Failures of Seamless Cross-play: No Stash Tabs/MTX
Regularly during the pre-Early Access interviews, we were pitched this idea of seamless cross-play. The idea was that you would be able to hop from desk to couch, pick up your controller, and jump right back into your gameplay on a different platform.
Great idea. Does not really work in practice though, for the reasons below. I was able to select all my PC characters and play them. I loaded in town, not my hideout. This is where the seams start to show. This is not seamless crossplay. 1) Paid hideouts seem to not be available unless you buy them on both platforms, so you cannot even visit your PC hideout. You need to select a free hideout. Have not confirmed whether this changes your PC hideout. 2) Stash tabs are also not available. All the PC stash tabs are remove-only. This is even worse, because its not as though buying a PS5 stash tab makes them available cross-platform. Unless I'm understanding incorrectly, this means you get two different sets of remove-only tabs depending on what platform you're on. This is really bad. 3) All stash tabs from PC get randomly re-arranged every time you log in on PS5. Default tabs 1-4 are the only non remove-only tabs, and when you manage to hide remove-only tabs, there doesn't seem to be an assigned input to bring them back. 4) When you go back to PC, all the affinities, some names, colours, etc., of tabs are reset. In addition to the re-arranging you basically need to do ~10-15 minutes of tab organizing just to start playing the game again. 5) All other cosmetic MTX is not available. Does not seem to matter if you bought them directly through GGG, you just can't access it unless it was sold to you by Sony. The underlying issue here is that there's no shared MTX between platforms. You could reasonably apply a fix that allows my stash tabs to keep their affinities when logging back onto PC, but that would be a band-aid solution to the underlying problem. For context, I am a PC player who bought the Liberator of Wraeclast supporter pack. I then spent an additional $30 on the PSN Store to get a PS5 key and download the game. As I understand, this will not be an issue when the game releases as free. However, all the MTX sync issues WILL be, if they settle with the way it works now. I didn't even buy some of these things through steam. I bought them ON THE PATH OF EXILE website. They should work on all platforms. Nobody wants to buy these MTX items twice, and nobody is going to go through the hassle of using remove-only stash tabs on one device, or using two different hideouts. GGG needs to come to a better deal with Sony. One that allows you to keep that seamless crossplay dream alive, by syncing MTX between platforms. Otherwise you've basically sold seamless crossplay as a false promise. I will not be playing on my Playstation until some of these issues with functional MTX are fixed. Last edited by AdioGG#4759 on Jan 2, 2025, 12:14:23 PM Last bumped on Jan 2, 2025, 12:13:42 PM
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