EA recently announced Cross-play coming to Apex Legends in the recent Aftermarket event announcement. But sadly we will not be getting any form of Cross progression.
EA recently announced the Apex Legends Aftermarket event in a blog post on its official website. We also got information about Cross-play beta coming to Apex Legends. But sadly we will not be getting any kind of Cross-Progression system with the introduction of Cross-play. Players have been asking for the Cross-play feature in Apex Legends for a long time now and EA is finally going to deliver.
How Cross-play Works:
The Cross-play Beta will be launching on October 6th. We will not get the final version of Cross-play during its initial launch. There will be a Beta version of Cross-play before it’s the final release. Players will have full access to all the features during the Beta version and EA will collect data, test the feature at scale, and make changes according to feedback. Here is how the Cross-play feature will work according to EA-
- Players will be able to party up and play together across all currently supported platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Origin (Steam too once it launches!).
- Cross-platform play is enabled by default. Unless you’ve changed it, you should be good to go! Xbox One also contains a similar setting in the system settings, outside of the game, that must be enabled. More on this setting later.
- To add a friend on any platform, go to the friends menu and click “Find Friend”. You’ll be able to search for a user name on any platform and initiate a friend request.
- The invited user will receive a notification in the lobby to accept, reject, or block the incoming friend request. Blocking a friend request will not only reject the request, but also prevent you from seeing additional cross-play invitations or requests in the future from that user. You can find and unblock users from inside the find friends menu.
- You can view all friends in the friends menu and which platform they’re on, indicated with a platform icon. If you’re on a console, friends on the same platform will be marked with a Playstation or Xbox icon depending which platform you’re on, and players on the other brand console will be indicated by a generic gamepad icon. In this example image, the user is playing on the Xbox One, so the first friend who is also on Xbox One has an Xbox icon, the second friend is on Playstation 4 but represented with a generic gamepad icon. The third friend is a PC player.
- Once friends, you can initiate a game invite via the friends menu. For cross-platform party invites, the party invitation will appear in the lobby screen and allow you to join the party. Same platform party invites will continue to use the default notifications as before, ie Origin game invites, or Xbox notification.
- Cross-platform parties can use in-game voice chat.
- Cross-play does not mean cross-progression. While we do believe this is a valuable feature, it’s unfortunately not available for Apex Legends at this time. However, we will talk more about this at our Steam launch later in the year.
Here I will explain the above points in short. Basically, you can play with all other platforms that are currently supported. Steam will also be supported once Apex Legends is released on Steam.
Cross-Platform play will be enabled by default. If you want to turn Cross-play off then you need to do it manually from settings. Players can add other platform friends simply by typing their usernames. The game itself will search among all platforms for the username.
You can either accept, reject, or block other players’ invitations. If you block a cross-platform invite then you can’t see any future invite from that particular user. You can see which friend is on which platform denoted by symbols beside their name.
Cross-platform parties will be able to use the voice chat. There will be no cross-progression available. That means you cannot play on the same account on different platforms.
How Cross-Play Matchmaking Works:
EA also explained how the matchmaking will commence once Cross-play comes out.
- Before cross-play, each platform would only play with and against other users on the same platform. Now, all console players will play together, and PC players will continue to play only with other PC players. We want to ensure that keyboard and mouse PC players are not being matched against console players, for reasons that should be obvious.
- If, however, an Xbox One or Playstation 4 player and PC player party up together, they will be put into PC matches. This ensures that the console games don’t have PC players in them, but still allows for the console player to play with their PC friend if they opt-in.
- Now, about that setting, I mentioned earlier. If you wish to disable cross-play altogether, you can disable cross-platform play in the settings menu. Doing so will only put you into matches with other users on the same platform, who have also disabled cross-platform play. This has a high chance of making your queue times very very long, as we anticipate that most users will have cross-play enabled given its default state of ‘enabled’ and the requests for the feature from so many players. We highly recommend leaving cross-platform play enabled to ensure the best experience possible.
After Cross-play goes live all console players will be matchmade into the same lobby. PC players will be matched with other PC players to avoid any unfair advantage. If a console player decides to party up with a PC player they will be matchmade in a PC lobby.
If you disable Cross-play then you will be matched with other users who have also disabled Cross-play. As the Cross-play setting will be on by default the number of players who have it off will be significantly low. This means that if you decide to keep Cross-play off then your queue time will be extremely long.
This could make it so that players are forced to keep Cross-play on to be able to get into matches.
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