COTW should allow account progress to carry over between Xbox, PlayStation, and PC because so many players have invested hundreds of hours into the game. When someone switches platforms, usually because they upgraded their setup or changed how they play, it feels discouraging to lose everything and start from scratch. Progress in COTW isn’t just levels; it’s trophies, diamonds, rares, weapons, skills, and DLCs that players have supported the game with over time. Forcing longtime players to abandon all of that can kill motivation and even push them away from the game. Having cross-progression, or at least a one-time account transfer, would respect player time, encourage people to keep playing (and even rebuy the game), and align COTW with modern gaming standards where progress follows the player, not the platform.
#Hunter: Call of the Wild Needs Account Carryover Between Console and PC
next totem
peak oxide
would be an excellent way for hackers/modders to have a chance to destroy the integrity of other console players' files unfortunately
aside from just being generally infeasible at this point in the game's life cycle
next totem
@peak oxide A lot of people saying this seem to misunderstand how account carryover actually works. Cross-progression doesn’t mean PC players suddenly get access to console save files or that data is being passed directly between players. In games, progression is stored and validated server-side. Your console or PC just pulls data tied to your account, it doesn’t touch anyone else’s files. If PC modders were able to destroy the integrity of console saves through account linking, we’d already be seeing that happen in games like Fortnite, Destiny, Apex, or Warframe and we don’t.
peak oxide
and the way COTW save data works means that modding touches every part of the game
sphgatetti code be like that
it was a fun time when Sundar launched because many people had their games completely break to the point of manually wiping all files and reinstalling the game.
next totem
PC modders already exist in COTW, yet they don’t affect console players now. Adding optional account carryover wouldn’t magically give them new powers unless the system was designed extremely poorly. On top of that, account linking is not the same thing as cross play. You can allow shared progression, unlocks, and DLC ownership without ever mixing PC and console players in the same gameplay environment or exposing platform specific files. The “it’s too late in the game’s lifecycle” point also isn’t really about security. That’s a development and business decision cost, resources, and platform agreements with Sony and Microsoft and not a technical impossibility. The hacking argument sounds serious, but in reality it’s a solved problem that many older games have already handled safely.
peak oxide
Okay.
The thing is.
the devs did not think hacking would be as much of a problem in a hunting game. Because who wants to cheat in a hunting game?
So there are no protections at all whatsoever
So the "older games have already handled it" argument on your end kinda falls flat on its face
and like you said, business decisions involving getting the storefronts to agree to it
storefronts don't like losing out on potential money
so it's extremely improbable Microsoft/Sony would agree to it
next totem
I still don’t think that really proves the point you’re trying to make it prove. Saying the devs didn’t expect hacking to be an issue doesn’t automatically mean there are zero protections, and even if protections are weaker on PC, that doesn’t translate into a risk for console players through account carryover. Those are two separate concerns. PC modding affecting your own local save is not the same thing as PC modding being able to inject or overwrite data in a completely different platform’s environment. The key thing that keeps getting skipped is that carryover would not involve uploading raw save files. If it did, I’d agree it would be a disaster. But no sane implementation works that way. Carryover would be about syncing specific, whitelisted progression values owned content, levels, maybe statistics while rejecting anything outside expected bounds. Even a game with minimal anti-cheat can still do basic validation like “does this account own this DLC” or “is this value within possible limits.” That doesn’t require a full anti-cheat system, just controlled input. Also, the idea that “older games handled it” doesn’t fall apart just because COTW didn’t plan for hackers early on. It actually supports the opposite point: other games also didn’t expect massive cheating at launch and still retrofitted safer systems later. The reason COTW hasn’t is far more likely because it’s costly, risky to refactor old systems, and not a priority this latenot because console save integrity would be impossible to protect. In other words, the real argument against carryover is effort and return, not that PC hackers would somehow be able to nuke console players’ files.