Yesterday, Codemasters released Dirt 3, their latest rally racing game. Since then, players on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 have been racing competitively against each other online. Oh wait, that’s not entirely accurate now, is it? Nope. In just the latest of a long string of indignities PS3 owners been made to suffer through, players on Sony’s console are unable to compete online.
You see, Dirt 3 requires you to have a VIP Pass, which PlayStation owners can only obtain via the PlayStation Store. And in case you missed it, Sony couldn’t get the store back online yesterday as they had supposedly planned. Mortal Kombat had a similar issue with the “Kombat Pass”, but disabled it temporarily.
“We’ve looked into doing something similar for DiRT 3 but it’s not technically possible,” a Codemasters representative explained to Eurogamer. “It’s hard-coded into the game. Changing this would require considerable development time and a patch which would need to go through the submission process. This in itself would be a longer process that waiting for Sony to bring the PSN Store back online.”
The new, new target date (Or was it the new, new, new target date? Who can remember at this point?) for the PSN restore is next Tuesday, the 31st. So PS3 gamers will have to wait an entire week after the game’s release to hop online. And that’s assuming Sony is able to get the store functioning again by month’s end. With the numerous delays the numerous twists and turns the PSN outage story has taken so far, it’s difficult to be optimistic about that date.
[Source: Eurogamer]
[Image courtesy of VGN 365.]
