Epic’s message to players when announcing those planned changes points to an important shift for the game. It sounds like Playground is just the first step toward a broader evolution for Fortnite Skins as a whole. “The Playground LTM represents our first step into what a full creative mode looks like in Fortnite,” the developer wrote on Reddit last week. We don’t know when it will arrive or what shape this “full creative mode” will take, but it could represent a more bold future for Fortnite that goes beyond its current competitive shooter trappings.
Because, more than anything, Playground mode feels like a true Minecraft successor. It’s a sandbox where you and your friends can mess around, get creative, and build stuff without worrying about hostile, trigger-happy players striving for a victory. It’s the perfect variation of Fortnite Items for those players who’ve started to grow tired of battle royale games or who never got into them in the first place because they’re so hyper-competitive and oriented around shooting guns. Typically, so much of Fortnite is dictated by other players’ responses to running into you on the map and your ability to deal with the exchange accordingly. Playground removes that barrier entirely.
For those players, like myself, who’ve become hooked on the battle royale genre, Playground represents a break in the game’s monotonous cycle. In our very first session last week, my three friends and I messed around with huge shopping cart ramps and tried to outbuild one another over Tilted Towers, resulting in the most elaborate and outrageous structure we’d ever seen in the game. We then ended our hour with a sniper showdown inside four giant pillars constructed on the corners of Loot Lake. Most of the time, killing each other was the most boring part. It was the unexpected events — like accidentally removing the floor beneath my avatar in a furious edit war or launching ourselves off a mountain in a shopping cart with an impulse grenade — that made it a memorable experience.