Back around E3 time, or what was supposed to be E3 time anyway, Respawn Entertainment revealed that Apex Legends is coming to Nintendo Switch. The company also revealed that ahead of the Switch launch, Apex Legends will also see the addition of cross-play. While cross-play has been controversial for various reasons, it’s still generally a strong demand and selling point for multiplatform games in 2020. We don’t have more officially-released details yet, but as usual the datamining community has many of the details out in spite of that.
Cross-Play in Apex Legends: What we Know
As we proceed here, keep in mind that this is datamined information from a recent update, and that none of it is guaranteed to be 100% accurate once cross-play is officially rolled out. That said, as is the case with most datamined leaks, there’s no reason to be suspicious of deliberate misinformation here. The source of this information is “Shrugtal,” who has a solid reputation in the community. Here’s what they had to say.
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First of all, some basic structural coding was found. This includes social features like cross-play chatrooms, presumably allowing for players across platforms to interact at more than a superficial level. It also reveals that cross-play will be associated with an EADP, or Electronic Arts Digital Platform account. This is similar to how Activision governs Call of Duty cross-play, so there’s no surprise there. The data also includes a UI overhaul, changing how the social features work in Apex Legends significantly.
We also might have a release date! The datamining community appears to be dead set on September 15, 2020 as the rollout date for cross-play in Apex Legends. This is associated with the timing of an upcoming collection event, which the dataminers suspect is the cross-play rollout point instead of waiting for season 7. But that seems to be conjecture or educated guessing rather than direct evidence of the date. Content creators, however, also seem to be on board with that date, and that crowd is usually privy to information well ahead of time.
More on the mysterious Clubs feature was found, and based on what the dataminers saw it seems like Clubs, which was accidentally shown during an official livestream, has something to do with cross-play matchmaking.
That’s about all we have so far! Of course, there usually isn’t much more than that when it comes to cross-play. One key item we’re wondering if we’ll see is the ability to turn cross-play off, which has gained popularity recently due to hackers in games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. But if this September 15 thing turns out to be on target, we’ll all know soon enough.
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Are you looking forward to cross-play in Apex Legends? Are you still just waiting for the Switch version? Or are you going to turn it off if the option is available? Let us know what you think over at the Prima Games Facebook and Twitter channels!
