Fans have been requesting practically nothing but a free-roam, free-build playground mode ever since Fortnite blew up around the world. This week was supposed to be the grand opening of that mode, and yet it has barely been live for more than a few minutes.
Epic has been trying to get the mode online for a while now, and last we heard, they said that they were going to try to reactivate it by the end of the day. But now they’ve just come out with new info that the mode is not being released today (it’s five till midnight ET as I write this, so no real surprise there). Here’s what they had to say:
“We need to continue testing our matchmaking improvements before opening the Playground LTM.
We know you’re eager to get out there but due to this we’ll be unable to release this game mode tonight. More details available tomorrow.”
As you can see, that’s not a promise the mode will launch tomorrow, but instead word that more details will be available tomorrow, which is very different. Players are understandable frustrated, given how much everyone wants to play this.
While Epic is usually pretty good at moving at the speed of light when it comes to bug fixes, buffs, nerfs and inserting new items, they’ve struggled with a good amount of stuff lately. Shopping carts have been an on-again, off-again disaster for a few weeks now. We’ve had LTMs disabled in the past, but none have seemed to undergo quite what we’re seeing here with Playground’s woes. Presumably it’s harder to formulate than a traditional competitive LTM, but it seems like Epic should be internally testing these things more before having them go live and being forced to pull them down constantly. A solid PTR to test this kind of stuff would go a long way, and many games have adopted that philosophy to make sure live patches don’t launch totally broken. Like this one.
Frankly, v4.5 has been a pretty rough update all around with glitches and crashes outside of just the problems with Playground. While I always appreciate Epic’s speed in updating Fortnite to keep it fresh, as the scope of what they want to do with the game continues to expand, they might be racing a little too quickly at this point. There’s no real point launching a mode fans have been waiting months for when it’s up for maybe a few hours its first week due to problems like this.
We’ll have to wait and see what Epic has to say tomorrow. If I had to guess no, we have not seen the last of Playground’s problems, and if Epic needs to keep it offline for a while to make sure it’s really fixed, then that’s what they should do. Stay tuned for more information tomorrow.
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