Future Crossplay?

[BlackBurn]

Will Risk of Rain 2 become cross platform with Xbox and PC in the future? or is it out of the question?

[Krull]

Without being an expert, I believe cross platform coding is pretty tough for what it is, but as the multiplayer is p2p, that might alleviate the challenge slightly. Right now the multiplayer utilizes the respective APIs for each platform it is released on, which for example allows you to invite a friend on Steam to your lobby. Some of the coding is more or less already done, as you can search up this stuff on Google, whereas you would have to create more of the code yourself for cross platform multiplayer. For cross platform play, I think you would need a master server as well with the ids of every player searching for games, and this would of course need maintenance.

If you would like to play private games with another console player, that would probably require linking your respective Steam, Xbox or PS accounts to your local RoR2 player profiles and then have the ability to manage an in-game friends list, so as to save your Xbox or PS friends. If this was to be implemented, they could more or less just scrap the entirety of the local APIs as they would have to write it all up from scratch by themselves.

There might be easier ways to code this, but with my miniscule programming experience, this is the most appropriate way to do it, that I could imagine.

On top of requiring a lot of code work, I can also see potential problems in how quick play handles mods. PC players can more or less do whatever they want with the game in quick play using mods or tampering with tools, whereas console players would have no way to do the same, as far as I know. Console players would likely want to play without PC players in their quick matches.

I'm all for cross platform play, but I think there would be quite a lot of work in it for what it's worth. My opinion might be biased by the fact that I primarily play singleplayer.