Custom Games for Fortnite Won’t Be Here Anytime Soon as Epic Games Provides an Update on Playground Mode

An Epic Games employee has responded to questions about custom games coming to Fortnite Battle Royale, confirming that the development team is still working on “Playground Mode” and that it won’t be the custom feature that everyone was hoping for.

The Fortnite Battle Royale development team announced that they were working on a LTM named “Playground Mode” in their “State of Development” press release on May 24th.

While there is very little information about what Playground Mode will actually do, the developers confirmed that it is their “initial step into what a creative mode looks like in Fortnite” and that it can be used to “practice, strategize, and enjoy yourself”.

For competitive players, or just casual players that want to practice and hone their skills, the lack of custom games or party games means that it can be difficult to make the most of their time and the announcement of Playground Mode was met with excitement.

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Some players were hoping that Playground Mode would go live in the V4.3 patch on May 25th, and then again in the June 5th V4.3 Content Update, but it looks like we will be waiting for a while longer.

Epic Games employee JShredz responded to a question on Reddit on June 4th to say that the development team are “still working on it” but that they needed to make “significant necessary back-end improvements” first.

He also confirmed, and explained the current reasoning for, Playground Mode not being available to play offline and used as a practice tool on private servers.

Apparently interaction and communication with the servers are “central to how the game is run” which means that the mode won’t run properly if you cut things off from the server.

With these bombshells it looks like we could be waiting for a good while longer before fully customizable/private matches are available.

This is once again a knock on the ever-growing competitive Fortnite community as tournament organizers, players, and teams continue to have to find work-arounds.