You can always count on Epic to find new and exciting ways to keep Fortnite feeling fresh all these years later. Chapter 5, season 1 has kept up that trend with a variety of thrilling items that change up the meta a lot, including the Ballistic Shield, which may be the best personal defensive item ever added to the game. Here’s where to find them and how they work.
Ballistic Shields can be found on the ground or in chests all across the map. Even so, it’s quite a rare item, so you could spend a match or two without seeing one unless you track down and take out your foes – which you’ll presumably be doing anyway.
The Ballistic Shield may be one of the new season’s most powerful and noteworthy new items, as it offers some substantial defensive possibilities that can really come in handy during firefights. By equipping and holding it up, you’ll gain a significant amount of protection for your body while being granted a pistol that you can use to shoot your foes. While the shield can be temporarily disabled after taking enough hits, it absorbs quite a lot of bullets that would otherwise be going into you.
All of that being said, good players can work around your shield in some circumstances, either by surrounding you with explosive blasts or by shooting your feet. Even so, if you see one, we highly recommend picking it up and keeping it on you for close-quarters showdowns – particularly if you’re low on health.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”