Oh dear. After riding a rather nice wave following the hypefest known as BlizzCon, Blizzard has made the announcement that PS4 and Xbox One owners will not be able to play together, and they also won’t be getting any of the Seasons content.
This rather unfortunate news come to us from Kevin Martens, lead designer on the project. According to him it’s “definitely not possible at this point with this game”.
He went on to say;
“We didn’t build it that way, so the two ecosystems are closed. I’m trying to give you the most definitive, least PR answer there is, and that is no, we can’t do that. What the Xbox and PlayStation networks do is different than what Battle.net does.”
That makes sense, but this somehow also rules out the possibility of Seasons, which is a chance for a player to start a new character and play the game fresh on a level playing field.
“Seasons requires always online, and that’s one of the major differences in the ecosystems there. For seasonal conquests and things to be what they are, everyone has to be playing on the same leveled field. That’s a great example for something that doesn’t work for consoles.”
To be fair to Blizzard, this probably isn’t by choice. For the cross-platform play and seasons to work, you would probably have to feed directly from Battle.net, thereby bypassing PSN or Xbox Live. I don’t see either Sony or Microsoft allowing that to happen anytime soon, do you?
