Shared Story Region Locked?

[Reapover]

My friend recently started the game and wanted to get the co-op trophy out of the way so she wouldn't have to worry about it anymore, so I agreed to help her. We sat down tonight, invited each other for like 30 minutes and every single time it would say it lost connection to the host so I thought to myself "well, the co-op is pretty buggy/unstable so maybe that's why, right" after a few more tries, she sat in the lobby I created for like 3 minutes before we lost connection again lol she's from a R3 country and I'm R1, so I'm assuming that's our issue, I know the PS4 is region free, but I guess games' online servers are not 🤔 or well, not all at least, because I haven't had this issue before with other games. Came here to ask because I just wanted reassurance that that's our issue and not something else lmao and I can't find anything about this specefic problem on this game online