How to play Fortnite Battle Royale in ‘first-person’

Update (March 6): One of the (many) leaks for Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 2 appears to confirm first-person will be officially supported when the season arrives, according to various prominent Fortnite Twitter accounts.

How exactly first-person will work in-game — such as a dedicated mode like Zero Build, or as an option you can toggle at any time — is uncertain, but we’ll likely know more later this week.

Update (Feb. 7): As expected, this method has been patched, so you can no longer use it to play first-person Fortnite Battle Royale. Original story follows.

You can start playing Fortnite Battle Royale in first-person now, kind of. It’s a little janky, and it’s not 100% in first-person: Rather, some guns will change your perspective to first-person when you scope in. It seems like a proper first-person mode may be on the way Battle Royale, but for now, you can test out this funky first-person camera option.

Due to the buggy nature of Fortnite Battle Royale’s first-person camera, we don’t think this is an intended feature, so it may get removed. Camera angles when dropping from the bus, sprinting, and doing other actions warped into weird perspectives, making us believe that this “feature” isn’t really ready for use. As of this writing, we can confirm that the method below does work for enabling it.

This feature does not turn the game into full first-person mode. It just makes some of the guns change to first-person when you scope. Some guns, like the Red-Eye Assault Rifle, already do this in the normal third-person mode. However, this adds more guns to the list, like the Machine SMG.

To do this, you’ll need access to Save the World, Fortnite’s PvE component. If you’ve ever bought specific skin bundles, you may already own Save the World, but if not, you’ll need to buy it.

Image: Epic Games via Polygon

Once you own Save the World, you can change to first-person by doing the following:

1. Change your gamemode from the main Fortnite screen to Save the World and load in.
2. Open the settings.
3. In the “game” settings, toggle to turn on the “first-person camera” under the “extra game options.”
4. Leave Save the World and reselect a Battle Royale gamemode from the menu.

Once you jump in to your Battle Royale game, you’ll notice something off about the animation when your character is jumping off the bus. If they look a little funny, like the image below, that means that it’s working.

Image: Epic Games via Polygon

To disable the first-person camera, you can just head back into Save the World and turn it off.