Before Fortnite Chapter 7, if someone completely depleted your health bar, you’d simply fall to the ground in a crawl. Maybe if you got lucky, a teammate could revive you from here. Usually, you’d probably get put out of your misery or would slowly bleed out to death. After Fortnite‘s latest update, though, you can actively roll while in the “down but not out” state. And for some reason, that downed roll allows players to blitz through the map.
Seriously: You can now move faster while dying than you can when your Fortnite character is upright and healthy. The animation almost makes it look like you’re performing a dodge roll in an action game, except the state is supposed to denote an incapacitated player in Fortnite. And sure, you still can’t shoot while you’re DBNO. But you can definitely get the hell out of a firefight using the new roll.
I keep getting into situations where I knock someone down and then completely lose sight of them as they scurry their way into safety. It’s annoying when used against me, but extremely useful if I’m the one who needs to be revived. Now it feels like you actually have some agency while DBNO, which is better than feeling like you’re a sitting duck. Changes like a drivable reboot van and self-revive devices all similarly help empower the player amid a crisis. Between these changes and the rumored gulag island, which will supposedly allow players killed during the main match to participate in mini-games, it seems like Epic is determined to take the sting out of dying. After a season full of complaints about the difficulty, these come off like smart tweaks that might help casual players feel comfortable even if they get knocked down seconds after surfing onto the map.
Still, there’s something deeply silly about the way Epic has implemented rolling. It’s all in the extravagant physics. If the player is rolling down an incline, for example, they’ll start ragdolling at mach speed. You can’t do anything while this happens. You can only sit there and watch helplessly as your character contorts into impossible poses until they reach the ground. The experience is bad enough that fans now feel embarrassed when they ragdoll intensely during a match.
Will things stay this way? It’s hard to tell whether aspects like ragdolling are intentional or if they’re a glitchy byproduct of the new rolling mechanic. It does seem like some elements aren’t quite where they need to be — or at least I imagine Epic doesn’t want people driving while they’re knocked down.
But even if ragdolling is something that Epic wants players to experience, it could still be fined-tuned so that players aren’t forced to watch themselves flail about for long periods of time. For now, though, rolling is one of the most chaotic things Fortnite has ever incorporated into its island — appropriate for a season that deeply shakes up aspects that once felt essential to the core experience.
