Epic Games will add a new setting to Fortnite that will hide what it deems as ‘confrontational emotes.’
One of the ironies of competitive video games is that they are often set up that devs leave it to players to compete against each other. The irony of this arrangement is that in many such games, like Fortnite, or Fallout 76, the players will often end up agreeing to not play competitive after all.
As a result, sometimes those games end up with hugely casual communities, that flout their disregard of the title’s stated goals and objectives. Fortnite was a very competitive, if somewhat casual, battle royale shooter, before its userbase grew and evolved into that kind of community.
This is all necessary context for this situation, where such emotes were put in the game to deliberately taunt other players, and now Epic Games feels they have to take those emotes away. But at this point, Epic now knows that not only are there younger players, but entire families are playing with each other in Fortnite. Nothing can ruin a good time those Fortnite players are having than dealing with outbursts of what we are going to refer to as gamer behavior. And that’s where we have ended up where we are.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, v29.30 will add a ‘See Confrontational Emotes’ setting to toggle your ability to view four Fortnite emotes. Those emotes are : Laugh It Up, Take the L, Whipcrack and Make It Plantain. So, when someone decides to use this emote, you will only see that person standing still.
But Epic Games also adds flexibility so that you don’t have to block these emotes from everyone. As Epic explains:
“The new setting can be found under ‘Social Privacy’ and will default to only show these Emotes from friends in your party. You can change this setting any time, so you can see these Emotes from ANY player or not at all.”
Since Disney themselves acquired a major share out of Epic Games, we had anticipated that they would drive some changes to how Fortnite operates, but if people were expecting them to inundate the game with Disney IPs, that’s obviously not how it’s turned out.
But if you think about it, what even were gamers expecting? Epic has already hosted tons of Disney owned IP, and it doesn’t make financial sense to block Epic from adding non-Disney characters to Fortnite.
This may be how Disney changes Fortnite instead; with more changes pushing it to a bigger, more family friendly audience.
