Fall Guys: How To Play Private Matches With Friends
The critically acclaimed platform battle royale game "Fall Guys" has officially gone from a Playstation 4 and PC exclusive title to a completely free-to-play, omni-platform game with full cross-play support. To say that the already immense popularity has outright exploded would be no exaggeration. As soon as the newest version was released, the "Fall Guys" server was immediately overwhelmed by the number of players.
On the official "Fall Guys" Twitter page, the developers have been maintaining their fun and upbeat tweeting as they field the numerous complaints. Updates on the server status and hotfix patching have been delivered in their usual style, complete with (increasingly more skilled) MS Paint representations of what's happening at the "Fall Guys" headquarters. One of the recurring issues they addressed was with custom lobbies, a mode where players could set up private matches — a critical issue, considering that with complete crossplay, many players will have been looking forward to being able to play with their friends regardless of console platform.
Thankfully, it seems the multiple hotfixes implemented since the relaunch have been fairly successful in stabilizing the servers. Reports of outages and connectivity issues have been leveling out (per the numbers on Downdetector and Istheservicedown), so now's as good as any to try your luck with custom lobbies. Here's how to set one up and invite your friends to play a customized, private match.
Joining or hosting a show
A custom lobby in "Fall Guys" supports up to 60 players with a hard minimum of 10 as of the hotfix implemented on June 24 (per the official Twitter page). While 10 seems like a high minimum for private games, it's better than the 30 minimum that the game was restricted to while Mediatonic was trying to patch the issues. Hopefully, there'll be an update to lower the requisite number of players soon. For now, you'll need to round up at least nine other people to play.
To create a custom lobby, you'll need to pull up the Show Selector option from the main menu and then tab over from Live Shows to Custom Shows. There'll be an option to join or host a custom show — to join, you simply have to enter the 5-character lobby code given to you by the host. To host, you'll be the one sending out the code as displayed on your screen. You can set the game mode from the available ones through the Show Selection menu while you're waiting for everyone to join — once you have the minimum amount of players in the lobby, you'll be able to start the game and drop everyone in.