Outriders is a new cooperative shooter from People Can Fly and Square Enix. Its entire campaign can be played solo if you’d prefer, but half the fun is running around with two other players as you tear through hundreds of foes — gathering loot and improving your skills along the way. To that end, People Can Fly has given Outriders a robust multiplayer system that allows for cross-platform support.
However, there’s a bit more to it than just clicking Join a Random Game and jumping into the action. Before setting off on your co-op adventures, here’s everything you need to know about cross-play in Outriders.
Further reading
- Outriders review: Thrilling action makes up for a flat sci-fi story
- The best weapon mods in Outriders
- 8 essential tips for starting out in Outriders
Does Outriders include cross-platform support?
In short — yes. Outriders supports cross-platform play, letting you dive into matches with players on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. Whether you’re playing on a last-gen or current-gen platform, you’ll be able to play Outriders with folks on all available systems. You can be playing on PS5, one of your friends can be running it on their old Xbox, and another can be using their gaming PC, and you’ll all still be able to join the same lobby.
Outriders’ cross-platform play is currently offline
Unfortunately, Square Enix had to turn off cross-play support mere hours after release. On launch day, Outriders was riddled with server issues. In fact, servers went down altogether for several hours, preventing anyone from playing Outriders at all. Square Enix eventually fixed a portion of the problem, although it still has some lingering issues with cross-play.
As of April 8, the team at Square Enix is yet to fully reimplement cross-play. For now, console players can only play with others on consoles, and PC players can only play with those on PC. Apparently, the game will need to be patched across all platforms before full cross-play support is fixed — something People Can Fly is hoping to implement next week.
How to turn off cross-play
If you’d rather not play with users on other platforms, Outriders gives you the option to toggle off cross-play. We highly recommend leaving this turned on — you’ll have a larger pool of players to group with, cutting down your wait time — but turning it off is simple.
After logging in, open the main menu. From there, scroll down until you see the Enable Cross-play option and switch it to Off. You’ll now only be playing with others on your system of choice.
Is Stadia Stream Connect cross-platform?
Stadia Stream Connect is an impressive new feature that lets Stadia players broadcast their screen to others in their party. It appears as a small window at the corner of your HUD, giving you a glimpse into what your team is seeing. This is a great feature that pushes communication and cooperation to the next level — instead of guessing where your teammate is asking you to go, you can simply look at their screen to get a better indication.
Unfortunately, this feature is limited to Stadia users. That means you won’t be able to broadcast your PS5 game to Xbox Series X players, or vice versa. Still, it’s a huge leap forward for cooperative shooters — and we hope to see it more in the future.
What about cross-progression?
While Outriders is incredibly cross-play friendly, the same can’t be said for cross-progression. If you’re currently playing on Xbox One and decide you’d like to pick up a PS5, you won’t be able to transfer your progress. However, if you stay in the same family of consoles — that is, Xbox One to Series X or PS4 to PS5 — you’ll be able to use your old save file without issue.
It’s a bit of a bummer that true cross-progression isn’t supported, but at least you won’t lose your progress if you upgrade your current console. Fans are also bugging People Can Fly about the lack of cross-progression, asking for it to be added with a future update, but there’s currently no plan to upgrade the feature.