Epic will not reinstate Fortnite's Playground mode until next week

Fortnite's time-limited Playground mode, which was added this week and then promptly removed because of matchmaking errors, will not return until next week, Epic Games has announced. 

The mode was introduced on Wednesday, and features hour-long matches that players can muck about in, build as much as they want, and kill their teammates with friendly fire. You gather resources 10x faster than normal, and there are more llamas and chests to loot. You also get unlimited respawns until the last five minutes, when the storm starts to close in.

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Later the same day, however, Epic disabled the mode, citing "issues with our matchmaking services". It's been trying to get the mode back up and running over the past few days, but now it won't be playable until next week.

The developer will provide another update on Monday, it said.

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Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Kevin Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.