Although, there was some issues a couple days after launch and they paused the mandatory linking. They are just now reimplenting it after fixing the issue it seems.
I played it without psn account so my experience is different from what you say. If in the first 2 hours I would have walked into this as a hard block I would have stopped and refunded.
Same is true for people unable to make a psn account but cannot because their country is not supported.
So while they indicated a 3rd party account it was not a hard requirement. If they would have shown all users a message clearly explaining that a psn account linking will be a hard requirement at some point… so better already do it… they might have had a better chance… but for me I disabled cross play in the first week also because the playstation players where insufferable mostly and it caused issues during gameplay.
Since January it’s been a requirement and has been listed on the steam store page
Although, there was some issues a couple days after launch and they paused the mandatory linking. They are just now reimplenting it after fixing the issue it seems.
I played it without psn account so my experience is different from what you say. If in the first 2 hours I would have walked into this as a hard block I would have stopped and refunded.
Same is true for people unable to make a psn account but cannot because their country is not supported.
So while they indicated a 3rd party account it was not a hard requirement. If they would have shown all users a message clearly explaining that a psn account linking will be a hard requirement at some point… so better already do it… they might have had a better chance… but for me I disabled cross play in the first week also because the playstation players where insufferable mostly and it caused issues during gameplay.