The genre that invented playing together is the worst at letting you
Here is the problem in one line: most MMORPGs are on PC and PS5 and still will not let a PC player and a PS5 player stand in the same field. It is the most counterintuitive gap in the whole crossplay landscape, and it catches groups out constantly - two friends buy the same game on different machines, make characters, and discover there is no server either of them can reach the other on.
The reason is architectural rather than political. An MMO is a persistent shared world running on dedicated servers, and the older ones were built in an era when each platform meant a separate certification, a separate patch cycle and a separate population. Those games did not decline crossplay; they were built in a shape that makes retrofitting it enormously expensive. The Elder Scrolls Online is the textbook case - it runs separate megaservers for PC, Xbox and PlayStation, and the reason given for the delay is precisely that the game was never designed with crossplay in mind.
The newer ones are different, and that is the useful news on this page. Anything designed after roughly 2020 launched with crossplay as a baseline assumption, which is why the list below skews recent. If your group is mixed, you are not short of options - you are short of old options.
Start here if you just want to play tonight
Throne and Liberty.Free, on PC, PS5 and Xbox, crossplay on by default, and the official FAQ confirms you do not need PlayStation Plus or Game Pass Core to play it - just a platform account. No group has to agree on a budget, which makes it the first thing to try rather than the compromise. The only thing to get right is the server: picking a "PS5 only" world switches crossplay off, which is a mistake you cannot undo without rerolling.
Everything else on this list asks something of the group - money, a subscription, or patience with a steep opening. Read the five criteria below before anyone commits, because in this genre the wrong pick costs weeks, not an evening.
What we checked, in order
1. Real crossplay, not shared branding.The only question that matters: can a character on PC and a character on PS5 appear in the same world at the same time? Several MMOs sell one box across every platform and still silo the players. Every pick below is confirmed against the publisher's own FAQ, free trial page or crossplay page, checked October 6, 2026, and the claim on each row says which platforms it covers.
2. Whether cross-progression comes with it. These are two different promises and the distinction matters more in an MMO than anywhere else, because your character is hundreds of hours of work. Crossplay means you can play together; cross-progression means your character can move platforms. Warframe and Final Fantasy XIV have both. Throne and Liberty and New World: Aeternum have crossplay and explicitly do not have cross-progression. Our cross-buy guide separates all three terms properly.
3. The total cost of keeping a group in it.MMO pricing has three shapes and they are not equivalent. Free-to-play means nobody is excluded - Throne and Liberty, Warframe and Genshin Impact. Buy-once means one payment and done, which is rare now and is New World: Aeternum's single best argument. Subscription means a recurring cost per person forever, which is Final Fantasy XIV, and it is the reason groups stall on it. For a group of four, that difference compounds fast.
4. Whether a console subscription is also required.Easy to forget and it can double the real cost. Paid console online services generally exempt free-to-play titles, and Throne and Liberty's FAQ states outright that neither PlayStation Plus nor Game Pass Core is needed. A subscription MMO on console can mean paying the publisher and the platform holder. Our free versus paid multiplayer guide has the full picture.
5. How steep the first three hours are. The criterion groups skip and then regret. An MMO that loses one player in its tutorial has failed for the whole group, and this genre contains some of the most hostile onboarding in gaming - Warframe is a decade of systems in a trench coat and genuinely needs a veteran friend or a guide to get through. Where a pick is hard to start, we say so on its row.
Two notes on what this list is not. We have not played hundreds of hours of all six; the facts here are platform, crossplay, pricing model and player-count claims taken from official pages, which is what the buying decision actually turns on - see how we pick. And two of the six are not strictly MMORPGs: Warframe and Diablo IV are included because groups searching for this almost always want "a long shared RPG we can all get into", and both deliver that with crossplay, which several real MMOs do not.
