It didn’t leak early, but Epic is now advertising that tomorrow will bring with it a new weapon at last, one pulled from the pages of military history.
That weapon will be the Infantry Rifle, which is very clearly based on the M1 Garand, one of the most famous guns of all time due to its use by the US in World War II and Korea. It should be hitting the game tomorrow after patch 7.40, which will mark the winding-down point of the season as we head into two weeks of “overtime” after the challenges and we start some sort of special Valentine’s-themed event for a while.
As for the Infantry Rifle, we don’t exactly know much about it, and I can’t find any leaked data about it at the moment. The blue background implies we’ll at least get a rare version of it, but rare and common? Rare and epic? That’s not clear right now. We don’t know damage numbers for it either, but the M1 Garand is a semiautomatic rifle, or a Scout Rifle, to use more modern day video game parlance. Individual shots rather than bursts or streams. In the meta, I would expect it to be a faster-firing, less hard-hitting version of the Hunting Rifle, always a popular choice, and at range, I’m guessing it’s going to be a very solid pick.
A long time ago when we were in the time travel era of the interdimensional rifts all over the map, transporting temples and Viking villages to the present day, I thought that we might get some “historical” themed weapons throughout the course of that season, with the M1 Garand being a chief candidate for an appearance. But Fortnite has really never linked its weapon introductions to the themes of its seasons for the most part, so that didn’t happen, and here we’re now getting the M1 at last for no specific reason other than it could alter the meta slightly with a new weapon archetype that isn’t there right now. Lord knows it has nothing to do with the Ice King or Fire Monster or the earthquakes that are about to reshape the map.
Many are predicting that a huge change is coming to the map in season 8 due to this earthquake, but even if the landscape changes, the meta may not unless we see a wide variety of balance changes and new introductions. Fortnite adding in a scout rifle doesn’t seem like it will be that much of an earthshattering addition, though it has needed this type of weapon for quite a long while now. Will we end with a scoped version? A silenced version? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Check it out for yourself tomorrow.
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