'Fortnite' Fans Are Getting Screwed by Weapon Problems Like “Dick Bullets”
It's like they don't realize this is still an Early Access game.
Epic Games’s Fortnite is mostly for the teens, and as such, some of the most glaring issues in the game get charming yet immature names like “dick bullets,” a visual discrepancy related to in-game bullet movement. This, coupled with another gunplay issue, renders the game unrealistic and frustrating to players that have seemingly forgotten that this free game, still in its Early Access period, is totally upfront with being incomplete and unpolished.
The v3.5 patch on April 11 introduced a short equip time for most weapons, effectively reducing the firing rate when you switch weapons. In theory, this should fix the common practice of switching between multiple shotguns to quickly take down enemies. But the harder nut to crack relates to “dick bullets,” which sort of becomes an exploit once you understand how it works.
“Dick bullets” was seemingly first coined as a term for H1Z1, another battle royale-style game. Because the camera in these games uses a third-person perspective, a parallax-ish effect happens between what you see, your target, and the actual path of the bullet:
Bullets travel from somewhere lower than your gun muzzle. They don't leave from the groin area of your character, but that didn't stop people from calling them "dick bullets."
The effect is more drastic the further away you aim, but the result across the board is that your bullets will land lower than where you’re actually aiming. No, it’s not the curvature of the Earth and gravity doing that. It’s because the bullet leaves your character from somewhere a bit lower than the gun muzzle flare. It doesn’t leave quiet as low as your character’s groin, but “dick bullets” probably seemed more fun to kewl gamers than “belly bullets,” and “chest-bursters” was already taken.
The more pressing concern when it comes to dick bullets relates to firing from behind cover, because if you built a small fort structure that’s higher than your enemy, you can skim some dick bullets just over the edge like so:
It does also mean that players have to expose more of their bodies to successful blast off some dick bullets; Just because your targeting reticle is over the cusp of a wall or ledge, doesn’t mean that your bullet will be as well.
This ultimately makes the gunplay physics a bit broken and unrealistic in Fortnite, but that’s largely a matter of perspective, literally because in third-person, the way targeting appears differs from the reality of how bullets travel.
Keep in mind that Fortnite isn’t built for realism. This is a game in which players have been known to shoot huge rockets and ride them for miles, and where a grenade literally forces everyone caught in the blast radius to do an entire dance. If you want realism, then you should be playing PUBG anyway.
The most elite Fortnite players employ both these tactics — switching between shotguns and using dick bullets fired from the high ground — to win matches. Many Fortnite fans see these as game-breaking issues that need to be addressed in future updates, but those fans would do well to remember that despite Fortnite’s incredible popularity, it’s still a free game that’s in Early Access.
Anyway, it’s about time that Pornhub tweeted something really funny about this whole “dick bullets” phenomenon.
