Remember when Blizzard was teasing a special announcement for Overwatch? As of this afternoon, we finally know what it is: cross-play. It’s a move the company is making in tandem with the big Battle.net update we noted earlier. There’s no hard date yet, just the typical “soon,” with a beta ahead of whenever soon is.
“Cross-Play is coming to Overwatch soon, allowing players to group up and play together. Powered by the latest global Battle.net update, players from around the world can team up, regardless of their preferred platform*. With the release of cross-play, all players will need to make a Battle.net account and link their appropriate console accounts. With the launch of Cross-Play, everyone who logs in to Overwatch by the end of 2021 will receive a Golden Loot Box to celebrate.”
If you’re a console player, you’ll need to roll up a Battle.net account and link it to your console account, even if you have no interest in crossplay. PC players can kick back and eat a sandwich or something since they’ve already got one.
Blizzard does note that if you swap back and forth between your PC and console play, your progress and collection content won’t carry over. While stats and ranks won’t reset with the launch, the studio will maintain separate leaderboards for each platform, including crossplay-disabled console folks (and yes, you can disable it partially, so you can team up only with fellow Switch players who also have the same settings, for example). However, you might want to consider that enabling crossplay will likely lower your queue times. Finally, crossplay won’t be enabled for competitive games, as those players will continue being split up “for balance purposes.”
