After the “Avengers: Endgame” type event called Zero Hour, where characters from different universes come together to fight the Demon King, the main villain of Fortnite Chapter 6, the story of Chapter 6 ends and opens a door to a new chapter. Before the update, people got to see a cinematic trailer, where right at the end, the Battle Bus, the drop-ship where players can jump and glide onto a location of their choice, has been destroyed by a huge mothership that’s shaped like a ball, controlled by the Dark Voyager.

Then, Fortnite had this funny idea of putting a black screen with having Chapter 6 transition to 7 while still having the 6 fading away. Putting it together would make it 67. I felt like they wanted to do that because they would like a huge reaction from the players that saw that whole bit, some people may not like that because they don’t like where Fortnite always have to stick to trends, but it’s Fortnite and they make a lot of money by putting in collabs that people would pay money for. But now that Chapter 7 has started, and I’ve went through different matches of this season, it’s time for me to share my opinion on it.

Let me just say that they have changed the whole UI: the inventory, your teammates’ health bars, emote selection, etc. Instead of having emote wheels from your favorited emotes, including emoticons, sprays, toys, etc.

Once you hold down the emote button, you notice that there’s a button that says “View Collection”, meaning that you can see all of your emotes in a whole different view where you can just scroll up and down on your emotes and not have to hold down the emote button once you click on it, it looks just like how you select your emotes in the locker in the lobby but the background of the emote collection still has your game POV except that it’s blurry, which actually fits well because I wouldn’t want to have everything in the way and just focus on what emote I would want to select. It also looks kind of buggy, but that’s a usual thing, considering that this is the first week of the season where if they release a new feature, it tends to have a little glitch. And what I mean by buggy is that they have gaps in the emote collection where some emotes don’t end up being right next to each other in one row, so I sure hope that they fix it soon enough.

When I was playing a duos game with my friend, I notice that my teammate’s health bar is on the bottom left of my screen and right above my own health bar. I was so used to seeing my teammates’ health bars on the top left that also include my own health bar up there. But the inventory in-game looks simplified, the only upgrade of it I like is that I can see when I have to reload a gun by looking at the reload icon on my items bar, so I have to say that they put on some good features, including how they put the rarity of the gun underneath my ammo count so that I don’t just have to look at the color in my items bar. However, there wasn’t a need to change the design of what my game UI looks like, so they only just oversimplified it all.

As of this time, before you land on the map of Chapter 7, you see that you’re surfing a whole big wave that surrounds the entire island. Now, this may not be forever, because I have been told that people are completing quests to repair the Battle Bus and that later in December, the beloved Battle Bus will finally let players land on their preferred locations easier. But the surfing mechanic is kind of weird because the game would choose where I would start surfing on a board, and then they would launch me off and make it to my side of the map, but it would be hard for me to go off into a location that I would want to land at because I’m not super high enough in the air to actually be landing from a far distance. As much as I like how they make the whole surfing bit in a very amazing style, I’m not a fan of how I can only land at a closer location from where I was surfing at. Even though I can surf around the wave, it still wouldn’t be enough time to go super far as I will have exactly 20 seconds to move around the wave.

Now, I won’t be talking about the battle pass, as much as I like Marty McFly and that his 2015 Nike shoes, called ‘Kicks’, are in that pass, which is unusual for them to be putting in the pass as most of them are in the item shop. There’s a new battle pass feature where you can decide which page of the battle pass you can unlock after reaching a certain level. However, you start with the very first page, which in this season is The Bride from Kill Bill, then once you reach level 5, you can pick a different page. Then after that you only need to level up to level 10, then it adds up by 10 and goes on. This isn’t something they did before as they always had it where you had to unlock items from one page to unlock a new page. So there might be some little things that people don’t like but they’ll have to get used to it as the developers will most likely keep forever, unless if Fortnite can change it due to a huge amount of players not liking them, which they might as well change the whole emote feature as a lot of people don’t like it. I think I do like some of the features, and I could give it time to get used to all of them and then I wouldn’t be struggling with the game.