Add another log to fuel the fire for PS4 Xbox One cross-play. Jeremy Stieglitz, co-founder of Wildcard, the studio behind Ark: Survival Evolved, claims that enabling cross-play between the two platforms wouldn’t take more than a few days to do. Last week, Stieglitz revealed on Twitter that they have cross platform play running internally, which caused quite the dust up for proponents of the two consoles bridging the gap between their online communities.
Eurogamer reached out to Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak, the other co-founder of Wildcard, to inquire about the details. What they found out is something that we’ve been hearing for a long time: It’s easy to achieve from a technical standpoint, but flipping the switch to publicly enable it is up to the relationship between Sony and Microsoft. Rapczak laid out the details.
“Look, it’s a thing that everybody asks for and everybody wants to do, and we can’t really say anything other than what it is. It’s easy for us to do technically and it’s just policy issues, and until that gets worked out we’re not different than any other game, even the big games that want to do it. It’s not really something we can solve on our own.
“If all those Ark players want to be satisfied and play together, these cross-network play policy things really need to get sorted out – and then we’ll do it. We’re really excited about it.”
Stieglitz confirmed what Rapczak had to say, continuing to talk about the ease and logistics of getting it running.
“Technically it’s doable, There’s nothing preventing it. And yes, we have it running internally. We think it’s cool and we would like to make it happen, so if the policies change we’d like to be first in line to turn it on. It honestly would not take us more than a few days to enable it.”
Rapczak final quote is the dreaded one that we want so desperately to happen. “Microsoft and Sony need to work it out.” Until those conversations occur, which may already be happening to some extent, seems we’ll just have to be content playing games with our friends that have the same console we do.
[Source: Eurogamer]
