Fortnite's Playgrounds LTM is live

Update: After a premature launch, and days of subsequent iteration, Fortnite's Playgrounds limited-time mode is now live worldwide.

Epic challenges players to "drop in and let your imagination run wild", and delivered the news via Twitter and the following Reddit update.

Community coordinator Sean Hamilton, aka MrPopoTFS, said this on the subreddit earlier:

Success! We’ve completed deploying our servers containing the improved matchmaking changes. All players can now join in on the fun in the Playground LTM.

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Please remember to change your region back to "auto select" and verify you're on your preferred region. There is the possibility that you may encounter an error, as many players are attempting to join this game mode. Just attempt to requeue until you find a match.

We’ll be releasing an in-depth and detailed postmortem in the near future to go over the obstacles that we encountered during the process of trying to enable this Limited Time Mode. But for now, drop in and let your imaginations run wild!

Hamilton goes on to praise the game's Reddit mods—the "unsung heroes" of the process—and is joined by other Epic employees to underscore the hard work and effort of the team over the last few days.

Our original story follows.

Success! All players can now join in on the fun in the Playground LTM. Drop in and let your imagination run wild.More details: https://t.co/nSpL6uQDwlJuly 3, 2018

Original story:

When Epic Games rolled out its Playgrounds limited-time mode for Fortnite last week, it didn't last long: matchmaking errors were rife, prompting Epic to remove it for some urgent patching. But it looks like the mode will roll out internationally later today, according to an update on Reddit. Indeed, it's already available in Asia.

"We’ve completed our testing process for the improvements to our matchmaking services and are deploying servers that will bring back the Playground LTM," the message from Epic Games reads.

"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."

Playgrounds is a sandbox-oriented mode which stretches matches out to a one-hour duration. Building resources are rewarded in higher quantities, allowing a bit more creativity with fort construction. But be careful: there's friendly fire.

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.