Crossplay games—that is, games you can play online with people on consoles or platforms different than yours—are increasingly common but also increasingly fractured. Some games are available only in a couple of places, and it’s often unclear why some platforms are supported for crossplay and others aren’t.
Here, we rounded up the best games that work on the most gaming destinations as possible, so you can play with your friends and family across the globe. Interested in more gaming content? Check out our guides to the Best Gaming Headsets, Best Gamepad, Best Gaming Mouse, and Best Gaming Keyboard.
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The gold standard for crossplay might be one of the most obvious, but it’s worth calling out up top. Fortnite lets players from across Windows, Xbox One and Series X/S, PlayStation 4 and 5, Nintendo Switch, and Android all play with their friends, no matter which platform they’re on, as long as they’re friends via their Epic account. You can play on Mac or iOS, if you’ve already downloaded the app, though new players will be out of luck for the foreseeable future. The system sorts pools of players into a complexity hierarchy and defaults to the highest tier—so all your PC friends can’t queue for a game with mobile players and destroy them, for example—but if you want to bring your friend on an iPhone into a game on PlayStation, you can.
Fortnite developer Epic also owns and operates the Unreal Engine and a huge library of developer tools including the Epic Online Services platform. These tools let developers add similar crossplay functionality to their own games. We mention it here because you’ll see it pop up again. If you want to play games across gaming consoles or devices, you might end up with an Epic account eventually.
PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, Android
Microsoft-owned Mojang’s Minecraft is an odd paradox of crossplay. Players can join the same servers even as they play on different platforms, but they have to be using the same version. If you’ve been playing Minecraft since it came out, you may still be on the Java Edition, which can be played across Windows, Mac, and Linux devices.
Source link : wired