Bethesda’s Pete Hines is a joy to follow on Twitter and the recent news that Sony will finally allow cross-platform play has caused him a little strife. Just last month Peter was laying in to Sony, saying Bethesda wouldn’t be releasing The Elder Scrolls: Legends, a free-to-play card game, on consoles that don’t allow cross-platform play.
“It is our intention in order for the game to come out, it has to be those things on any system,” Hines said. “We cannot have a game that works one way across everywhere else except for on this one thing. The way the game works right now on Apple, Google, Steam, and Bethesda.net, it doesn’t matter where you buy your stuff, if you play it on another platform that stuff is there. It doesn’t matter what platform you play on, you play against everyone else who is playing at that moment. There’s no ‘Oh, it’s easier to control, or it has a better framerate on this system.’ It’s a strategy card game. It doesn’t matter.”
Meanwhile Game director Todd Howard told “Gamestar.de “We would have loved [cross-platform] with Fallout 76 but right now we can’t, Sony is not as helpful as everyone would like, but we’ll see what happens in the future.”
Fast forward to this week when Sony announce cross-platform play can now be a thing on third party titles and Peter tweets:
Folks, chill. I work with a lot of devs and games for whom this is important going forward.
Fallout 76 does not support crossplay, for a number of reasons. I have no idea if it ever will. But I assure you it is not on our radar right now as we focus on B.E.T.A. and Launch.
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) September 26, 2018
After criticising Sony and saying they are the ones holding up cross-play, suddenly saying there are “a number of reasons” it can’t happen has got quite a few people miffed.
Many tweets have been asking why Fallout 76 won’t have cross-play, but it does seem a lot of people really don’t understand how game development works and think putting cross-platform play in to Fallout 76 is as easy as flicking a switch,
As for Peter, he’s still firing off tweets explaining himself. I suspect if he had crafted a more eloquent Tweet in the first place he could have saved himself a lot of hassle.
i'm reiterating what i have said for months, which is that we don't have cross-play support because of decisions we had to make a long while ago. i imagine that is something we will revisit, but 7 weeks from launch we are gonna stay focused on launch
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) September 27, 2018
Source: Twitter
