The newly released, quickly popular, free to play battle royale confirms cross-platform play.
When Respawn released Apex Legends, one of the first questions was whether or not cross-platform play would be at the forefront of their development cycle. In the Fortnite, age of super popular game kind of superseding platforms, cross-platform play is much more achievable.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with what cross-platform play means, it basically means if you’re on PS4 you could play with your friends on Xbox. Or if you’re on Xbox you could play with PC players. The point is player enablement beyond the restrictions that a platform usually forces players into.
Since Apex Legends is available for free on all major platforms, the expectation and need for cross-platform play is exponentially heightened. Thankfully, Respawn has confirmed that it indeed does have plans to allow players to play with others on different platforms.
Respawn told Eurogamer it “plans to allow players to play with their friends on other platforms”. Cross-progress and cross-purchases, however, will never be possible in Apex Legends, “due to the way systems were set up early on” which “can’t [be] reconciled after the fact”.
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Since we’re in the infant stages of Apex Legends it remains to be seen how often they plan on patching the game and adding features. My initial thoughts are that they’ll be somewhere in between Fornite’s weekly updates and Call of Duty’s sporadic updates.
The biggest obstacle in the way for Apex Legends to be truly cross-platform is, shocker, the platforms themselves. Specifically, Sony will probably be the pain in everyone’s side. We have to hope since they did plan this release for so long, Respawn is already deep in discussion with the platforms about enabling cross-platform play.
Until we know the dates for sure from Respawn, the best observation we have is that cross-platform play will happen before summer hits. That’s if it’s based on a typical game development cycle, which who knows how that actually works in the new free battle royale meta.
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