Exoprimal has crossplay, but there's a big catch

Capcom is trying to court players of all stripes to its dino shooter Exoprimal—or at least, every type of player with a passing interest in blowing up thousands of dinosaurs. The game is available on Steam, Game Pass, and Xbox and PlayStation consoles, offers a mix of PvE and PvP, and after beta test feedback opted to add a PvE-only mode. Capcom also wants players to be able to compete with one another across platforms, so Exoprimal does have crossplay—but it's unfortunately missing a pretty key feature.

While players on PC and consoles can race to kill the most dinosaurs, they can't party up. Worse, if you're playing Exoprimal on Steam, you can't group up with friends playing on PC Game Pass, even though you're both on PC.

Here's how Exoprimal's slightly confusing crossplay setup works.

In a tweet on July 7, Capcom wrote that "On day one, Exoprimal will support cross-platform matchmaking, but party creation will be specific to each platform ecosystem."

Unfortunately Steam is its own ecosystem, while PC Game Pass is part of the Xbox ecosystem. PC Game Pass players can party up with Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S players using Xbox Live. PC Game Pass players and Steam players cannot party up.

As indicated by the tweet above, Exoprimal's crossplay system is currently just for matchmaking, meaning if you're playing on Steam you could end up competing against another player on a PlayStation or Xbox console. Party creation is limited to how each separate platform handles its friend systems and invites, apparently, meaning it's impossible to play together with friends on another platform unless you both enter matchmaking together and get really, really lucky.

The limitation is disappointing, especially since Exoprimal forces you to create a Capcom ID to play online—that seems like a service that should be able to hook into each platform's friend system and let you find your dino-shooting buddies no matter what system they play on.

Capcom's tweet does say that there's no party creation crossplay "on day one," so hopefully that option is added sometime shortly after launch.