Oh, yawn. You’d think with a new round of consoles, we’d at least get a couple of space-age new reasons why their games can’t be friends with ours. Risks associated with “high-speed platform pressure change”, perhaps, or “cyber-kinetic discharge”. Anything but the boring old cog in the machine that is “Sony combing updates for errant bugs or boobs”.
No such luck. Planetside 2 creative director Matt Higby says that while all future PC version patches will also appear on the PS4, the slight delay necessary for official approval makes cross-platform play impossible.
“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,” said Higby in an interview with Eurogamer at SOE Live in Las Vegas.
“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.”
Small consolation comes in the form of transferable characters. So if you fancy playing with your PC loadout on a swanky new plastic box or vice versa, that will be a thing you can do.
“We’re talking about having character portability, so a PC character, you could transfer it to PlayStation 4, and then back,” explains Higby. “The character format’s the same on both, it’s just purely a matter of the server updates.”
Are you sorry not to be able to see your PS4-toting friends pottering about on Planetside’s servers come Christmastime? Perhaps send them on their way with a cheery potshot? There’s always the keyboards ‘n’ controllers compatibility issue to argue over, of course, so maybe it’s for the best.