Fortnite‘s first ever vehicle has been disabled this morning due to an unspecified issue.
Epic Games tweeted the announcement that the Cart would be temporarily removed, despite today’s v4.4 update—which is now live in the game—seeking to address some of the common bugs affecting the new item.
The Shopping Carts are new ground for Fortnite. Unlike other battle royale titles, Fortnite has never had vehicles. Its map is small enough that it doesn’t need them, so players just run everywhere. Items like Jump Pads make that travel easier, but ultimately it’s still about going on foot.
Shopping Carts changed that. They aren’t super fast, but they are good enough to outrun the circle and give you a helping hand in getting around the map. They’ve also enabled a ton of cool jumps and stunts that players have been messing around with.
But alas, adding something so unique and new was never going to be totally smooth. In this week’s patch, Epic tried to address some of the issues—seven of the 11 listed bug fixes were directly about Shopping Carts, not counting client and server optimizations for the item.
While reports are sketchy, the update might have caused more problems than it solved. The item has been disabled while Epic try to work out the problems.
The wording of the tweet might remind players of the way Epic addressed the Guided Missile Launcher. That was taken out of the game to fix a bug, but was eventually removed indefinitely—though that was more due to negative feedback about the weapon from players.
Update June 16 10:00pm CT: Epic just announced that Shopping Carts have been disabled in-game once again. “Due to a bug with the Shopping Cart, we’re temporarily disabling it until we have a fix,” Epic said. “We’ll update you once the issue is resolved.”
