Apex Legends Cross-Play Beta Dates and Details Revealed

The Apex Legends team has revealed the dates and details for the game’s upcoming cross-play beta period.

“Since the launch of Apex Legends, cross-play has been one of the most requested features from our players who want the ability to play with their friends on other platforms,” reads a post on the Apex Legends blog. “During the cross-play beta, players will have full access to cross-play functionality while we collect data, test the feature at scale, and most importantly, listen to you, the fans, for feedback.”

Starting on October 6, players will be able to start forming parties consisting of players across the various Apex Legends supporting platforms (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Origin, and, soon, Steam). The option to group with players across various platforms will be enabled by default, so you should just be able to search for your friend’s username and add them to your party/friends list.

From there, the process is fairly standard. Players will (hopefully) be grouped together regardless of platform, and the game will indicate which platform each player is currently using. While Apex Legends will not enable cross-platform progression at the start of this beta period, you will be able to use in-game communication options to talk to your teammates regardless of which platform they’re using.

That said, the Apex Legends blog outlines a few “rules” for crossplay matchmaking that will be enabled at the start of the beta:

• 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 we 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.

As you can see, there’s no reference to the mobile version of Apex Legends, which is still seemingly in development. It’s possible that version of the game will eventually support cross-play, but we’ll just have to see how this concept evolves.