It’s been five years since Blizzard unleashed one of the most popular multiplayer titles of all time in Overwatch. Since then the game, or franchise at this point, has only expanded to transcend pop culture status, making it one of the most marketable titles in existence. Even though the company is at work with the next entry, Overwatch 2, they haven’t forgotten about the current iteration that is still being played by millions around the world. With that in mind, the company has officially announced that Overwatch will be getting cross-play support between PC and console players, with a beta coming soon.
The plan for cross-play was outlined by Game Director Aaron Keller, who pointed out that those who are looking to join this new venture will have to create and link up a Battle.net account with their respective system. For those who don’t know, Battle.net is Blizzard’s proprietary game launcher for all PC Blizzard titles. Those in the PC community are extremely familiar with this, but for the home console players, this might be the very first time they actually make their own account.
Other tidbits that Keller went over include keeping your progression over if you were to play your account on PC instead of your respective console, and vice versa. Unfortunately, you will not be able to do this as the progression of experience and cosmetics will stay on whichever system you unlocked it on. Things that will not be affected by cross-play include stats and rankings in competitive. However, there will be separate leaderboards for PC and consoles.
This is a most welcome feature that will more than likely increase the overall player base for the title. It will also benefit those who find the wait time for matches to be a little longer than they’d like, as this opens the matchmaking possibilities up by a mile. Other major online titles use cross-play already, to varying degrees of success. This includes Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and the ever-popular Fortnite. It’s also possible that Blizzard will implement this into Overwatch 2, although we’ll have to wait and see if that comes to pass.