Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Multiplayer is an Utter Disaster at Launch

The video gaming industry is changing, both for the better and for the worse. We’re getting next-gen hardware, top-of-the-line consoles, and state-of-the-art games. However, in recent times, we’ve managed to experience highly anticipated titles go down the drain as soon as they launch. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the firsts that come to mind when a topic like this comes into question.

The latter was undeniably an unmitigated disaster when it was released, hoarding in all types of issues, glitches, and bugs together, and snowballing them into what CD Projekt Red called an action RPG. In relatively more recent times, we’ve had one trainwreck of a launch for Battlefield 2042—a disappointment so huge, it’s not going away anytime soon. 

Now, the latest game marking its entry into the list of these tip-top failures is Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. The title has launched six days from the time of writing—on March 25, 2022—and is already a no-show in terms of letting gamers play online.

I’m a fan of the Borderlands franchise and the whole looter-shooter concept amuses me. When Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was announced late last year, I looked forward to its release. Now that it was finally here, I purchased the title on day one and hoped for an agreeing experience, at the very least. 

What I got, however, was an immeasurable disappointment. I tried out the tabletop RPG for a good hour or two until I wanted to try the title’s multiplayer. That is where trouble sprung up, not allowing me to connect to others, not even for a mere moment. 

I first turned to my internet connection and various other factors, but I soon found them not being relevant as I looked up the issue online. It was both comforting and unfortunate to discover a bevy of other Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands players trying to experience the multiplayer aspect of the game, but utterly failing to do so. 

Reports have been pouring in left and right, all stating how it’s practically impossible to hop onto the game’s online servers. I, for one, was able to find 5 different Reddit accounts complaining of this pertinent issue. People try switching their game saves and end up getting, “Your connection has timed out. Please recheck your network.” If anything, this is totally uncalled for. You’re not even trying to play online in that case. 

Moreover, cross-platform play seems to be the most affected portion of the scenario. If you’re on PC, you can forget about connecting to someone on Xbox Series X|S or Xbox One. I ran into a somewhat similar scenario when I tried to play brave the dungeons of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands with a colleague.

The servers remain to be down for most of the time but occasionally go live…until they’re brought back down again. It’s total chaos for what appears to be the situation at the moment. 

At least, the one good thing about all this debacle is the developers taking responsibility. Gearbox Software is aware of the problems surrounding their latest IP and is frequently posting updates on their official SHiFT Status Twitter handle. 

However, even at that, the company’s fix roll-outs do not seem to faze the existential crisis that Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is currently in. They recently released a patch to fix problems related to the game’s online play, multiplayer, and cross-play. 

The developers prompted players to restart the game and try playing again. 

However, not long after that, the heap of players who started to jump in on the promised fun eventually got the game broken again. SHiFT Status posted another tweet that they’re “still working on mitigating the issues.” 

Up until now, not many have been lucky enough to experience the otherwise fantastic game world of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands online, including me. Moreover, it’s being said that the effects of incompetently built game servers are also protruding out to the offline portion of the game—as unusual as that sounds. 

According to a few Redditors, the game’s single-player campaign lags at certain points and attributes to a dismal experience basically. I wasn’t able to spot something similar on my end of the gameplay, and it isn’t clear why. Does this point toward a forced launch for a title that wasn’t thoroughly ready? You tell me.    

On a side note, though, If you’d like to play the game with your friends, for now, there is a workaround I found that can be approached. You can set up a LAN party with a dedicated VPN program on your Windows computer.

Speaking of which, this solution isn’t for consoles and can only be employed on PC. In addition, the fix also warrants that you have your friends connected to the same internet connection. 

The only way forward is to take a deep sigh and wait. I long for the day when anticipated games come out in a refined form, one that doesn’t necessitate hefty day-one updates or a flurry of issues exacerbating the overall experience. 

This is Matt Hunter from eXputer, a curious gamer expressing his due frustration over not being able to play Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands online.  

In Case You Missed It: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is the follow-up title to Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep. On its own, it’s a first-person looter-shooter RPG that’s loaded to the brim with the franchise’s usual craziness and mayhem-centric gameplay, not to mention the ingrained fantasy element.