You’re telling me Fortnite is just now getting a ranked mode?
Ranked arrives in Fortnite’s next season.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Tis the season for substantial competitive updates to the biggest battle royale game around: Fortnite is getting a fully-fledged ranked mode in its next update, and Zero Build fans are getting in on the fun too. Fortnite’s ranked mode will follow a traditional divisional structure with players climbing from Bronze through Diamond, with three upper-division ranks in Elite, Champion, and finally Unreal.
It’s basically your bog-standard battle royale competitive mode, which is why I’m surprised it’s taken Fortnite five years to implement it. Fortnite technically already has a competitive mode in Arena, a tournament-style playlist with separate rules from Battle Royale and Zero Build, but Epic has decided to discontinue Arena at the end of the season in favor of the new Ranked.
Ranked will be playable in all three variations of Battle Royale (solo, duos, squads) and just one Zero Build mode (duos). Epic’sannouncement blogdoesn’t mention why Zero Build is limited to Duos, but it could be an effort to avoid splitting the playerbase of Fortnite’s less popular mode in a way that impacts matchmaking times. You’ll have a different rank for Battle Royale and Zero Build.
Here’s how the ranking divisions break down:
Interestingly, once you’ve reached the rank of Unreal, you can’t be knocked out of it for the remainder of the season. Instead, your Unreal rank is displayed against all other Unreal players (similar to Overwatch 2’s “Top 500” division). Epic will maintain anofficial online Unreal leaderboard(link not live yet) for players to “flex” their rank publicly, but you can opt out of showing up on the leaderboard by changing in-game privacy settings.
Other key details:
That’s as specific as Epic is getting about Ranked for now, but I want to hear more about those two win conditions. How heavily match placement should or shouldn’t be valued over kills has been an ongoing discussion among the Apex Legends community, where new ranked rules made it possible for one streamer to reach themax rank without scoring a single kill.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Respawn says this is the system working as intended (the goal of battle royale is survival, not a high K/D), but Epic may choose to favor other skillsets in Fortnite. Epic gave no word on when patch v24.40 will release, but if Fortnite follows its usual schedule, expect it to come later this month.
Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn’t pay him. He’s very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he’ll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don’t, though.
Palworld developer reports Nintendo’s suing over 3 Pokémon patents for only $66,000 in damages, but a videogame IP lawyer says fighting the lawsuit could mean ‘burning millions of dollars’
No Man’s Sky gets cross-save on a dozen platforms and brings back Mass Effect’s Normandy as a limited-time rewar
Genshin Impact’s missing English voice acting returns in its latest trailer, but players aren’t sure if they should celebrate yet
