Cross-platform play has been big for the last few years. We’ve seen platform walls lowered for runaway successes like Minecraft and Rocket League , and even first-party fare like Gears of War 4 . But the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds community seems pretty divided by the concept after the possibility of letting PC and Xbox One players face-off against each other was floated by PUBG executive producer Chang Han Kim in an interview published earlier this week.
Kim acknowledged the most obvious problem, the disparity between aiming with a controller and instead of a mouse, during his chat with VG24/7 . But it sounds like Bluehole does have serious interest in bridging the gap between PC and Xbox One. The most vocal members of the PUBG community don’t seem to be onboard though. Two threads taking issue with the proposed cross-platform support rocketed to the front page of the game’s subreddit, drawing hundreds of comments from fellow PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds fans who don’t want to see the flavor of the month diluted. Most seem to be upset by the prospect of facing off against players receiving the benefits of aim assist, a common feature in console shooters. Aim assist isn’t the only potential problem though.
Cross-platform multiplayer support typically requires version parity on the platforms in question. In theory, that’s doable. But the people playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on Steam have become accustomed to a pretty steady stream of patches and hot fixes that keep the Early Access project surprisingly stable (for an unfinished game). Trying to maintain version parity with the Xbox One port, which will be subject to all of the testing and certification processes frequently blamed for patch delays, would means any future updates for PUBG would take longer to hit Steam. And a large swathe of the game’s community isn’t particularly interested in waiting longer for patches. Not when they’re already able to find fresh games as quickly as they queue up for them.
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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is available in Early Access. The game hits Xbox One in 2018.
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