April Fools’ Day is a long-celebrated tradition in the gaming world. Whether through silly videos, fake patch notes, or even full blown in-game events, it’s the time of year where teams can go a little crazy and try something completely different— and it doesn’t get much more different for us than Fantasy Battle Royale.

First off, we understand that times are difficult right now due to the impact of COVID-19 around the world and that some companies have chosen to forego April Fools activities this year. In a time when people are keeping themselves safe and indoors, we believe that video games offer a diversion from solitude and a way to be social while still staying safely apart. For these reasons, we’ve chosen to go forward with our planned event in hopes that it offers a little bit of lighthearted fun during this necessary isolation.

We’ve also ensured that all rewards associated with this event can be earned, with no purchases required, to prevent people from missing out on them if they have to choose more necessary things to spend their money on during this time. The first set of rewards are earned through special event missions, either directly or purchased with the “gold” that the missions give. These rewards can also be purchased in the regular shop if you have some extra income and choose not to participate in the event. The other set of rewards can only be purchased with BP and there will be an option to convert your extra “gold” into BP to help acquire these. Taking care of yourselves and your loved ones is the most important thing right now, so making sure that all of the Fantasy Battle Royale rewards could be earned was a priority for us.

So what exactly is this event? Fantasy Battle Royale is an optional event mode that lets you choose from one of four fantasy classes to take on the Battlegrounds in a completely different way. Creating a true fantasy mode would require more resources than we wanted, so we made a couple… alternate choices in how we represent the fantasy in Fantasy Battle Royale. By utilizing existing PUBG mechanics in fun and crazy new ways, we came up with (what we consider) a funny mode that didn’t have to waste important development resources for a week-long joke.

Even a silly event mode has its uses, though. Fantasy BR has given us the opportunity to test a few new ideas in a real (but fantasy) (but still real) environment. A big part of Battle Royale is survival and we’ve been curious what crafting on the Battlegrounds might look like. Fantasy BR gave us the perfect opportunity to try out a crafting system and as such, the vast majority of the loot you’ll find in Fantasy BR consists of crafting components used to improve the items you begin with. Utilizing fantasy classes, such as the Paladin, had the added bonus of finally letting us test a certain shield we teased out to you all a little too soon.

Now, none of this means that these test features are going to appear in normal PUBG matches tomorrow, or ever for that matter, but it does finally give us a good way to get them out to you and gather your feedback so we can decide whether or not to develop them further.

We wanted to mention all this up front because it’s important for us that you know Fantasy BR wasn’t some giant use of our development resources. It is mostly some creative new art on top of a few bits of code to change how things that already exist in PUBG work. We know that what we spend our time on is important to you, especially while some persistent issues remain unfixed right now.

We also know that we’re late on delivering the Community Letter we promised you that talks about those issues, but plan to have that out within the next week or so. All in all, we’re happy we can test potential future content and give you something silly on a day that’s all about fun, with minimal impact on the more pressing issues we’re actively working on.

So, put on your robe and wizard hat, because this is Fantasy Battle Royale and things are about to get… well, weird.

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