Ah nice! Not that I'd ever do it, have you tried dual hand crossbows? Does it literally give you two ranged attacks per turn?
No, I haven't actually had two hand spare crossbows to try it out. However, I have seen somewhere that it DOES give you the ranged offhand attack bonus action if you dual wield them. However, this is problematic from a 5e standpoint, primarily because crossbows need to be reloaded after every shot, which requires a free hand. In other words, you cannot effectively dual wield hand crossbows for more than a single turn. Note that this restriction still applies even if you are using a melee weapon + hand crossbow or hand crossbow + shield.
I noticed that crossbows have a "loading" property in its description. Is that implemented at all in the game? I'm trying to figure out if there is any real difference between bows and crossbows, outside of damage.
I think so; but this doesn't really affect things in EA all that much. "Loading" does two things:
1. Restricts the number of times that weapon can attack per round to 1.
2. Requires a free hand for the weapon to be usable again the next turn.
The former doesn't really matter in EA since the only way to get multiple attacks is through something like Action Surge, which you can't use more than once in an encounter, even if you rest after each encounter. The latter matters to the extent that it restricts dual wield and weapon-and-shield combos when using crossbows, but since you can freely switch between melee and ranged on a whim, as Postwave mentioned, this doesn't really matter either (you can use a weapon+shield or dual wield melee in the melee slots and use a single crossbow in the ranged slot, and switch to melee to get the AC bonus or to make offhand attacks).
