Electronic Arts today announced the second year of its esports league, the Apex Legends Global Series. The most interesting news, however, is that console players will also be competing in the second year. Instead of its own league, the PC lion's share of the action is expected to come from the PC.

With the addition of Xbox and PlayStation players, "the majority of players and fans will be under the same competitive umbrella," EA said." The battle of controller versus mouse and keyboard is about to reach a whole new level of intensity!"

Well, sort of. To compensate for the inherent speed and accuracy advantage of the mouse and keyboard setup, controller players will be using a "PC-valued Aim Assist setting" in their matches, which is about 50% weaker than the stickiness of the console's default Aim Assist. In a recent update, Respawn added a toggle to switch between console and PC assist strength on all platforms. While this bit of help is almost certainly necessary to maintain some balance in combat, I feel that it inevitably leads to questions and complaints (and a lot of attendant ugliness) when a player with a controller wins against a rival equipped with a mouse and keyboard. (Theoretically, PC players could also use controllers if they thought it would help. Why not?)

Cross-play, where PC and console gamers play multiplayer together, is becoming increasingly common and popular. However, it is still a rarity in professional esports. For example, when the Call of Duty League announced that it would transition from PlayStation 4 consoles to PC starting with the 2021 season, it ruled that players would be restricted to controllers and not allowed to use a mouse and keyboard during competition, despite being on PC.

It will be very interesting to see how this cross-platform competition plays out, although it is clear that it has the potential to be a headache. My guess is that M&K will prevail and Respawn will be forced to tinker with the Aim Assist settings, or perhaps even cut off console players altogether. However, it is also possible that the controller team will surprise us by kicking us off the wall, and even then, if the impression is that the console competitors are getting too much of an advantage from their controllers, there may be a call for Respawn to take action. [If this experiment works, we may see more widespread cross-platform competition in pro esports; we'll find out in a few months, as the ALGS Year 2 pre-season qualifiers are scheduled to begin in September.