Gears 5 is now officially available worldwide and this is to remind you that the new installment fully supports cross-play functionality.
It doesn’t matter if you purchase the game on either Xbox One or PC. It also doesn’t matter if you conduct the purchase from either the Microsoft Store or Steam. Gears 5, by default, has cross-play enabled across the board. This means that you and your friends, regardless of their platforms, can play together online with ease and without jumping through any hoops.
There’s even support for cross-save, in case you have a copy of Gears 5 on both platforms and want to carry your save data between them. Should you create some custom maps in the Builder mode, they can also be shared across both platforms as well. The only thing you need to have is an active Xbox Live profile.
The Coalition has certainly thought of everything, including a remedy for console owners who don’t necessarily like the feature. There’s the old debate of desktop peripherals (mouse-keyboard) having an unfair advantage over controllers. Since cross-play is enabled by default, Xbox One players are likely to match against those on PC when going online. Such players can always opt out of the feature for ranked mode. Unfortunately, the same option is not available for the other modes.
It can’t be said enough how much work The Coalition has put into Gears 5. The new installment looks beautiful. It has both cross-play and cross-save. The storytelling is marvelous. It has pretty much everything that fans were expecting. Other developers should take note of this. Blizzard, for example, is still trying to make sense out of cross-play for Overwatch. Hopefully, someone at Blizzard will be playing Gears 5 in the coming days and realize how important cross-play and cross-save functionalities are these days.
