Listen, I’m not the biggest fan of Fortnite, but I have to give it respect for accelerating cross-platform support in the industry. There were only a few rare exceptions before Epic Games bullied Sony, Microsoft, and even Nintendo into tearing down their walled gardens around online play and opened the floodgates. Now, every notable multiplayer game is expected to have cross-platform support for all consoles and PC.
That’s the way it always should’ve been and it’s a little embarrassing it took this long.
Still, better late than never, right? We can now look forward to playing games like Battlefield 6 and Black Ops 7 online together, regardless of platform. But there’s one thing that hasn’t become a standard feature in cross-platform games that needs to be adopted to make it a perfect system.
Keyboard and mouse vs. controller
We’re almost 10 years into cross-platform gaming being mainstream, yet there are still plenty of growing pains. Not all games have full cross-platform support, either only having partial crossplay options or not having any cross-progression functionality. We’re getting better as an industry, but we do still need to confirm for each individual game, especially now that we’re straddling generations with the Switch and Switch 2. For the majority of gamers, the only part that really matters is full crossplay support.
And I totally agree. Crossplay is what most people mean when they say cross-platform. But this is a double-edged sword, and not all games offer players the tools to have the best experience with it.
We just learned that Battlefield 6 will not have the distinction to turn crossplay off between consoles and PC — it’s either on or it’s off. This is becoming a bigger and bigger deal for several reasons, but the biggest has to be one platform having an unfair advantage over the others based on its control scheme.
By and large, FPS games are best played on keyboard and mouse setups. The mouse simply offers far more precision than a thumbstick, and there are so many ways to tailor your controls with additional mouse buttons and keybinds. Games attempt to level the playing field by giving controller players more aim assist, but that’s a fine line between too little and tipping the scales in the opposite direction. It never feels good to lose a gunfight or match because the other team can do things you simply can’t.
It isn’t completely one-sided, though. There are some games where a traditional controller offers an advantage. Games where various levels of movement are involved, like stealth games, are far more intuitive using an analogue stick to smoothly transition through walking, jogging, running, and sprinting. PC players do have the luxury of being able to use any console controller as well, while console owners have a limited selection of games that support keyboard and mouse. Skill will win out at the end of the day, but certain games favor one control method with a higher skill ceiling.
Getting outgunned by a PC player with keyboard and mouse isn’t fun, but nothing is worse than encountering cheaters. Sad to say, but cheating is almost exclusive to PC games. It is possible to hack a console to cheat, and it does happen, but it is typically a much more complicated process than on PC. Each game does its best to scrub cheaters from the game, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole where new cheats and exploits are constantly being found to get around the fixes. And the bigger the game, the bigger the cheating community will be.
The solution to all these issues has already been found: console-only crossplay. A number of games offer full crossplay, console-only crossplay, and no crossplay options so that anyone who is worried about cheaters or feels like PC players have too much of an advantage can remove that platform from the pool. If it is a cheating issue, this gives console players a way to keep enjoying the game in a safe environment until the issue is resolved.
Cross-platform play is low-key the most important innovation in gaming since online play became a thing. Being arbitrarily segregated based on what system we owned, even when playing the exact same game, was beyond silly. But we didn’t account for what advantages one platform has over another at a base level. We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, here; just give players the option to limit what platforms they want to crossplay with. Now that cross-platform support is essentially universal, making this final option standard across the board will make it perfect.
