Does Fortnite need to be reinstalled to work?
So... a friend of mine and I were migrating from the official Epic Games launcher to Heroic, simply because the Epic Games launcher has horrible performance and this is no secret to anyone.
The thing is... during the migration, my friend simply took the game files that she had already downloaded from the Epic Games Launcher and imported them into Heroic. After that, she uninstalled the Epic Games Launcher and when she opened the game through Heroic... she encountered some problems. The game worked, but the high-quality textures did not stream, and she could not access screens like the buy screen (who shows when you try buy an item with real money).
On the other hand, I already wanted to reinstall my game due to some problems, so for the migration, I completely uninstalled my game, then the Epic Games launcher, then installed Heroic and finally, downloaded the game from Heroic. By doing this, I did not get the same problems as her and the game worked perfectly.
So... my question is... if you just use the Fortnite game files directly from the Epic Games Store download, they won't work? For this game, it's necessary to reinstall it through Heroic? And if so... why? Doesn't Heroic download exactly the same files from Epic Games' own servers?
I would like to have this information clarified since I want to guide another friend of mine to do this migration, but I don't really understand why this problem happened and if it is really necessary to redownload the game.
⚠️ To be clear, we all use Windows.
2 Replies
extended-salmon•4mo ago
I don't know if legendary (the tool we use in the background to do all the epic management) can detect the extras when importing the game
usually, when you already have the Epic Games Launcher installed, what you want to do is open Heroic and use the
EGL Sync option that keeps Heroic in-sync with Epic Games Launcher, I understand things work better that way instead of manually importing games cause then legendary has access not only to the game files but also to any Epic Games Launcher config file needed
I don't use windows, and don't use fornite so I don't know the exact behavior (which I understand is one special case that uses Selective Downloads instead of DLCs like most of the other games)
currently, heroic has no way of installing Selective Downloads after the game is listed as installed in the library, but you can access legendary through a CMD to change that https://discord.com/channels/812703221789097985/1044301598018515105/1186694726502592720
I would expect legendary to be smart enough to know that the files are there and not download things that are already downloaded, but will flag them locally as installedcorrect-apricotOP•4mo ago
Uhm... yeah... this might be the case...