Borderlands 3 revitalized the looter shooter genre, offering a unique blend of first-person shooting and addictive loot grinding reminiscent of Diablo 4. While other titles like Destiny 2 and The First Descendant embraced the live-service model, Borderlands 3 doubled down on its core single-player and co-op experience. Playing with friends significantly enhances the Borderlands 3 experience. Given its staggered release across multiple platforms and console generations, achieving seamless cross-platform play presented a considerable challenge. This guide examines the current state of cross-platform play and cross-progression in Borderlands 3.
Borderlands 3 Moze
Borderlands 3 now offers full cross-platform play compatibility across all platforms. After an initial period of platform exclusivity, cross-play functionality was implemented in 2022, unifying players on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store). This allows you to team up with friends regardless of their chosen platform.
Cross-progression, however, is a different story. While seamless character transfer is possible between the Steam and Epic Games Store versions on PC, console players face limitations. Currently, there’s no direct way to transfer characters between different consoles (PlayStation to Xbox, for example). This poses a challenge for players who switch platforms while wanting to maintain their progress.
While character transfer remains restricted between consoles, there’s a workaround for transferring loot and gear. Utilizing Borderlands 3‘s in-game trading system, players can send their hard-earned equipment to a new character on a different platform. This alleviates the frustration of starting completely from scratch, even though players still need to level up a new character and repeat missions. While this isn’t a perfect solution, it provides a way to retain some progress when switching platforms.
In conclusion, Borderlands 3 successfully delivers on cross-platform play, enabling cooperative gameplay across all major platforms. However, cross-progression remains limited, with full functionality only available between the PC versions on Steam and Epic Games Store. The in-game trading system offers a partial solution for transferring loot between platforms, mitigating the impact of recreating characters but not eliminating it entirely.
