Finally, you can go dinosaur hunting in ARK: Survival Evolved (PC, PS4, and Xbox One) as a PC gamer along with your friends from Xbox One. The survival MMO is finally getting the long-awaited crossplay and the handy “Play Anywhere” feature.
Cross-platform play is a popular and unfortunately still far too rare feature in online games. The term means that you can not only play with people on your preferred platform. Rather, you meet players from other consoles and operating systems in crossplay games. So PC with Xbox One or Android together with iOS mobile games.
Already at E3 2017, crossplay between PC and Xbox One for the survival game ARK was announced. Now it is time.
Players on Windows 10 and Xbox One go dinosaur hunting together
Anyone who bought ARK on PC via the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 can now dive into the wild world of dinosaurs together with gamers on Xbox One. This should significantly increase the player pool of ARK.
Even better: Thanks to Microsoft’s “Play Anywhere” program, you only need to buy Ark on one platform. You will then receive the other version for free. Additionally, game saves, DLCs, achievements, and your gamerscore are synchronized across the versions. So you can play at will on one platform or the other without losing any progress.
Steam and PS4 players are out of luck
The crossplay and “Play Anywhere” feature, however, only truly apply between Xbox One and an Ark version purchased from the Windows 10 Microsoft Store.
If you own ARK: Survival Evolved “only” via Steam on PC, you cannot play it in crossplay. Not even if you have Windows 10 as your operating system. For crossplay with Xbox, only the version from the Microsoft Store counts. The same applies to players on PlayStation 4. Sony unfortunately still resists crossplay with PC or even Xbox One, citing “youth protection” among other reasons.
ARK: Survival Evolved is going psychedelic. In the new add-on, you can get high with magic mushrooms!
