Fortnite’s Save the World update will add a new ‘Fork Knife’ NPC

Epic Games is working on the front-end experience of Fortnite's PvE game mode, Save the World, as part of an overhaul of the game's oft-neglected side. The developers also introduce a new character to Save the World that goofs on the "fork knife" meme.

What's the front end, you ask? It's all of the menus you use to navigate the game. So these changes are going to affect the way you upgrade your heroes, craft new weapons and generally manage your band of survivors.

All of these new changes are located in Fortnite's new Command Center screen, which acts as a hub for every other aspect of the updated UI. From the Command Center you can get to the menus to manage your heroes, upgrades, survivors, research, the armory and even your quests. Each of these screens will now be managed by an in-game character, which Epic hopes will give these metagame elements a little more personality.

The Major Epic Games

Among these characters are Clip, the weaponsmith, Lars the scientist, who will head the Research Lab, and The Major, who is missing a hand, and has replaced it with a piece of metal that has a fork and a knife attached. Epic loves to lean into a meme, something it's already done with the Fork Knife food truck. The other new character is the Director — who you'll unlock during the story, and will help you manage your roster of survivors.

Also a part of these clarity changes comes a larger alteration to the game: Epic has removed the skill and research trees. They aren't gone all together; for the most part those trees have just been spread out and put in different places. Between F.O.R.T. stats and the new Upgrade menu, most of those things are still around, just not in the form players might be used to.

Thankfully, Epic is going to be giving players a reward of F.O.R.T. stats and upgrade points based on account XP to help make up for the skill tree being gone, and in the end, it looks like players will end up a little more powerful overall thanks to the change. In order to help players get a handle on the new system, Epic is also allowing everyone to reset the upgrade menus several times, to let you try a few things out and figure out which upgrades you like best.

New players are also getting some attention, thanks to a more polished onboarding experience, Epic says.

Previously we used a lot of quests with UI-based objectives to help explain new features, but they were often hard to notice and not as effective as they could be. The quest-driven UI tutorials have been replaced with contextual, quick explanations of key features as they are unlocked. Prior to this revamp, new users could be taken back by the amount of tabs, menu options, etc. available right from the beginning of the game. With the introduction of the new Homebase characters, features are now more consistently revealed as the player progresses through the campaign, being briefly explained when additional clarity is necessary.

All of these changes should go live with the next big Fortnite Save the World update, patch v6.30, which should be coming within the next week.

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