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It’s fair to say there’s been a mixed to tepid response to Fortnite’s current season, as Chapter 5 Season 1 comes to a close. The community’s offered up several things about the season that have irked them, and now there’s one more to add to the list.
A thread by the user GlassesAndBangs claims that the guns haven’t quite felt right of late in the game, and may be attributing to the current apathy. “Gunplay this season feels awful,” they write. “Previous chapters supported both hitscan and projectile, so why not this one?”
To illustrate their point, they included a literal, well, illustration of how they see the guns in the latest update, basically implying that guns are now less effective at a distance than they used to be for almost everything outside of sniper rifles.
While not everyone agrees with the OP’s point, some have offered up their explanations for the game moving away from hitscan: “Most likely because of the attachments system. You can throw a 4x scope on an AR, and with hitscan bullets that would be downright insufferable to play against,” says GK99.
“I think it was an attempt to fix power creep and op scoped rifles,” posits Decades101. “Ever noticed how scoped ARs got more stupidly op over time since c3s1? MK7 and Twin Mag ars were some of the most busted rifles ever.”
“I think that making all the guns projectile-based over hitscan is supposed to counter the uptick in op guns by making it harder to aim and hit your shots.”
But there’s definitely users who feel it’s better this way, such as BrownBaySailor. “I honestly highly prefer the projectile mechanics,” he says. “It feels a lot more fun in general and a lot more satisfying to get long range kills with ARs now than it used to.”
There’s even a few people who think something more sinister is at play, considering Chapter 5 Season 1 saw the introduction of new modes like Fortnite Festival and Rocket Racing. “It’s making me think that they want us to use cars much more so that we can hopefully buy the overpriced car skins to look cooler in said cars,” says PS_0123.
It remains to be seen if Epic will make any wholesale changes to how the guns feel in Chapter 5 Season 2 when it arrives – it’s currently expected to turn up in the first week of March – but if more weapon tweaks come in the last few patches of C5 S1, we may have an indication of if the community’s feelings match the developers.
For more on the game, check out our Best Fortnite XP maps for power leveling for this week. Alternatively, the Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 2 theme may have been already revealed.
