Fortnite Creative is like a living space—it needs ongoing care and maintenance to remain welcoming for both players and creators. Epic Games frequently adds and updates content, providing fresh opportunities for creators to design new experiences. However, each new update can also introduce technical issues and bugs, creating a never-ending cycle of fixes and adjustments.

It’s much like a game of whack-a-mole with household repairs: just as one issue is resolved, another seems to pop up. 

Earlier this month, Epic Games introduced the Fortnite V32.00 update. It added customizable role playing mechanics – including the Conversation Device and and the Skilled Interaction Device – as well as auto-localization features that make islands available in all 14 languages that Fortnite supports. These new features were met with excitement from creators who’ve been waiting for more ways to incorporate story into their gameplay experiences. 

New Features, More Possibilities

“The new Conversation Device allows creators to design dialogue trees for NPC interactions,” wrote Alliance Studios CEO and co-founder Mackenzie Jackson in a post on LinkedIn. “This lets players make choices that impact gameplay. It’s perfect for adding depth and storylines to the player experience.”

Creators have been building fantastical role playing experiences in Creative since the platform launched in 2018. Chronicles of Zaneth and Epic Dungeon: Taloria have been around for years, providing adventures that loosely resemble megahits like The Witcher and Skyrim. More recently, Fort Knight Legend—a map that peaked at over 20,000 concurrent players—has captured the attention of role playing fans by giving them a constantly changing fantasy world with a variety of massive bosses and custom loot. 

Update V32.00 will help creators of the aforementioned maps build out more detailed quest lines with more sophisticated NPC conversations and designs. Characters will feel more three dimensional once these tools are incorporated.

Every bit of good news that comes with a major update like this is usually followed by chaos. While new features bring new possibilities, they also break current features, mechanics and systems. It happens so often that creators expect major issues with each update.

Big Update, Bigger Problems

“What did you do @FNCreate? Fortnite Creative won’t launch,” wrote Fortnite creator Chad Mustard in a post on X a day after the v32.00 update was released. “You turned on infinite magazines, reloading, etc in every map using infinite ammo. Islands are missing. Collisions in maps that were working are no longer working. Like what did you do?”

Creators often have to rush to fix issues on their map, sometimes needing to completely take their experiences offline while they address bugs and other technical issues. Fort Knight Legend studio, Love Is Real Games, released a brand-new zone – Valley of the Forsaken Dunes – right alongside the V32.00 update, not knowing there would be major issues that would prevent thousands of players from enjoying the studio’s work. 

“Due to the latest Fortnite update, Fort Knight Legend is currently experiencing server lag, unresponsive NPCs, and issues joining games,” the studio wrote in a post on X. “We have contacted Epic immediately, and we are urgently investigating these problems. We greatly appreciate your understanding and support.”

The Love is Real Games team had to spend the next day rushing to resolve issues that made their map unplayable. Technical problems can often come with significant updates, but they shouldn’t become a staple of each update that’s released – especially when tens of thousands of creators rely on the UEFN ecosystem.

“Today’s update caused unexpected issues that impacted your ability to publish and manage your islands. We know you’re frustrated, and we get it,” Epic Games wrote in a post on their Fortnite Creators page on X. “We’re exploring all options to prevent these issues from happening again. Thank you for bearing with us.”

Shaping A Better Fortnite Creative

Posts like this, while welcome, are just the starting point for holding Epic Games accountable in making these processes smoother. Every day that a map is down or unplayable can cause significant harm to a creator’s reputation and income,– therefore, their livelihood. What’s worse is that Epic is usually unresponsive shortly after these updates go live, leaving creators to fend for themselves while technical issues pile up. 

Unreal Engine for Fortnite’s V32.00 update came alongside the return of the original Chapter 2 battle royale map, which sent players back to locations they explored in 2019. This final season of Chapter 5 is only scheduled to last a month before Chapter 6 is introduced to the Fortnite ecosystem. That could mean that another major update is already only a couple of weeks away, including new items, features, and problems for Fortnite Creative. 

Epic Games has committed themselves to building the next generation of the creator economy. If they hope to see Creative become the YouTube of gaming, they’ll have to work extra hard to make building and sharing experiences as easy as publishing a video. We’re far from that point now, but we hope and plan to contribute to the conversation and help push Creative in the right direction.