Is ARC Raiders Crossplay Compatible?

Since its release in October, ARC Raiders has enjoyed considerable success, bringing a fresh and accessible take on the extraction shooter and PvPvE genres. Much like Embark Studios’ previous game The Finals, ARC Raiders is best enjoyed with a full squad of friends, but what if you’re on different platforms?

Luckily, ARC Raiders has crossplay functionality, meaning that you can play with anyone, regardless of which platform they’re on. Enabling crossplay means that you’ll be joined by people on PC (regardless of which store you bought it from), Xbox Series X/S, and PS5. But only if they’ve enabled crossplay, too. Speaking of which:

Happily, ARC Raiders has one of the more intuitive UIs we’ve seen recently, so it’s a straightforward process. Note that the process is identical regardless of platform, which is fitting when you think about it.

• From the main menu, click the gear icon in the bottom right to open the settings menu

• Under the “Online” tab find the “Crossplay” setting and click the arrow to enable it.

• Return to the main menu and you’ll see “Crossplay: On” underneath the play button.

It’s worth noting here that at time of writing, there is no console-only crossplay option. This means that if you’re on Xbox and enable crossplay to play with someone on PS5 or verse vica, you will be opening yourself up to playing with PC users too. You cannot filter by platform.

We believe that crossplay as a concept has been a great innovation for multiplayer gaming. No one likes feeling left out and if you’re the lone console gamer in a group of PC gamers, crossplay bridges that platform gap fairly seamlessly.

Unfortunately, when it comes to competitive games, crossplay throws some inherent platform differences into sharp relief, which results in some debate as to whether you should enable it or not. Most of these debates are to do with aim assist and hacking.

Aim assist is a common feature of shooting games on console as it can mitigate the inherent inaccuracy that comes with using a controller compared to using a mouse on PC. Given that a mouse is far more precise, the PC version of games rarely come with this feature. However, sometimes the aim assist can be too strong, resulting in an unfair advantage towards the console players.

On the other hand, owing to the more open nature of PC gaming, it’s a lot easier to install hacks and aimbots on the PC version of games, so if the anticheat system in question isn’t up to snuff, then enabling crossplay can result in an unfair experience for the console players.

As a general rule, we like to keep crossplay disabled and only enable it when we actually need it to play with people on other platforms.