When Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid was announced last week, one of the most impressive things about the game was how it handled cross-play. While fellow April fighting game Mortal Kombat 11 probably won’t have cross-play at launch, Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid is poised to feature both cross-play and cross-progression between the Nintendo Switch, PC, and Xbox One versions of the game. This means not only can you fight players from other consoles online, your progression will also carry over if you move systems as well.
While the PC version is coming at a later date, this will certainly be a beneficial feature at launch to Switch and Xbox One players. DualShockers recently interviewed Jesse Cherry, Senior Product Manager over at developer nWay about Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid. Cross-play came up during the discussion and Jesse explained why nWay, Hasbro, and Lionsgate decided to include it.
Interestingly, nWay “had built out” some of the systems necessary to sustain cross-play when developing Power Rangers: Legacy Wars for iOS and Andorid, though Jesse still confirmed that Battle for the Grid is not a mobile port.“Here’s something that was helping us that we could take over to the console games,” Jesse highlighted to me. “Of course, it takes a team of server engineers to make this work but luckily we had that.”
In the end, Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid’s developers just consider that “the more people you have to play with each other, the better matchmaking can be”. Jesse Cherry even called cross-play a “no brainer” as being able to play with those on other consoles will make playing Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid online “a great experience.” Hopefully, this could eventually inspire an esports community if players are interested.
Still, there is one glaring omission from Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid’s cross-play and cross-progression support: PS4. While Sony has been taking steps recently to implement this feature, they were quite late to the party so the only PS4 games that truly support cross-play with more than PC are Fortnite and Rocket League. I asked Jesse Cherry if nWay would like to add PS4 cross-play into the mix and he seemed quite on board with the idea, Sony just has to lighten up first:
“Of course. We’d love every player to play with each other. The more the merrier for sure.”
Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid is currently poised to release for PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in April before making the jump to PC later in 2019. You can expect DualShockers’ full interview with Jesse Cherry to go live later today.
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