Epic Games has launched Fortnite Chapter 4, ushering in a new season for the popular free-to-play Battle Royale game. It's not just any other season either, since a brand new island has formed, featuring key locations such as The Citadel, Anvil Square, Brutal Bastion, and Frenzy Fields.
Gameplay additions include the Trail Trasher dirt bike, the ability to vault upon obstacles by sprinting toward them, randomized Reality Augments given to players at set intervals (provided that they are still alive), and of course, new weapons and healing items. There's popular new characters like the Doom Slayer and The Witcher's Geralt of Rivia, as you can see from the trailer's thumbnail.
Last but not least, Fortnite Chapter 4 improves Points of Interest in a couple of ways. Some of them picked randomly at the beginning of each match will be dubbed Hot Spots. These are filled with flying drones; once shot down, they'll drop high-rarity weapons. POIs can also be claimed down by your squad by staying near the banner long enough, which will also reward players in that squad with loot.
Epic Games also improved the game's graphics by updating Fortnite Chapter 4 to Unreal Engine 5.1. While the game already ran on Unreal Engine 5, the developers are now taking full advantage of its main features, chiefly Nanite and Lumen. Here's the overview provided by Epic:
NANITE
Nanite provides highly-detailed architectural geometry. Specifically, 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
Lumen reflections provide high-quality ray traced reflections on glossy materials and water. Also, Lumen provides real-time global illumination at 60 FPS. You’ll see beautiful interior spaces with bounce lighting, plus characters reacting to the lighting of their surroundings. (For example, red rugs may bounce red light onto your Outfit.) Also, Outfits that have emissive (a.k.a. glowing) qualities will scatter light on nearby objects and surfaces.
VIRTUAL SHADOW MAPS
Virtual Shadow Maps allow for highly detailed shadowing. Each brick, leaf, and modeled detail will cast a shadow, and character self-shadowing is extremely accurate. This means that things like hats and other small details on characters will also cast shadows.
TEMPORAL SUPER RESOLUTION (TSR)
Temporal Super Resolution is an upgrade over Temporal Anti-Aliasing in Fortnite and allows for high-quality visuals at a high framerate.
You can check out a gallery of screenshots showing the upgraded visuals of Fortnite Chapter 4 below.
Do note that out of all those tech improvements, only Temporal Super Resolution has also been added to Fortnite Save the World and creator-made islands. To enable hardware ray tracing on a PC for Lumen GI and Reflections, you have to set GI and Reflections to Lumen High or Lumen Epic, and Nanite also has to be enabled. Do note that NVIDIA DLSS is currently disabled as Epic ensures that it works correctly in this new build.
On the latest consoles (PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X), Fortnite Chapter 4 players can still enjoy Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution, provided that they switch off the 120 FPS mode in the graphics section of video settings. If you don't own a capable enough PC or a console from the current generation but have a speedy Internet connection, there's always the option to use GeForce NOW.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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