Fortnite has already nerfed its new season's big gimmick, and players can't decide whether that's a good thing or not

May. 31, 2024

Those boss cars aren’t as brutal anymore

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If you’ve played anyFortniteat all since the latest season, Wrecked, began, I’m sure it comes as little surprise to find out that the fancy boss cars havealreadybeen nerfed. The change was pretty much inevitable, but despite this, fans can’t decide whether it was actually a good decision.

Chapter 5 Season 3 has beenverychaotic so far, allowing players to fight bosses across the map in order to steal their powerful cars. Driving around in a car in Fortnite was already a good way to boost your survivability, as well as deal some damage to foes if you have a team with you to fire out of the windows, butthesecars take things to a whole new level. Not only do they come equipped with deadly turrets to deal enormous damage to opponents and structures, but they also have spiked bumpers to destroy opponents as you ram into them, and infinite Nitro power to increase their driving speed, ramming and turret power,anddecrease the fuel used. Oh, and up until now, they were also able to automatically regenerate their health, making them very difficult to demolish.

Needless to say, right out of the gate, these three boss cars were almost unstoppable killing machines, which is great fun if you’re sitting inside one, but less so if you see one hurtling over a hill towards you. As such, yesterday,Epic Gamesrolled out a hotfix aiming to balance things out, notably removing the boss cars' health regeneration ability, as well as reducing the accuracy of machine gun turrets and the damage grenade launcher turrets can deal to structures. On top of that, in Solo matches, vehicle health has been reduced so that they can be destroyed more quickly, and in all modes, Boom Bolts now deal more damage to vehicles, making them an effective weapon to blow cars up with.

What’s more, Boogie Bombs are back, which can be thrown at opponents – including those in cars – to force them to dance for a few seconds. So, if youdofind yourself in the path of a particularly aggressive vehicle, throwing one of these at it should at least stop players from driving into you. Epic has also teased that “looking ahead, we will bring back a widely-requested electric throwable to replace Boogie Bombs,” which seems to all but confirm the return of Shield Breaker EMPs. These handy throwables not only obliterate opponents' shields, but can temporarily immobilize vehicles. Needless to say, they’ll likely become must-have items for anyone aiming for a Victory Royale this season.

That’s alotof changes that all aim to make cars less of a pain to deal with, which many are relieved about: “THEY SAVED THE SEASON OMG YOU GUYS AREEE GOATTEDDDDDDD,” one Twitter userwrites. “THANK YOU. WE NEEDED THIS,“addsanother.

Others, however, were clearly enjoying the chaos that the cars brought, and aren’t so pleased: “Couldn’t even let us have fun with the, I don’t know, ENTIRE MECHANIC THIS SEASON WAS BUILT ON for more than like a week and some change?” one playertweets. “I liked the OP cars…” anotheragrees.

As we’re only a week into the season, it remains to be seen if further changes might be rolled out to tweak the experience further. For now though, there’s no doubt that the cars are stillstrong, but hopefully not so much that they’re plain unfair.

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I’m one of GamesRadar+’s news writers, who works alongside the rest of the news team to deliver cool gaming stories that we love. After spending more hours than I can count filling The University of Sheffield’s student newspaper with Pokemon and indie game content, and picking up a degree in Journalism Studies, I started my career at GAMINGbible where I worked as a journalist for over a year and a half. I then became TechRadar Gaming’s news writer, where I sourced stories and wrote about all sorts of intriguing topics. In my spare time, you’re sure to find me on my Nintendo Switch or PS5 playing through story-driven RPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles and Persona 5 Royal, nuzlocking old Pokemon games, or going for a Victory Royale in Fortnite.

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