Is it hard for you to fill up your Fortnite: Battle Royale squad with three players? Now imagine trying to do that with 16.
A new function called Squad Formation was added to Fortnite overnight, as spotted by a few players on social media and confirmed later by Epic Games. It allows any person to create a lobby of 16 players with people on their playlist and queue for matches in big team modes, such as Team Rumble, Food Fight, and the promotional Avengers mode Endgame.
Squad Formation splits all 16 players into four squads of four players each, and the lobby leader can move them around and change teams between the Llama, Crab, Bear, and Dragon squads. There’s also an option to “sit out”, which can probably be used when one of the squads is missing players. Players can activate it in a lobby by clicking the “Squad Formation” button at the bottom right.
When Squad Formation is enabled and the lobby has five or more players, all default game modes are disabled. That means players can only join Playground and big-team modes, since joining a default Squads match would let players on all teams see where their opponents are.
Even though Squad Formation seems like a custom matchmaking tool at first, it’s not. Players can’t go beyond the 16-player limit to make a 100-player match with select people, and its features seem made to let players exclusively join big team modes with premade parties.
Prior to this new feature, parties could only have up to four players, and full squads would join big team modes with other random players. Those who wanted to play with other friends who were in another squad had to queue up at the same time and pray for the matchmaking gods to put them on the same match and team.
The addition of Squad Formation was unexpected, as Epic Games hasn’t released any Fortnite update today officially. A few minutes after players spotted the feature, Epic revealed that it was added intentionally today.
