Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is a coop game by design, but it’s a bit cumbersome to invite your friends to the party. This is partly due to the integrated crossplay between PC and Xbox (though Steam is left out of this partnership until a later post-launch update), but it’s not too hard to invite your friends into Dark Alliance. It’s just fiddly at the moment. If you already know how to invite your friends to join your party in other games on your chosen platform you shouldn’t have an issues doing so in Dark Alliance.
Invite friends to your Dark Alliance party via your platform’s social menus.
Yep, if you want to invite your friends to a custom party in Dark Alliance you will need to send them invites from your platform of choice’s baked-in invite function, typically within its social menus. That means everyone you want to play with needs to not only be online, but also in-game.
Before you can even send out an invite to your friends you need to set Dark Alliance to online mode, and you need to establish a custom match. To do so hold down either the Select button or M-key to bring up the “Manage Session” screen while in your basecamp at Kelvin’s Cairn. You’ll want to choose “Custom Game,” followed by “Friends Only” or “Invite Only.” “Friends Only” will allow you and anyone else on your Friends List to matchmake, but if you want to curate who you play with you’ll want to opt for “Invite Only.”
From here you’ll create a Hosted game, and just need to wait on the game to reload your basecamp. Once you’re officially reloaded and hosting a session, you can go into your platform’s integrated party/social menu or Friends List to send out invites. Keep in mind that your friends will have to open this same interface after the invite has been sent in order to accept it.
- Steam: open the Overlay and right-click the friends you want to invite, then select “Invite”.
- Once Steam to Windows crossplay is live you’ll want to enable the Xbox Game Bar to handle invites cross-platform.
- Xbox: tap the Xbox button and scroll to the Social tab. Select the friends (who need to be in-game) you wish to invite, and pick “Invite to Game.”
- PlayStation: similar to Xbox. Make your way to your Friends List in the overlay and invite them to your game.
- Windows Store: you’ll need to enable the Xbox Game Bar in your Windows settings to both send and accept invites.
A couple of things to keep in mind: Windows Store for PC and Xbox consoles have crossplay enabled by default, and a future patch will add Steam crossplay with those platforms. PlayStation will not feature crossplay with those, nor does it have cross-generation crossplay at launch (meaning no PS4 to PS5 parties). Cross-generation crossplay for PlayStation is coming in an update after launch. Hopefully a more intuitive way to invite friends to your Dark Alliance party is also coming down the road, but for now you’ll need to rely on your platform’s overlay and social functions to send and accept invites.
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance is available June 22nd on Xbox Game Pass for PC and Console, PC (Steam), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
