Epic Games’ epic game — Fortnite — has taken the world by storm (literally at times) ever since the company introduced a Battle Royale mode. However, what keeps players coming back to the game goes far deeper than just the fun, playful graphics, the emotes, and the excellent building mechanism (which can be quite difficult to learn properly). No, what keeps players coming back for more is the simple fact that Epic keeps updating the game with fresh content, takes chances with random experiments, and is not afraid when something starts messing up.
One of these fresh things are what Epic calls ‘Limited Time Modes’ in the game, which are special variations of the Battle Royale gameplay to mix things up and keep the experience fun, challenging, and engaging for the game’s audience. There has been a 50v50 mode, a 5 teams of 20 mode, and more, and with today’s patch v4.5, Epic has added another Limited Time Mode to the game. One which people have been very excited about for quite some time now — the Playground LTM.
What Is the Playground LTM?
LTM, as you might have guessed by now, is short for Limited Time Mode. Playground is a special, first of its kind LTM that Epic has brought into Fortnite. This mode doesn’t involve Battle Royale, to be honest. In fact, this is a mode that Epic is using to let people have fun on the island and build crazy weird things without worrying about getting shotgunned mid-way through the pyramid they were building.
I tried out Fortnite’s Playground LTM a short while back, and I’m convinced that this is a great mode for both beginners (such as yours truly), and seasoned Fortnite players alike. Here’s why.
1. Too Many Resources
The Playground LTM awards a lot more resources for every car, fence, building, and tree you take down than the regular mode ever has. Going through a couple of trees will get you upwards of 700 wood in Playground.
This means you can build insane stuff without having to worry about scarce resources. The Playground LTM is like a resource jackpot and I can see seasoned Fortnite players with some amazing building skills getting up to some insane shenanigans in this mode.
If you’re a beginner, this is the best way to learn how to build, and how to build faster without worrying about resources or enemies taking shots at you while you’re just trying to learn how to build a simple tower (this applies to me, by the way).
2. Guns and Ammo are Still Here
The Playground LTM will still spawn all the guns, ammo, chests, and traps that the regular Battle Royale mode does, so this is a great place to practice aiming and learning the mechanisms of the various guns involved in the game.
3. Play Alone or With Friends
In Playground LTM you aren’t thrown on the island with a bunch of strangers. You can either drop down alone and do whatever suits your fancy, or you can drop down with your friends, and practice building together, or practice aiming. With a whole bunch of weapons and ammo, and no one else to compete against, you can use whatever gun you prefer and practice aiming and shooting with it.
4. Friendly Fire Is On
Friendly fire is turned on in Playground LTM, which means if you drop down with your friends, you can actually practice shooting on each other. However, if you kill a friend, or a friend kills you, you’ll simply respawn in 10 seconds.
Why Playground LTM?
Some of you may be wondering why Playground is such a big deal in the Fortnite community. That’d be because a big chunk of the Fortnite community is all about having fun, and Playground LTM is perfect for them. The rest of the community includes pro-players, and beginners who want to learn, and Playground is great for them as well.
Fortnite players have been known to come up with weird, creative, and funny building ideas. In fact, a streamer known popularly as ‘Loserfruit‘ actually covered the entirety of Wailing Woods with a pyramid.
There have been other such impressive feats as well, with a group once having built a cover over Dusty Divot. So yeah, it’s pretty obvious to Epic that a mode such as Playgrounds will be pretty much a guaranteed hit among the many, many, many fans of the game.
My Experience with Playground LTM
The moment I landed on the island, I started practicing building (because I need a lot of practice with that), and I realized that I suck pretty bad at it. However, the fact that there are a lot of resources in Playground LTM, and that I can’t die, emboldened me to try building, and then building as fast as I can.
Mistakes are acceptable in Playground because that’s exactly what it’s for… learning, building, having fun. I mean, it’s right there in the name ‘Playground.’ So yeah, I dropped off at least 3 times while I was trying to jump and build a tower in Pleasant Park.
Over a period of almost 30 minutes, I had practiced more building than in days of playing regular Fortnite matches. 
I died quite a lot of times too, but hey, respawning in 10 seconds is great to practice whatever you want to practice, and so I built what I can only describe as a weird cross between a tower, a flat-head pyramid (plateau?), a bridge-sort of thing between the two, and lots and lots of errors in judgement (like that time I jumped too quickly and forgot to place a floor, fell down from the top of the tower and died).
However, at the end of the day, I’m sure I’ll be playing a lot more of Playground LTM over the next few days before I jump back into regular matches to test whether my building skills are as good in real matches as well.
Playground LTM Is Awesome and Fun
All things considered, Playground LTM is a really great Limited Time Mode from Epic, and the company is saying that this is being treated as a type of test bed by the developers to see if a permanent playground mode will be a good fit to the game.
In my opinion Playground mode is a great fit. Not only because it’s a fun way to kill some time with friends when you’re just looking to have some fun, not only because it’ll help streamers who aren’t pro-players to get creative and share more Fortnite experiences, but also because it’ll make it easier for a new audience to get acquainted with the building aspects of the game, because honestly that can be quite difficult to come to terms with. In the mean time, I’m definitely gonna be on the lookout for what popular streamers get up to in Playground LTM.
