Fortnite's update leaves some at odds with weekly grinds

Fortnite’s Chapter 4 kicked off this weekend, with plenty of new cosmetics and shiny features for everyone to ogle over. Namely, an Unreal Engine 5 upgrade arrived, alongside Doom Slayer, Geralt of Rivia, The Incredible Hulk, and… Mr Beast. Fair play, Epic.

So, we can safely say that Fortnite looks even better than it did before with the help of UE5’s Lumen and Nanite. And with Doom Slayer being a battle pass exclusive, there are no doubts in my mind that I’ll be grinding out Victory Royales this season. That said, some changes to the game have left a sour taste in players’ mouths, and understandably so.

One of such changes is to weekly challenges. Previously, players could start a weekly challenge, and would have the entire season to complete it. Weekly quests would also accumulate, so players could play Fortnite at their own pace and still have plenty of quests to work towards.

Now, as pointed out by user JaredG on ResetEra, “weekly quests don't accumulate any longer, and you must play every week in order to complete them.” JaredG themselves wasn’t at all happy with the change, and they weren’t alone.

Kanuuna responded, “sounds pretty hostile to players coming in late. I liked completing those in batches, several weeks at once in seasons past.” With user Santar also adding, “They've been slowly but surely making more and more types of quests time limited. Taking away the player's ability to do things at their own pace is a very bad direction for the game to go in.”

And Santar is right. Fortnite is a game that I’ll often play in big bursts; me and friends might jump on for a week straight two or three times per season, neglecting the game the rest of the time. Thus, completing weeklies together in big batches was what we did for fun. Santar adds, “I don't like being forced to play longer than I'm having fun. I've always done quests in spurts whenever I felt like it,” and I share the exact same sentiment, as do many others.

With the new change, players are inclined to play the game on a weekly basis and complete their quests each week without fail. If you miss out on them, you’re missing out on a bunch of XP that you could’ve usually earned at a later date otherwise.

Now, that said, some players on ResetEra have suggested that the quests others are referring too are not actually the standard weekly quests, hence the lack of quest accumulation. User New Donker put forward that, “Are we sure the ‘this week’s’ challenges are the weeklies? I assumed it was just a limited early set of quests to do.” With Valcrist following up with, “I have a feeling the real weeklies will show up next week or over the next day or so.”

User Selbran also noted, “I think they are just early challenges to do. Last season, there were a bunch of "Zero Week" challenges for the start of the season that went away.” So, it seems that this panic about weekly quest accumulation may not be necessary, and that these current weeklies are just quests for the start of the season.

However, until we see more weeklies pop up in-game, and also see whether they accumulate or vanish as the season progresses, there’s no real-telling whether JaredG’s concerns are legitimate right now; only time will tell if us min-maxers can continue to blast through our Fortnite weeklies in big bursts and claim that sweet XP.

Fortnite has new weekly quests typically appear each Thursday at 3pm GMT / 7am PT / 10am ET / , so we’ll soon find out on Thursday whether our weeklies are expiring, or continuing to stack each week; here’s to hoping it’s the latter.