The next time you get pegged with a Nerf dart, it might be from an incredible 120 feet away — because Hasbro’s new Ultra One blaster, coming October 1st for $49.99, is boasting ranges we’ve never seen from an unmodified blaster thanks to a completely redesigned dart with new stabilizing fins.

It could be the single most important change to Nerf blasters in years, since range has always been a limiting factor in Nerf wars. When Nerf introduced the “Elite” dart with its 75-foot range in 2012, and its 90-foot Elite XD* blasters in 2014, players scrambled to get an advantage over their foes whose darts didn’t shoot nearly as far.

But the new blasters come with a catch: DRM for darts, it sounds like! “If the blaster detects an incompatible dart in the drum, it won’t fire and will skip to the next chamber,” writes The Wall Street Journal. A Hasbro executive told the publication that existing darts were just too easy to copy, and it’s got patents pending on the new Ultra foam.

That may annoy the Nerf community, because it could drive up the effective price of hosting a Nerf war. Right now, you can buy hundreds of knockoff Nerf Elite darts for just a few dollars online and use them in dozens of different blasters from both Hasbro and competitors, whereas it’ll cost $10 to get just 20 of these new Ultra darts instead.

The low prices and interoperability of Elite darts meant event organizers could afford to provide a big chest of ammo for players that they return at the end of the day — instead of each person bringing their own ammo and fighting over which darts belong to which people at the end of each game.

Then again, it didn’t take that long for third parties to copy Nerf’s ultra-squishy Rival “high-impact round” balls, which seemed pretty novel at the time. Heck, there’s a prominent ad for the well-regarded knockoff “HeadShot Ammo” right on Hasbro’s official Amazon listing for the Ultra One!

It’ll be tough for Nerfers to ignore drastically improved ranges, DRM or not. If the new darts are good, the community will find a way.

The Ultra One is a motorized blaster with a 25-round drum, and takes four C batteries according to its official product page.

*Elite XD was not a new type of dart, but rather a slight improvement in range with some blasters. You might also be wondering about Nerf’s 70 mile-per-hour claims for its Rival line regarding range — the answer is that Rival balls have more air resistance and don’t generally shoot as far despite the velocity.

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