Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Core Element Is Severely Broken
Tiny Tina's in trouble!
This article is more than 2 years old
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, an action role-playing first-person shooter Borderlands spin-off, launched just weeks ago, and one of the game’s core elements has been malfunctioning since the launch. It would seem that the game centered around the gaming world’s favorite teenage explosives expert, Tiny Tina, has had some difficulties with the multiplayer component ever since it launched, and Gearbox Software, the game’s developer, is oddly silent about it.
The issues with the Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands’ multiplayer component were brought to our attention by Kotaku, as they noted that the game had server issues for the better part of the past two weeks. This is an unfortunate turn of events; all Borderlands players will confirm that the gaming series and, by extension, its spin-offs are at their best when played among friends. And while this isn’t a big surprise, considering that all multiplayer games suffer some server issues at launch (almost every one), this instance is somewhat different from typical server issues most games suffer from.
If the readership remembers, the launch of Final Fantasy XIV’s latest expansion caused massive server congestions, which prompted Square Enix to temporarily pull the game from sales. Something similar happened when Korean MMO Lost Ark launched in Europe and North America via Amazon. Any type of continuous server issue is regarded as a red alert among gamers and publishers and usually ends up generating several headlines in online publications. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands somehow evaded showing up in the online press, at least until now.
The Borderlands-loving gaming community has voiced their concerns regarding the state of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands servers online, but for some reason, the issues persist, and Gearbox Software remains silent on the matter. This also isn’t something gamers are used to seeing, as most developers and publishers immediately issue apologies and work their best to fix the issues which may potentially turn the customers away from their recently released product.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands came out less than a month ago, on March 25, for Xbox, PlayStation, and PC, as the first-ever Borderlands game to launch with full cross-play capabilities. It’s not the first Borderlands game to feature cross-play, as that title belongs to 2019’s Borderlands 3 — which got its cross-play feature two years later. On the Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands official release date, Gearbox’s proprietary online service, Shift, notified players that they might see a notification about being disconnected from Shift throughout their online sessions, referring to them as errant pop-ups.
Three hours later, however, Gearbox issued a notice of reports of instability and spent a few days trying to fix the matter and improve the game’s playability, rolling out an update that was supposed to address crashes across different platforms. This patch fixed most of the issues, with only a few “limited cases of disconnections.” If these continue to persist, Gearbox suggests an age-old cure — restarting the game — as if that’s going to fix server issues. It’s worth noting that these issues appear most keenly felt during crossover play, but it’s not exactly smooth with traditional matchmaking on the same platforms either.
