Finally, there will be more comprehensive crossplay options for Borderlands 3. However, the actually good news was accompanied by a setback for PlayStation players.
This is what happened: On Twitter, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford commented on an upcoming update for the loot shooter Borderlands 3. It is supposed to include crossplay options for all platforms – or rather: Almost all.
Pitchford divides his announcement into “good” and “bad” news: “An update for Borderlands 3 has been prepared for release that supports full crossplay for all platforms.” But the setback: “For certification, we were asked by the publisher to remove the crossplay support for PlayStation consoles.”
This means that – under the current circumstances – there will likely be no crossplay feature for PlayStation players in this update. PlayStation players will remain isolated.
What was the situation before? Until now, Borderlands 3 had not been equipped with many crossplay options. There is a PC crossplay feature, which allowed players to play together between the Steam and Epic Games Store versions. Now the Xbox player base will likely join in.
Players unhappy about missing PlayStation crossplay
As it stands, it is still unclear why the Sony consoles will initially be missing from the crossplay update. According to Pitchford, it was the publisher, in this case 2K, who made the decision to remove crossplay support for PlayStation. The issue of crossplay and PlayStation has been ongoing for a while: Only in 2018 did Sony allow such a concept in the case of Fortnite, but according to information from the current dispute between Epic and Apple, this seems to have a cost.
Whether this is crucial for the Borderlands case remains open. However, it is certain that many fans of the game are unhappy about the missing feature on Sony’s consoles:
- “My brother and I have been waiting to play BL3 together since launch. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined,” writes a user in the Borderlands subreddit (via reddit).
- “Personally, it doesn’t affect me, the people I want to crossplay with are on PC. But I would have liked it just from the standpoint of expanding the player base. Matchmaking has been dead for some time and it would have been nice to combine the player bases,” finds another (via reddit).
Crossplay has been one of the features that fans wanted for Borderlands 3 early on – now at least part of the player base will have more options to play together. Just a few weeks ago, Randy Pitchford made attention with another tweet: He may have hinted at the next installment of the Borderlands series.
