And there might be hope for Borderlands 3
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is in the home stretch, and in the lead-up to its launch on March 25, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford confirmed some last-minute good news about cross-platform multiplayer. Unlike Borderlands 3, players will be able to team up across the big three platforms — PC, Xbox, and PlayStation — for co-op in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands will ship on March 25 with full cross play for all platforms at launch, including PlayStation. Incredible work from the engineers at Gearbox Software with thanks to our partners at 2k Games and 1st parties, including Sony, for working together on this. pic.twitter.com/J1SV7HgnhW
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) March 13, 2022
You might be thinking, what’s the big deal? And on a certain level, I feel that way too.
A big release in a big series from a big publisher with a big co-op hook — why wouldn’t there be cross-platform play? From a player’s perspective, it feels like this should be the standard; even if that means a lot of time and energy to get the job done.
Borderlands 3 was an interesting case, though. With an update last June, the game got cross-play across PC, Mac, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and even Stadia — but PlayStation fans were left behind, seemingly due to a hangup at Sony. At the time, Pitchford tweeted that “for certification, we have been required by the publisher to remove cross-play support for PlayStation consoles.” It seemed silly then, and it seems silly now.
With confirmation that Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is supporting cross-play across the board, it seems there’s some hope for Borderlands 3, too. (It’s not too late, is it?)
“The future addition of PlayStation to crossplay for BL3 is now what I would consider to be inevitable,” according to Pitchford. “More info to come as soon as we have it…”
For other developers’ sake, hopefully this means there was a meaningful change at Sony.
Circling back to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Pitchford also tried to get ahead of potential (and perhaps inevitable?) cross-play problems at launch. “Please take it easy on us if there are hiccups,” he tweeted. “This is hard stuff and none of the platforms were designed for this. We’ve done impossible work to make it happen and to try to make it as easy to use as possible, but this is new territory and the wild is not a test environment.”
The easier it is for friends to fire up a game together, the better. Even without platform preferences, genre tastes, and gaming budgets to account for, it’s tough enough to get a bunch of folks on the same schedule as it is. Admittedly, Game Pass has been a boon.