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Bethesda Declares War on Sony Over Cross-Play Limitations

Cross-play has become a major issue over the past few months as prominent games like Fortnite have been sandboxed on the PlayStation 4. As more games proliferate across the Switch, Xbox One, and PC, Sony continues to be the last holdout, simply because there's no pressing reason why the company should do things any differently. But pressure from companies like Bethesda could force it to rethink that stance. In a recent interview with , Pete Hines, Bethesda's senior VP of global marketing, discussed the upcoming console version of the Elder Scrolls Legends, a free-to-play card game set within the Elder Scrolls universe. Here's what Hines had to say:

[The Elder Scrolls Legends] is a strategy card game that encompasses both single and multiplayer...It is both cross-platform play and cross-platform progress. It is our intention in order for the game to come out, it has to be those things on any system. 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.

When asked if Bethesda actually intended to fight Sony on this issue, Hines replied: "We continue to talk to all of our platform partners," Hines added. "But those [terms] are essentially non-negotiable. We can't be talking about one version of Legends, where you take your progress with you, and another version where you stay within that ecosystem or its walled off from everything else. That is counter to what the game has been about."

Separately, Why Bethesda changed its review policy:

In 2016, with the release of DOOM, Bethesda announced a new policy to only send out review code to media on the day of release. The policy was met with a lot of pushback from both players and critics who saw it as a way of stifling pre-release criticism, even though, at the time, Bethesda was releasing some of the strongest games it had ever put out.

In the past year or so, code has been quietly coming in earlier for some of Bethesda's titles, so we asked the company's SVP of global marketing, Pete Hines, if the company's policy has officially changed. "We put out Evil Within 2 and sent it out to press well in advance, and we did the same thing for Wolfenstein 2. Then there were other games that we sent out at launch." Hines says. "I think we're going to continue to evaluate what makes the most sense.

[...] "We did it the first time because there was the whole thing about transparency and companies needing to be transparent," Hines explains of the initial decision. "We were like, 'Well, you want us to be transparent, this is what we're doing'. "Then it ended up being the focal point and, honestly, we were tired of reading reviews where the first paragraph spent more time talking about our review policy than the game. So we decided we're not going to keep drawing attention to it – we'll send out copies and maybe people will start talking about the game instead of talking about policies. So we did."

See also: Sony's stalling tactics on cross-play worked

Previously: Sony Faces Growing 'Fortnite' Backlash At E3

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