Fortnite players on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were able to briefly play with each other due to an in-game bug.
In a recent announcement, Epic Games revealed they will be releasing Battle-Royale PvP mode for Fortnite. Creative Director Donald Muster says,
“We love Battle Royale games like PUBG and thought Fortnite would make a great foundation for our own version. A few months ago Epic’s Unreal Tournament team began experimenting with the mode while the original Fortnite team kept updating the core game.”
The Battle-Royale PvP feature is set for official release on September 26th, but it can be accessed before then if players want to be a part of the test phase and don’t mind some of the errors or bugs that may be encountered while playing.
Some Reddit users noticed one of these unintentional bugs, which was cross-platform play. In Reddit thread, one user discussed how they were killed in the Battle-Royale by someone with a gamer tag that couldn’t be created while playing on the PlayStation 4 version of the game. The same user also has an Xbox One, and verified that the user who killed them was indeed registered, but on an Xbox One instead of a PlayStation 4. This meant that while the Reddit user was initially playing on their PlayStation 4, they had also briefly been playing with other gamers who were using their Xbox One. Another Reddit user posted photos showing the brief cross-platform capabilities, with him and his child playing side by side on their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Microsoft has allowed some cross-platform play with the Nintendo Switch and PC, but Sony hasn’t openly agreed to do so with games like Minecraft and Rocket League. Unfortunately, the bug encountered in the game wasn’t signal of Sony jumping on board for cross-platform play either; in a brief statement to the Verge, an Epic Games representative said that they “….had a configuration issue and it has now been corrected.” There has been no announcement from Sony or Microsoft about officially releasing cross-platform play in the future.
Fortnite’s official Battle-Royale PvP feature will be released September 26.