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Blizzard Entertainment announced today that Overwatch is adding crossplay support, meaning that players will be able to enjoy the game together no matter which platform they’re playing on. A beta for the feature is live now.
Overwatch is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Now a PC player will be able to play with someone on Switch, or an Xbox Series X user can compete with a PlayStation 5 owner. All combinations will be possible.
However, this does not mean that the game is getting cross-progression. You won’t suddenly see your PC cosmetics and player stats on Xbox.
On consoles, crossplay is going to necessitate that those players link their Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo accounts with a Battle.net ID. Crossplay will work for all game modes except for Competitive. There, players will either go into a PC or console pool. Competitive is a ranked mode, and using a mouse and keyboard is typically an advantage over playing with gamepads for shooters like Overwatch.
Blizzard is working on Overwatch 2 right now. It’s nice to see it add crossplay ahead of the launch for the sequel. Along with making it possible for people to play with friends across different platforms, the larger player pool should help make match queues go faster.
This new feature could also help bring some life back to Overwatch, which hasn’t gotten much in the way of new content lately while Blizzard develops the sequel.
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