Rocket League Gets Cross-Platform Play on PS4

Rocket League now supports cross-platform online games across PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC (via Steam). This means that when playing online, if you enable cross-play, you will be able to play against players from other platforms too. A Rocket League PS4 player could be paired against a Nintendo Switch player and so on. While Rocket League has been supporting cross-play for a while, this is the first time PlayStation 4 players will get to experience it because Rocket League has just entered the PS4 Cross-Play Beta programme. As of now on Rocket League, cross-play is supported across all match types — casual, competitive, and extra modes.

This was announced by Jeremy Dunham, VP of publishing at Psyonix, which is the company that made Rocket League. In the comments section of the blog post, Dunham answered a interesting query. He said players will be told whether they're playing against someone from a different platform, but not which platform their opponents are from.

Dunham also mentioned that this makes organising e-sports events much easier for Rocket League. In the comments section, he wrote, “One of the main advantages of having full cross-platform play now is that it makes several of our e-sports events more intriguing, as well. In the past, we would have to identify which platforms could or couldn't play in certain major competitions that used in-game MM because of platform limitations.”

Dunham added that cross-platform play is enabled by default on all platforms for Rocket League, so if someone doesn't want to play against players from other platforms, they will have to manually disable that option. At the moment, Rocket League only matches you against opponents from different platforms. You can't team up with friends from different platforms for online play just yet, but Psyonix has announced that this feature will be released via its first update of 2019, but there's no firm date on it yet.

However, it is possible to create a private match to team up with your friends across platforms. As of now, Rocket League doesn't support cross-platform chats during online play and that's unlikely to change because Dunham said Psyonix wants to keep the experience as clean as possible for everyone.

Finally, one limitation of cross-platform online play is that platform-specific cars will not be visible to all players. For instance, if a player is in an online game playing with a car exclusive to Nintendo Switch, it will appear as a different vehicle to PS4 and Xbox One players in the game. This isn't something that can be fixed due to how platform-specific IPs work, Dunham wrote.

Rocket League can be described as a football game but with rocket-powered cars instead of human players. The goal is to put the ball into the opponent's goal to earn points and in most game modes, the team with the most points wins.

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