'Fortnite' Gets New Map, Guns And Engine Upgrades In Latest Update

The newest season of "Fortnite" has just gone live, and it came with tons of new features that should get fans excited.

Here's a quick overview of some of the most exciting additions from the update.

New Island

Players get to fight on a new battlefield with a focus on medieval architecture. Expect quiet towns and villages as well as grand citadels and bastions around the landscape, along with the usual colorful sceneries as seen in the game's previous seasons.

Snowballs and Dirt Bikes

A couple of new mobility options are getting added to "Fornite" in the first season of Chapter 4.

Up in the snowier areas of the map, players will be able to make giant snowballs that they can ride down hillsides for quick escapes or engagements. Slap some snow with a pickaxe, jump inside and roll into battle.

Players can also ride on the new Trail Thrasher dirt bikes that can be spotted all over the map. These dirt bikes are capable of better mobility than other vehicles and players can use them to perform aerial tricks as well.

New Guns

There are seven new weapons in Chapter 4, Season 1, including six guns and one special weapon:

• Tactical Pistol
• Twin Mag SMG
• Red-Eye Assault Rifle
• Thunder Shotgun
• Maven Auto Shotgun
• Ex-Caliber Rifle
• Shockwave Hammer

These weapons spawn all over the map, but players may have a better shot at getting the guns they want by visiting new Hot Spots that appear over certain areas. Here, loot drones can be found buzzing above. When shot, they drop high-rarity weapons.

Capture Points

Squads can now claim POIs as their territory by standing in their capture points for a period of time. Conquering an area will ping all chests and enemies inside, giving the territory owners a major advantage over their competition.

Reality Augments

Players will be offered stat-boosting Reality Augments while in a match. These are essentially perks that give boosts like faster reload speeds, unlimited vehicle fuel, higher jumping and more. Some also give free weapons like bows and the Chug Cannon.

UE 5.1 Implementation

"Fortnite" is now the first game to ever run on the Unreal Engine 5.1. This update gives the game a serious facelift in terms of graphical quality thanks to Nanite and Lumen tech that can render millions of polygons at a time and provide high-quality reflections respectively.

This engine upgrade also allows for the use of Virtual Shadow Maps for accurate shadow casting from objects as well as TSR upscaling that helps deliver extreme picture quality without sacrificing performance.