Fortnite dev team removes Infinity Blade for being 'overpowered'

The Infinity Blade in its current state is no more, says Fortnite developer Epic Games.

In a tweet published earlier today, the studio explains that the weapon is being removed for being overpowered and poorly balanced.

If the name sounds familiar, this comes just a few days after Epic pulled three Infinity Blade iOS games (it debuted in 2011 as the first Unreal Engine mobile games) from sale on Apple's App Store.

While its not uncommon for developers to shelve certain things for live games, this could serve as a good lesson for fellow devs to properly balance test any new features implemented into their games. 

Introduced back in update 7.01, the Blade was the first instance of a "Mythic" tier weapon and spawned only once due to its rarity. However, players quickly realized the weapon was unbalanced and reception was poor.

Epic explained in a Reddit post how the weapon would be shelved for update 7.10, saying the goal "is to remove the ability to build and harvest when wielding the Blade."

"When designing the Infinity Blade the goal was to provide a weapon with inherent risk to balance out the great capability it provides – the ability to harvest/build removes a great deal of that risk," the post continues. 

"After this removal we’ll continue to monitor the Blade’s effectiveness and make adjustments as necessary as well as communicate those changes."

However, it seems likely that Fortnite might get rid of the Blade entirely, and instead adjust how Mythic items are introduced into the game in the future.