Gears of War 4 gets unranked cross-platform multiplayer on Xbox One and W10

Microsoft has introduced cross-platform multiplayer between Xbox One and Windows with Gears of War 4. Players on both platforms can now compete against each other in unranked social quick play matches. Those are matches that do not affect player rankings.

Microsoft had been testing the functionality for some time and has now decided to make it public. This is especially good news for the players of the Windows version. The company indicates that on average 91 out of 100 players played on the Xbox One in the test phase. In other words, less than ten percent plays on Windows. Without cross-platform multiplayer, this group would have a harder time finding gamers to play with.

The Core and Competitive elements will not be cross-platform compatible. “While the performance of players on the two platforms is very close, we want to keep the competitions as fair as possible,” Microsoft said. The company has other plans for Core and Competitive on Windows 10, but they are not being disclosed at this time.

Microsoft announced the plans at the 2016 E3 game show as part of the Xbox Play Anywhere program. This means that gamers who purchase a game published by Microsoft digitally can play it on Xbox One and Windows, provided the game has been released for both platforms. Save games and achievements are also synced. Multi-platform play is also possible thanks to Play Anywhere, but that must be enabled per game. That is now the case for Gears of War 4.