Epic Games announce screen resolution rule for Fortnite World Cup and players aren’t happy

Epic Games have dropped a bombshell announcement about screen resolution during the Fortnite World Cup qualifiers, and it’s caught most competitive players by surprise.

What is screen resolution and why does it matter in Fortnite?

Screen resolution is the way that the pixels on a screen are arranged, as it determines how many pixels there are both horizontally and vertically.

In recent months, a lot of competitive Fortnite players have turned to what is known as a ‘stretched resolution,’ which places a lot more pixels horizontally than the default resolution.

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The reason why stretched resolution has become so prevalent is that most players contend that it is the easiest and most comfortable to use in-game, despite the fact that it’s not ideal for spectators and viewers.

Stretched resolution has become a lot more popular over the past few months, especially among competitive players.

Epic announce new screen resolution rule for competitive

On April 3, in their latest release of the Competitive Fortnite State of Development, Epic announced that in all competitive playlists, including the Arena mode, the aspect ration will be locked to 16:9. 

This means that players will no longer be able to use stretch resolution and will have to go back to the native resolution that comes default in Fortnite.

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The first in-game tournament that this new change will be applied to is the upcoming $500,000 Fortnite World Cup Warmup, which is open for all players to try and qualify.

Following that, all ten weeks of the Fortnite World Cup qualifiers will also be played using native screen resolution. 

Why is Epic adding in this new rule?

While Epic have not actually explained the reasoning behind this change, it seems pretty clear that they want an even playing field across the board for the upcoming 10 weeks of qualifiers for the Fortnite World Cup.

Since all of the competitive modes in Fortnite are cross-platform by default, they likely want to ensure that players on PC do not have the substantial advantage of being able to use custom resolutions while console players are stuck playing native.

Players will now have to use the native resolution when playing competitive game modes.

Community reacts to new screen resolution rule

As expected, such a massive announcement has garnered a lot of attention on social media from prominent competitive players as well as popular content creators who may not always play competitively.

While most have understood the reasoning behind the change, a lot of players are confused and angered by the timing of it, since Epic had allowed stretch resolution for months and are now implementing a huge change to it less than two weeks before the World Cup qualifiers begin.

Here are the best reactions found on Twitter so far: