After a couple of days of uncertainty due to matchmaking issues, Epic Games has begun to bring Fortnite’s highly-anticipated Playground limited time mode back online.
Playground was briefly enabled last Tuesday before a flood of excited players broke down Epic’s matchmaking system, forcing them to disable the mode while they tried to find a way to fix it. Sadly, Epic was unable to find a fix and worked through the weekend on getting the mode enabled.
Throughout the LTM’s downtime, Epic posted to Reddit to provide a number of updates on the process of testing matchmaking improvements, so players were kept in the loop. Finally, the latest update confirmed what players had been looking forward to all along.
“We’ve completed our testing process for the improvements to our matchmaking services and are deploying servers that will bring back the Playground LTM,” Epic said on Reddit. “You may notice that some regions or platforms gain access to this LTM before others, this is intentional and allows us to gradually open this game mode up to ease stress on all relevant backend services. This process may take some time. But get those creative ideas ready, our aim is to have this fully available to all players later tonight. We’re going to closely monitor our stability over this time.”
Playground ditches the classic battle royale formula and turns the Fortnite map into a sandbox for players to do whatever they like. The game mode lasts for an hour and has increased resources all throughout the map so players can build massive structures with reckless abandon. Friendly fire is also enabled, so friendly squabbles with teammates in Squads can be taken out in one-vs-one battles all around the map, too.
In the end, though, Playground is for players to do exactly what they want without the pressures of the battle royale mode, and now they finally can. Get out there and enjoy the LTM while it’s still available.
