Fortnite players call for major change to “dumb” Shakedown mechanic

The Fortnite community has called on Epic Games to change one of their newest features, the ‘Shakedown’, after experiencing some frustrating issues.

Season 2 of Fortnite Chapter 2 introduced a ton of new features into the game, including weapons, skins, and more. One of the most interesting additions was the Shakedown feature, which allows players to pick up enemies and NPC agents and ‘interrogate’ them to find out the locations of chests, fellow henchmen, and other players. 

At first, this proved to be incredibly useful as it allowed players to track down a whole squad, but it has now turned into a frustrating issue.

Reddit user VanDenTopHeavy shared a clip of a shakedown on Feb 24, summarizing what’s wrong with the feature in it’s current form.

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The problem with Shakedowns breaks down into two key issues. First off, it’s quite a lengthy animation that can be canceled, so it leaves players incredibly vulnerable. This wouldn’t be a huge issue by itself, as it would just mean that you have to ensure you’re in a safe place before doing it. 

However, the second, and biggest, problem is that the shakedown button is the same as picking up weapons. This means that if you’ve just downed someone and need to quickly grab their gun to continue a fight, you’re more than likely to inadvertently perform the shakedown action, wasting time and possibly getting killed. 

To top things off, the feature itself does not have a key bind in the game’s settings, meaning players can’t manually change it.

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Most users called for Epic to just make the animation cancellable, with comments like “Or they could just have it be cancelable” and “Should just make it so you can cancel somehow” filling the Reddit thread. While others simply put the blame on the devs. “Sometimes I wonder if Epic devs are a bit dumb or if it’s with purposes,” one said.

Epic have not yet commented on the issue, although they no doubt have their hands full dealing with everything that came with the release of Season 2.

For now, fans will just have to do their best to play around the issue, and hope that the next patch will offer some sort of fix.