Okay, so I’ve been digging into this whole Age of Empires cross-platform thing, and let me tell you, it’s been a bit of a journey. I wanted to play with my buddy who’s on Xbox, while I’m a PC gamer through and through. I first bought the game on Steam, thinking it would be easy to connect.
First Attempt: I fired up the game, went into the multiplayer settings, and… nothing. I looked everywhere to find how to invite my friend who was playing on his Xbox. I was hoping to see an option to add him using his Xbox Live gamertag or something. We both made sure that we had crossplay enabled in the options, but still, we couldn’t figure out how to join each other’s games. I spent hours searching for a solution, but everything I found was pretty vague.
- Bought Age of Empires on Steam.
- Enabled crossplay in the game settings.
- Couldn’t find an option to invite my Xbox friend.
- Searched online for solutions, but nothing concrete.
Second Attempt: After a lot of trial and error, I thought maybe it was a Steam issue. So I went ahead and got the game through the Microsoft Store, thinking it might work better since it’s all in the Microsoft ecosystem. I launched the game from there, and it felt a bit different, but the problem remained. I still couldn’t figure out how to connect with my friend on Xbox. It was super frustrating!
- Bought the game again, this time from the Microsoft Store.
- Hoped for better integration within the Microsoft ecosystem.
- Still couldn’t find a way to connect with my Xbox friend.
- Getting increasingly frustrated.
Figuring it Out: Finally, I stumbled upon some forum posts that mentioned something about Xbox Live. I did some more digging and realized I needed to enable “playing with people outside of Xbox Live” in my account settings. Turns out, this is a crucial step to crossplay.
- Discovered the need to enable “playing with people outside of Xbox Live.”
- Realized this was a key setting for crossplay.
The Solution!
So, I went into my Xbox account settings, found the option to play with people outside of Xbox Live, and enabled it. After restarting the game, I could finally see an option to invite my friend using his gamertag. We joined the same game, and it worked! We were finally playing Age of Empires together, despite being on different platforms.
It was a bit of a headache to get there, but we made it. So, if you’re trying to play Age of Empires across PC and Xbox, make sure you’ve got that “play with people outside of Xbox Live” setting enabled. It makes all the difference!
