Fortnite Battle Royale has today got a brand new weapon added to the arsenal - the Silenced SMG.

The stealthy new weapon was first revealed in a Fortnite developer’s blog video posted on Friday.

Lead systems designer Eric Williamson unveiled the new weapon, saying it will give players the “element of surprise”.

He said: “This is a bit of a stealthier weapon used to take out enemies. 

“It’s a little bit more quiet than some of the other weapons so players might not know where you’re shooting them from and will definitely give you the element of surprise.”

And today the Fortnite Twitter account signalled that the Silenced SMG has now been added to the game.

They tweeted: “Silent ... and deadly. How low-key can you be with the Silenced SMG? Tweet us your sneakiest plays! #FNBRPlays”.

During the dev video, Fortnite’s Eric also said that this week Epic Games will be making some balance tweaks to the hit online game.

He added: “We’re also going to be making some balance changes and improving the basic SMGs, increasing their damage, increasing their magazine size to make them a little bit more effective.

“We’ve heard your feedback on those and really want to make them more viable.”  

Eric also said the Fortnite team had been impressed with the ingenious ways players have been using pumpkin rockets.

Rocket riding does what it says on the tin, with Fortnite players jumping onto rockets and using it to traverse the map and reach enemies faster.

And Williamson said Epic Games want to make this into a proper, full-blown (no pun intended) feature of the game.

He said: “We’re going to try to support it as a proper feature of the game. 

“Unless we find any game-breaking issues, it’s here to stay.”  

Williamson added that Epic Games have tweaked the drop rate of the recently added Bush cosmetic.

He said it was initially dropping at two high a rate, and this has been tinkered with to make it more rare to come across.

The news comes after last week Epic Games deployed a new path solely focused on Fortnite Battle Royale.

This latest patch is only concerned with fixing some lingering bugs, such as audio problems when playing in teams.

The full Battle Royale patch notes can be found below:

Gameplay

• Fixed an issue which caused raindrops to appear on the screen when one of your teammate's was in the storm but you were not.

Audio

• Fixed an issue which caused storm audio to persist even after leaving the storm.

• Fixed a bug which allowed players to hear glider and umbrella deployment from great distances.

Stability

• Fixed a client crash that could occur when a player deployed their glider.

Fortnite is currently a paid-for game in early access, whereas Battle Royale is a free-to-play title.

Next year Fortnite will become fully free-to-play.