Fortnite Replay System guide: tips to watch those homicidal highlights like a pro
Fortnite now lets you watch and edit replays with its neat little video system.
The new video editor is currently only available on the PC and consoles versions of Battle Royale (there’s no word yet on when replays might come to mobile or Save the World mode). Still, it’s a surprisingly robust tool, and with a little help from your old pals at VG247, you’ll soon be fiddling with filters, taking snazzy in-game snaps, and watching your finest survival moments in salivating slow-mo.
Fortnite Replay System guide
First up, you’ll need to actually find where replays are kept – don’t worry, matches are recorded and stored automatically to ensure there’s no mid-match faffing with video options. To access your footage, go to the Career menu, then select Replays.
From here, you’ll find all stored videos, sorted by date played, replay length and where your survivor ranked in that particular match.
You also have the option to rename videos, but sadly this feature is currently a bit borked. Epic is reporting a high incidence of game crashes when players try to give their vids new monikers. For the time being, you better hold off on renaming that one match where you actually finished first to ‘AWESOME, EPIC PWNAGE 4EVA’ until Epic remedies the issue.
Fortnite Replay System: basic playback options
Switching between players, pausing the action, and even changing playback speed is thankfully a doddle. Epic has done a good job ensuring the replay HUD is easy to read, and once you’ve familiarised yourself with what each icon does, you’ll be going back through your favourite survivor-slaughtering moments with ease.
With a click of the left stick, you can cycle through various HUD options, allowing you to turn the in-game map, other screen furniture and the replay bar on and off as you please.
The clock icon on the left side of the replay HUD lets you skip to a specific part of the match timeline, while you can spectate other nearby survivors by interacting with the player name bar on the right.
The actual main playback options are Forrest Gump-simple. There’s a play/pause and stop button, while the two curved arrows let you skip back or forwards 15 seconds.
If you want to pan the camera in or out, press R1/RB or R2/RT depending on whether you’re playing on PS4 or Xbox One. You can get up-close-and-personal with your character or make ‘em look teeny by zooming in and out on them with L1/LB and L2/LT.
Cutely, you can also change the replay seed of a match by pressing up or down on the D-pad. If you really want to savour that match-winning kill, you can slow the action all the way down to a tenth of normal game speed. Alternatively, if you’re keen to skip ahead to the end of a match, you can ramp proceedings up to play out at 4x speed.
Fortnite Replay System: viewpoints
There are three main views to choose from: Third Person, Gameplay, and Drone. Pick the first option if you want to be able to closely control camera angles for in-game snaps or pick Drone for a wider view of the action. The middle option, meanwhile, severely limits camera control.
You can switch between cameras by simply clicking the right stick. Drone also has three separate modes: Drone-Follow, Drone-Attach, and Drone-Free. The first lazily follows a player from a distance, the second snaps closely to them and affords you more camera control, while the final option gives you complete control of the camera, letting you freely pan and steer it around the whole island.
Fortnite Replay System: camera settings
Click on the little camera icon on the left side of the replay HUD, and you’ll be greeted with all manner of options to tinker with the look of Fortnite Battle Royale.
Be warned: there are a lot of options, some with confusing names. Thankfully, we’ll explain what each setting does below:
- Auto Exposure – This determines general gamma/lighting. If you switch this option off, you can manually adjust how bright or dark replays are.
- Aperture – Affects how much light gets into the frame when the action is paused. Confusingly, f/1.0 lets the most light in, while f/22.0 is the darkest setting. In practice, this effect is damn subtle, and it can be difficult to tell aperture settings apart.
- Focal Length – Determines the distance of the camera. 8mm places the camera absurdly far away, while 400mm is the most zoomed in option. The default 50mm is pretty much the sweet spot, though the 100mm setting still provides a good view of the action while allowing you a closer look at character models.
- Auto Focus – Keep this setting on to get the most reliable view of your character. Switching it off and tweaking Focus Distance means you can alter how far away the camera operates while tracking you.
There are also additional indicator and tracking settings you can tweak:
- Name Plates – Self-explanatory. Turn this on if you’re curious to see whether it was CoolDude69 or N00bDestroyer72 who just sniped you from that ridge.
- Player Outlines – Switch this on to make luminous lines appear around players, thereby making it possible to see them through walls and other obstructions.
- Replay Region – This one can be a little confusing. Basically, if you turn this on it greys out areas that aren’t in the active play region, like the distant mountains that surround Fornite’s island.
- Damage Effects – Keep this on if you want to see gunfire effects, muzzle flashes, and damage indicators.
- Auto Follow – With this activated, the camera will obsessively track your survivor like a sleazy paparazzi chasing an A-lister out of a club. Set it to Lazy, and camera-rotation while tracking is slower. Turn it off completely, and you have to manually adjust the speed and distance with which the camera tracks you using the Distance To Subject setting.
- High Quality FX – Toggle this on or off to determine whether effects like depth-of-field are activated.