Epic Announces Downtime For Fortnite’s Big Update This Week

For a cartoonish free-to-play title with no franchise cache, Fortnite has truly exceeded everyone’s expectations.

The Epic Games battle royale shooter was among the first to enter the lucrative genre, and while it’s led to a whole bunch of less-than-stellar imitators, Fortnite remains the current king of online gaming. In fact, Epic now presides over 250 million players worldwide, and has no intentions of taking the foot off the pedal.

That’s been quite evident with the frequent updates they’ve been making as part of Season 8, the latest of which will arrive later this week. Over on Twitter, the developer announced that there will be some downtime beginning at 9am UTC on March 27th so that they can implement the v8.20 update, which will bring with it, among other things, a brand new Limited-Time Mode.

For those who don’t know, Limited-Time Modes are usually a way for the folks at Epic Games to pursue a wackier method of game design where they don’t have to worry too much about balance and rules. In the past, we’ve seen modifiers like low gravity, one-hit kills and increased vehicle/weapon spawns and now, they’ve got something else pretty unique planned for us.

Called The Floor Is Lava, and surely the result of the volcano being added during Season 8, it’ll task you with surviving Battle Island submerging in the red stuff by either getting yourself to the highest point you can find, or building your way to safety. Further details haven’t been disclosed, but it sounds like a ton of fun and should keep folks busy for a while.

Beyond that, the v8.20 update will be making a number of bug fixes as well, and you can look for it all to go live in Fortnite later this week, on March 27th.