Overwatch’s Cross-Play Beta is Now Live on PC and Console

Good news and bad news for Overwatch fans. The good news is that the cross-play beta, which allows players on both PC and console to play games together, is now live. The bad news is that several players are not happy about the apparent obliteration of regions in play, either. But either way, Overwatch has finally joined several of its multiplayer compatriots in offering cross-play to players. Fingers crossed Overwatch 2 has the feature as well.

Blizzard announced cross-play earlier this month in its usual developer update video, and it’s now rolled out to users on PC, Switch, Xbox One, and PS4. While competitive PC players and competitive console players will still be separated, for the most part, everyone will be able to play together. PC players will have cross-play enabled by default, while console players will be able to link to their Battle.net accounts.

Unfortunately, the roll-out hasn’t been without its issues. Apparently, along with this change, Blizzard has removed the ability for the player to manually swap their region. This means that, when it comes to matchmaking, players can be put on teams with players from very diverse regions. Blizzard has defended this change in an official statement, saying, “The simple answer is, you are placed into the best match based on a variety of factors including player skill and ping. Getting more technical, it’s because the regions themselves no longer exist (at least not in the way players traditionally understand them), so there is no region to swap to.”

In addition to cross-play, the patch adds an Ashe event, which adds a new skin for the titular hero and B.O.B. The patch notes also indicate that the recent and avoided player lists have been purged with the new changes. There have also been a handful of hero changes, which you can view on Overwatch’s site.

Source: GamesRadar