Effective as of 23:00 PDT on August 2 (02:00 EDT August 3/ 07:00 BST August 3), Fortnite has temporarily pulled all motorboats from the game due to an unspecified issue. An official account for the game tweeted that boats will be pulled from all game modes, and that an update will be provided once the issue is resolved. No further information was offered.
Motorboats were added to the game during Season 1 of Chapter 2, becoming the first aquatic vehicle in the game, and are an essential piece of kit once the water levels reached their peak. In Season 3, Loot Sharks joined the party, and while these are technically vehicles, they’re harder to locate and manoeuvre than the motorboats. They’re more effective as loot drops than as transportation, so don’t really offer an adequate replacement long term.
Coinciding with Aquaman’s arrival in the game, removing the most reliable method of water travel isn’t ideal, but there have been some fairly substantial bugs caused by these boats.
Aquaman himself actually shares a bit of the blame here. Coral Castle, introduced alongside the DC hero and his homeworld of Atlantis, might be the source of the issue. Riding your motorboat through the waterfall of Coral Castle allows you to glitch out of the map, making it impossible for other players to detect or attack you. That’s a sizeable enough glitch on its own, but doing this method also results in you slowly and continuously drowning.
Don’t go chasing waterfalls, kids. TLC had it right.
Another issue with the motorboats has been with an item spamming exploit. Jumping into a motorboat while switching between an item and the pickaxe could give you 1,000,000 of whatever item you’d just switched out. Better (or worse, depending on your point of view) yet, these million items would only take up a single inventory slot, and as long as you got your timing right, you could repeat this task over and over until you’d never need another item ever again.
Due to an issue, we’ve temporarily disabled Motorboats in all game modes.
We’ll provide an update when this is resolved. pic.twitter.com/B08UWqBdn9
— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) August 3, 2020
This feels the more likely reason Epic have temporarily nixed the boat, but they probably aren’t going to comment further.
Motorboats have been a hugely popular addition to the game, and many will be hoping Epic can fix these issues quickly and either return motorboats to the game or provide an alternative water vehicle. Fortnite’s meta is ever evolving, but prior to this morning’s removal, Motorboats were a key part of the balance.
There’s no time frame on their return as of right now, but it feels like an issue Epic will want to solve sooner, rather than later.