and each stone, flower, and blade of grass is modeled.

Lumen

Reflections provide high-quality ray-traced reflections on glossy materials and water.
Provides real-time global illumination at 60 FPS which features beautiful interior spaces with bounce lighting, plus characters reacting to the lighting of their surroundings.
Outfits that have emissive (a.k.a. glowing) qualities will scatter light on nearby objects and surfaces.

Virtual Shadow Maps

Features highly detailed shadowing.
Each brick, leaf, and modeled detail will cast a shadow, and character self-shadowing is extremely accurate.
Character cosmetics such as hats and other small details on characters will also cast shadows.

Temporal Super Resolution

An upgrade over Temporal Anti-Aliasing in Fortnite, and allows for high-quality visuals at a high framerate.

Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 1 New Weapons, Items

The new season will also introduce new battle and healing items into the game, according to Dexerto. Fortnite players can expect a whole new range of items to discover on the new island, including these:

New Weapons

Ex-Caliber Rifle
Thunder Shotgun
Maven Auto Shotgun
Red-Eye Assault Rifle
Twin Mag SMG
Tactical Pistol
Shockwave Hammer

New Items

Slap Berries
Slap Juice
Sky Jellies
Flying Drones

Additionally, new skating mechanics will be introduced in the upcoming chapter, as well as motorcycle mounts.

New Fortnite Settings Changelog

With the introduction of the new Unreal Engine 5 features, Fortnite's video settings will also undergo changes to its features and overall UI.

Here is an overview of the upcoming patch's graphic settings changelog:

The "Rendering Mode" Setting moved from the "Advanced Graphics" section to the "Display" section.
The "Performance" rendering mode is no longer in beta and is now called "Performance - Lower Graphical Fidelity."
The "VSync" Setting moved from the "Advanced Graphics" section to the "Display" section.
The "Motion Blur" Setting moved from the "Advanced Graphics" section to the "Graphics" section.
The "Temporal Super Resolution" Setting will have the following options: Recommended (default), Performance, Balanced, Quality, Native, and Custom.
The "Nanite Virtualized Geometry" Setting will only be available if the rendering mode is set to DirectX 12.
"Hardware Ray Tracing" makes it so that Lumen Global Illumination and Lumen Reflections use hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
Selecting "Auto-Set Quality" sets most Graphics Quality settings to either the Low, Medium, High, or Epic options and also sets options for the "Global Illumination" and "Reflections" settings.