The Outriders demo is out for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Xbox One, PS4, and PC. And you don’t have to worry about where you play–Outriders supports cross-play between all its platforms, allowing you to connect with your friends wherever they decide to play. That said, you will have to complete a few steps in order to do cross-play multiplayer. Don’t worry; it’s not too hard to do.
First off, you can’t even engage in any form of multiplayer until you complete the prologue. The prologue concludes with the mission in which your character becomes fully Altered, allowing you to pick a class. Upon the completion of this mission, you’ll unlock the first hub area of Outriders, Rift Town. It’s here where you can start teaming up with other players.
You can either summon players to your game or join someone else’s. To do either, you need to access the matchmaking terminal in Rift Town’s garage or click on the “Join A Random Team” or “Play With Friends” buttons from the Lobby. On default settings, you will be limited to only teaming up with others on your platform.
To enable cross-play, you first need to go to Options. Navigate to the Gameplay tab and scroll down to “Enable Crossplay.” Switch it from “Off” to “On.” And that’s it. If you haven’t done this already, you won’t be able to engage in cross-play multiplayer from Outriders’ Lobby; you’ll instead need to first boot up the game and then adjust these settings.
Now when you go to matchmaking, you’ll see options to “Generate Your Game Code” and “Join Using A Game Code” under the cross-play section. Clicking the first option will produce a code that your friends on other platforms will need to input to join your game, while clicking on the second will allow you to input a code that you get from a friend to join their game.
As an added note: on the Gameplay settings page, you can also change your Default Game Privacy. It will begin as “Open,” which means anyone can join your game if they click on the “Join A Random Team” option from Rift Town’s matchmaking garage terminal or the Lobby. If you don’t want strangers just popping into your game, you can change this setting to “Friends Only” or “Closed.” The former means that only your connections on your chosen platform (for example, all of your Xbox friends if you’re playing on Xbox Series X|S or Xbox One) can jump into your game without getting prior permission. The latter means that no one can get in without an invite.
After the prologue, Outriders fully supports cross-play multiplayer, so you can play through the entire campaign solo, with a team, or a mix of both. If the demo is any indication, you will be able to play through the game on your own without too much trouble, though how easy that will be will largely depend on which character class you pick. So be smart: you can change your character’s appearance whenever you want, but once you pick a class, you’re stuck with it.
It’s worth noting that cross-play support is currently in beta for the Outriders demo. So you may run into a few connection issues while using cross-play. We assume cross-play support will be ironed out and completely ready to go by the time Outriders officially launches on April 1, but we don’t know that for sure.
GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.
