Fortnite Season 8 Update Nearly Doubles XP From Most Challenges

Fortnite Season 8 got off to a slow start in the eyes of many players, thanks largely to a faulty seasonal XP system that offered too few challenges for too little XP. Epic fielded complaints from players for weeks and promised a fix. Now that it's here, it's plain to see things are much improved. XP is now more generously awarded to players completing challenges.

Prior to the Fortnite 18.10 patch, players were kept from leveling up their battle pass quickly thanks to a dearth of both challenges and XP per each challenge. Today's patch addresses both of those complaints. For starters, the daily XP gains have increased from 17,000 XP per challenge to 30,000, and each player can unlock three dailies at this nearly doubled rate.

NPC quests have also vastly improved. The old system would award a growing number of XP with each subsequent quest in a character's five-part questline, totaling 80,000 XP by the end of any questline. Now each challenge offers the same number of XP at each stop along the way--30,000 a piece-- totaling 150,000 XP for completing a questline the first time through.

Even repeating Party Quests will award XP now as well, starting at 500 XP for a character's common-tier quest and climbing to as much as 750 XP for each subsequently rarer quest. Before the patch, repeating these challenges merely awarded gold bars, which was one of the community's biggest problems with this system.

On the flipside, weekly challenges have seen their XP gains lessened in this update, though Epic says that decision was made for balancing reasons as a way to avoid players who miss their weekly goals feeling like they've missed critical gains. Weekly challenges previously awarded 65,000 XP, but starting today they offer 50,000 XP, or about the same as completing an extra day of daily challenges. Over on Reddit, user Nevsson put the net gains in a chart for easy comparison.

In total, NPC quests were increased by nearly double, while daily gains increased by a similar margin. Once you add in the fact that two NPCs came to the island this week rather than one like last week, and suddenly it's the case that players can earn 300,000 XP by completing the Week 3 challenges, whereas last week only 80,000 was on offer.

These totals still fall shy of the Season 7 system, which offered close to 400,000 XP from weekly challenges, but the fix is still an appreciated one in a community of XP-starved players. If ever a third NPC arrives in a given week, it would make that one of the most XP-rich non-event weeks in the history of Fortnite. The added bonus of awarding Party Quest XP means the players that play the most will continue to enjoy moderate gains long after they complete their new NPC quests each week.

For more on Fortnite this week, don't miss the just announced Soundwave Series, bringing several more concerts to Fortnite in the months ahead.