Many players these days take advantage of cross-play features in their preferred online games. Fall Guys and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are two excellent first-person shooters and party games that make good use of this functionality, which is standard on most modern platforms.
However, what if you’d prefer not to engage in system-based competition with others? Owners of the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S are in luck, as Microsoft has enabled the option to disable cross-play permanently.
In this manner, you can save the trouble of having to adjust the feature for every game you play. So, how exactly does one disable crossplay on an Xbox, and what exactly is crossplay? We’ll have to see.
What is Crossplay Gaming?
Regardless of platform or console, crossplay enables gamers from disparate gaming platforms to join each other’s games and play online. In general, cross-platform gaming enables more players to participate in online games. For gamers, this means speedier matchmaking and a less constrained online social experience.
The majority of games that support cross-platform gameplay will use personal information, such as your email address, to track your success in-game. Crossplay-enabled games let you advance in a game through any supported platform by utilizing these details across platforms, similar to an individual account.
Likewise, you are able to play versus players on different platforms universally. This generates a massive player base for games like Fortnite, which are accessible on almost every platform you can imagine. Crossplay gaming does have a lot of advantages, but it also has a lot of disadvantages, and often the benefits seem unneeded.
When utilizing a controller versus PC players that use a mouse, you might even be at a direct disadvantage if you’re playing a first-person shooter on a console and you join PC players. In some cases, especially if you’re using a system like the Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S, you might want to disable cross-play gaming.
How Do You Disable Crossplay on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S?
To avoid any issues when playing games on other platforms on your Xbox, you can stop crossplay globally by following these steps:
- To access the guidance menu, press the Xbox button on your controller.
- After you locate the Profile & System settings, navigate right and choose Settings.
- Choose Online Safety & family from the settings under the General tab.
- Choose Privacy & online safety from this menu.
- From the options that are provided, choose Xbox privacy.
- After your privacy settings appear, choose View details & adjust.
- Select Communication & Multiplayer to view your console’s online preferences.
- Change the Allow to Block selection under the You can join cross-network play setting.
Any game that tries to pair you up with online players from other platforms won’t be able to as the preference for cross-network play has been restricted, and crossplay will be permanently turned off on your Xbox.
You can choose to welcome or refuse players from other platforms on Xbox so that you can embrace cross-platform play without any issues. Your Xbox still offers a ton of tools for interacting socially online with other platforms, even if you decide not to play games with them. This is true even if you decide to disable crossplay and all of its social perks.
What Are the Benefits and Drawbacks of Crossplay?
Crossplay has both advantages and disadvantages, depending on your preferences and the type of game you are playing. Here are some of the benefits and drawbacks of crossplay:
Benefits
After discussing some of the disadvantages of cross-play gaming, let’s examine some of its advantages that enhance your gaming experience.
Cross-Play Gaming Reduces Matchmaking Times: The ability to play on various platforms greatly increases the number of players that can be active at any given time. This implies that compared to searching without cross-play, the time it takes to find a game when playing online should be significantly less.
When cross-play is enabled, you are essentially permitting the majority of a game’s player base to play alongside you. However, if it’s disabled, the pool of players who can be matched only consists of those who use the same gaming platform. As a result, if cross-play gaming is allowed, it should significantly reduce your online loading times.
Cross-Play Gaming Breaks Down Social Barricades: The ability to extend your social gaming experience outside of your platform is the most apparent advantage that cross-play gaming will offer. You can play with pals regardless of any platform limitations that might otherwise apply thanks to cross-play.
This broadens the pool of people you may play games with and lessens the financial burden associated with the social side of gaming. You can play with your pals by using cross-play features regardless of whether you buy a new platform or an entire console. The social aspect of cross-play is by far its greatest advantage; it fosters a sense of community and accessibility in gaming.
Drawbacks
There are a few disadvantages to cross-play gaming, and not all is as it seems when it comes to playing with other players online from different gaming platforms. Let’s examine this.
Cross-Play Gaming Is Unbalanced by Nature: There are inevitable repercussions and disadvantages when matching gamers online from different gaming platforms. Most severely, if you play a game with players on both PCs and consoles, you can encounter biases that work against you on a console or in your favor on a PC.
Comparing playing with a keyboard and mouse vs a controller, there are clear advantages. You can react more quickly with a mouse, especially when aiming, and you can customize gameplay mechanics using a keyboard to fit your preferred playing style. As I just said, a controller has slower analog sticks and binding possibilities, making it more constrictive.
When both PC and console players participate in a cross-play match, PC players have a clear advantage over console players if they use a mouse and keyboard. Your game may be skewed for or against you if you play with people from PCs or consoles.
This can make an online game completely unbalanced, a problem already made worse by battle pass systems, which change how you play games in the modern gaming world.
Cross-Play Creates a More Competitive Online Environment: An additional concern regarding the gameplay aspect of cross-play features is the increasing focus on competition in games, irrespective of whether they are casual or ranked. Your online experience has to be skill-based to account for the skill-level or setup biases of platforms like PC due to problems with online balancing with cross-play titles.
If you want to play a non-competitive game, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, cross-play will still place you with gamers who share your skill level. You always run the risk of having players with clear platform biases disrupt your online experience if a cross-play game doesn’t use skill-based matchmaking.
Consequently, in order to enable cross-play, one must almost always be grouped according to skill when looking for an online game, which fosters competition. Turn off cross-play on your game or console if you’re seeking for an online game where you don’t have to play against other players.
You might also like to know about if these other games are cross-platform or not: Is Monopoly Plus Cross Platform? and Is Granblue Fantasy Relink Crossplay? We appreciate your interest in our website! Make Gameempress.com your go-to site for gaming information.