On Tuesday, October 6 the Aftermarket Collection Event for Apex Legends will kick off. This update will include a lot of new content including a new LTM called Flashpoint, new event cosmetics, free rewards for playing, and more. Perhaps the biggest addition and inclusion with this update will be the launch of a cross-play beta.
When this beta launches, players will be able to party up and play together across all currently selected platforms. These platforms include a PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Origin. Yes, it will also include Steam on PC once that version of the game launches.
Cross-platform play is enabled by default. You can optional disable it within the game. Xbox One owners will also have a similar setting on a system level outside of the game.
- To add a friend on any platform, go to the friends menu and click “Find Friendâ€. 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.
- 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.