Apex Legends is finally getting crossplay for all platforms: Here's how it will work

Apex Legends is finally getting crossplay for all platforms — testing starts October 6
(Image credit: Respawn Entertainment)

Respawn Entertainment announced that crossplay would be finally coming to the game, allowing Xbox One, PS4 and PC players to play together. The beta will start on October 6.

The development team went into detail on their blog to talk about how it works and what precautions they're taking to make everything a level playing field or at least, as level as possible, as implementing cross-play isn't an exact science.

How crossplay will work in Apex Legends

At the start of the beta, Crossplay will be enabled by default, so you'll have to manually turn it off if you don't want to participate (although, you should, because it helps the developers gather more data).

If you want to add a friend on any platform, you have to go to the friends menu, click "Find Friend" and you'll be able to search for a user name on any platform and send friend request. The photo displayed seemed to indicate that you can come across two different people with the same name on different platforms but it would identify which platform is which.

You'll be able to view all of your friends in the friends menu and see what platform they're playing on based on the icon displayed. Additionally, cross platform parties are available via in-game voice chat.

The actual matchmaking will work like this: consoles players will play with console players and PC players will play with PC players. If there's at least one PC player in a group, then the group will join PC matchmaking. You won't see any PC players join console matchmaking.

Respawn Entertainment clarified that cross-play does not mean cross-progression, so you can't jump from platform to platform, but they wrote that, "we will talk more about this at our Steam launch later in the year."

Rami Tabari
Editor

Rami Tabari is an Editor for Laptop Mag. He reviews every shape and form of a laptop as well as all sorts of cool tech. You can find him sitting at his desk surrounded by a hoarder's dream of laptops, and when he navigates his way out to civilization, you can catch him watching really bad anime or playing some kind of painfully difficult game. He’s the best at every game and he just doesn’t lose. That’s why you’ll occasionally catch his byline attached to the latest Souls-like challenge.