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Halo Wars 2 will get cross-play this month

Halo Wars 2

Halo Wars was conceived largely as an attempt to make RTS titles work on console, and it was pretty successful on that front. But that doesn’t mean the game wouldn’t hit that genre’s native platform, and Halo Wars 2 launched across both PC and Xbox One on the same date earlier this year. While it was a cross-buy title on Microsoft’s storefront, it didn’t feature cross-play, leaving consoles and PC in separate online player pools.

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That’ll be changing soon, 343 Industries have announced. Cross-play for the Xbox and Windows 10 version of the game will be coming in the next update, which is expected to release late this month. It’ll certainly be interesting to see if a bigger population of keyboard and mouse players have a significant advantage over those on controller, a concern that’s normally limited to shooters.

Halo Wars 2 will also soon offer support for Xbox Arena, offering an easy way for players to conduct online tournaments.

“Crossplay has been a passion project for the team and frankly was something we weren’t sure would be feasible to incorporate at this stage in the game’s development,” reads 343’s official announcement. “The team has worked hard to deliver this feature and final testing indicates it’s ready for release into the wild.”

That gels with what we had previously heard about cross-play for the game. It was announced before launch that Halo Wars 2 wouldn’t feature cross-play, but later we heard the team were looking into it – until they weren’t, of course. But then they were after all, so happy ending.