Developer The Coalition has recently announced a couple of rather surprising additions to the PC version of Gears of War 4. Not only will it support split-screen co-op, but also the ability to play with your friends on the Xbox One via the cross-play feature!

Naturally, there are some limitations in place given that the mouse & keyboard are objectively better when it comes to precision aiming. In other words, the public multiplayer will continue to be locked down to specific platforms, but everything else is free game. You can play through the campaign together, and if you so wish you can also play the horde mode, multiplayer vs ai, or just the regular ol' versus mode in private lobbies. A rather elegant solution to a rather complex problem.

I never was much of a fan of Gears of War, mostly because my only experience with it was the buggy PC version of Gears of War 1, but I have to say that this announcement alone has my interest piqued. Developers don't just go through the trouble of adding minor, but extremely amazing features unless the game behind all of it is good enough to deserve them. 

On a slightly different note, I'm immensely happy to see the artificial borders between platforms slowly crumble. Rocket League started it all by allowing cross-play between both consoles and PC (though not between the consoles themselves), and ever since then things have started to move even more quickly. The most shocking thing about all of this, however, is that Microsoft is one we can thank for the sudden push for cross-platform play. If you had told me a couple of years ago that Microsoft would go from practically ignoring PC gaming to actually promoting it, I would've called you crazy... and yet, here we are.

Gears of War 4 will be arriving on October 11th, and here's to hoping we get a few more of these announcement by the time launch rolls on by.