Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Cross platform co-op

If I buy and play the game on Stadia (which is streamed) will I be able to play it with a friend who bought it from Steam and is playing it on his PC?

I don't think they've said anything about it so far, but I would imagine it would be the same as Divinity, where the PC platform didn't matter, you could join through a generated code.

Oh yeah? For example, when my three friends played DOS2 on PS4, I could have joined them on my PC?

Well no, like if you bought it on Steam or GOG you'd be able to join each other, rather than being restricted to Steam or GOG players. I'll admit I'm not very familiar with Stadia so I could just be adding to confusion, but my understanding is it's a PC platform that streams the game to your machine, right? So it's still technically the PC platform?

I just googled it, and no, Stadia is normally a closed multiplayer environment and it’s users can’t play with other PC gamers.

yeah I just did some research and it looks like I was mistaken, sorry for the confusion on that.

I figured we would not be able to mix PC with Stadia (much like I assumed with PC and PS4 ... never actually tried it). Since Stadia can be played on a PC too I thought maybe there was a chance. Oh well. Thanks for the feedback.

Technically speaking, the only requirement to get cross-platform games to work is that every participant has a reliable network connection with high enough bandwidth and low enough latency. But practically, it also requires the game developer to put in place a full suite of MP utilities within their game and public services to support them; so typically, developers go with whatever MP facilities each game platform supplies, and those services generally don't work together, by design.

One of the supposed advantages of Stadia ( or game streaming, in general ) is the fact that all the hardware running a MP game is located in the same data center, removing wide-area networking as a constraint on MP game complexity; but this also means that cross-platform MP games become less likely.

Swen seemed very positive about the MP potential of Stadia, although I have not seen anything about particular plans for BG3 on Stadia. But, perhaps when the game releases, there will be additonal features specific to Stadia.

I hope that anyone on any platform will be able multiplayer together, otherwise it would be prudent for Larien to clearly declare as soon as able any limitations with a player base on different platforms.

The default for the overwhelming majority of games is that cross-play is not a feature. Gamers know and expect this, so no games declare it. You only ever hear about cross-play in the rare times when it is available, and then it is usually predominantly advertised.

This isn't true. Stadia actively encourages crossplay, it's down to devs.