Fortnite Season 5 is Here

Fortnite Season 5 is here with lots of new additions to the game and a few quality of life updates. Along with that comes the much-awaited Season 5 Battle Pass with around 10 new emotes, 7 new skins and much more. Fortnite: Save The World also got a lot of new additions but I will only be covering the updates to Fortnite: Battle Royale in this article.

Fortnite Season 5 Battle Pass:

Apart from the usual items in the battlepass, this time there’s a completely new kind of item named as “Toys”.  Toys like Golf balls and Basketballs can be unlocked throught the Battle Pass, which can be used to interact with the Basketball fields and the Golf courts in the map. Also, the progressive challenges from season 5 onwards, will no longer be restricted to a single season. These challenges can now be completed whenever the player wants to. Check out Epic’s Fortnite Season 5 Battle Pass trailer for more info.

The New Map:

The map of Fortnite got a lot of new updates to it. An entirely new type of biome, the Desert biome has been added to the bottom right part of the island. Two new locations named “Paradise Palms” and “Lucky Links” have been added to the map. Apart from that, a few new places of interest like the Viking’s area and desert outposts have been added to the map. Here’s how the new Fortnite map looks like:

The All Terrain Kart:

Fortnite finally has a proper vehicle in the game now, named the “All Terrain Kart”. You can ride this vehicle with your entire squad and it is actually pretty fast for a game like Fortnite. Every squad member apart from the driver can shoot and build while riding in the passenger or back seats. Also, the roof of the ATK acts as a mobile bounce pad, which is really handy.

Rifts:

Like the hop rocks in previous season, Season 5 brought a new mechanic into the game, called “Rifts”. Rifts are basically portals that are spread all across the map. When interacted with a rift, the player is dropped through the giant rift in the sky which was caused after the rocket launch by the villains in the previous season. The player can choose which area he wants to drop into, much like when the players are dropped through the battle bus at the beginning of the game.

Balance Changes:

Fortnite Season 5 has brought a lot of balance changes. I’ll be covering the most important changes below.

• After firing a shotgun, another shotgun cannot be fired for a very short time.

Using Double Pump Shotguns/Heavy Shotguns has been very popular since a long time now. Some players also liked to use The Pump-Tac or the Heavy-Tac combo. This nerf brings an end to all these combos because the new cooldown feature takes too long when you are in a close-combat. This will definitely encourage players to use other close-range weapons in the game.

• Adjusted shotgun spread patterns to be consistent with no random variation.

There have been many complaints that the shotgun spread in Fortnite is way too random and inaccurate. The developers finally decided to remove the RNG factor from shotguns and hopefully the shotgun behavior won’t be so erratic anymore.

• Changed the damage drop-off profile for the Suppressed SMG to be the same as other SMGs.

Recently, the Suppressed SMGs, especially the rare Suppressed SMG became very popular and players started preferring them over the assault rifles for medium to long range fights. Seems like the developers weren’t too happy about it and nerfed it so that these weapons are viable only in close combat as they are supposed to be.

• The center of Storm circles 7, 8, and 9 can now shift in random directions (instead of simply shrinking). As the storm closes in, it will move & shrink to the new location.

In professional matches, many players liked to go to the center of the storm circles and camp there in a tall 1×1 building. This gave them a huge advantage over the players that couldn’t reach the center as fast as them. The new storm change will backfire campers, as the center of storm might shift in a very unpredictable manner.

The theme of this season seems very mystical and extremely different from the previous seasons. The meteor in season 3 and the rocket launch in season 4 were both amazing and kept the fans in suspense throughout the season. I can’t wait to see what Epic does with Season 5. Looking at Fortnite’s rate of growth, I can only expect bigger and better things with each new season.