Sony Online Entertainment’s Planetside 2 was a resounding success last year. The PC free to play shooter, which set a new standard for the genre and for its format, is also coming to the PlayStation 4 after the system launches later this year. However, Sony has confirmed that there will not be any cross platform play between the PS4 and PC versions of the game. Speaking to Eurogamer, today they finally explained the ratonale behind that decision.
“Because of the update cadence, and the additional steps you have to go through to be able to release an update on the PlayStation network, we’re not going to be able to keep our servers in sync, so you won’t be able to just play with the same people,” Matt Higby, creative director for Planetside 2, explained.
“They might be a week behind in terms of patching, or a day behind or whatever it ends up being, and we can’t really have that.”
That makes sense. Even though Sony has made the patching and updates process for games on the PlayStation 4 as easy and seamless as possible, the content still has to be cleared by the platform holder, meaning that updates for games can never be simultaneous with the PC versions of those games, not unless the PC version updates are deliberately held back.
However, he did try and assure us that some form of cross platform interactivity would be coming to the game anyway; specifically, he hinted at character transfers between versions.
“We’re also talking about having character portability, so a PC character, you could transfer it to PlayStation 4, and then back. The character format’s the same on both, it’s just purely a matter of the server updates.”
Sounds like a good compromise to me.