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Yesterday we got the surprise announcement that Quantum Break, a highly anticipated Xbox One exclusive would actually also be launching on the PC at the same time in April. On top of that, those who pre-order the Xbox One version get the PC version as well, which is something we will see happen more often as Microsoft wants to bring more cross-platform features to Xbox One and Windows 10.
According to Microsoft's head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, cross-buy between PC and Xbox One will be a platform feature: “We'll make it a platform feature. We think it's good for gamers. More players, more games, better ecosystem”.
Quantum Break will be the first game from Microsoft to launch on the Xbox One and PC with cross-buy, the game will also have a cross-save feature so players can pick up where they left over and switch between the game on the console and the PC without losing any progress.
Microsoft has been talking about supporting the PC platform better going forward for a while now but this is the first big push from the company. That said, some are concerned about the high recommended system requirements for Quantum Break on PC.
KitGuru Says: I'm happy to see Microsoft doing this and hopefully it is a sign of more to come. As a Xbox/PC gamer myself, I am particularly looking forward to cross-buy as I tend to own a lot of the same games across platforms. While Quantum Break's recommended requirements are high, hopefully, this won't be a case of bad optimization but a case of really pushing graphical boundaries like Crysis did back in the day.
Finally they’re listening.
But what about cross-platform play? I thought one of the high points of a windows 10 powered OS was that the architecture was similar enough for the two platforms to connect. Surely this would be a good opportunity
Go on Microsoft! 😀 Too bad it’s exclusive to the Windows 10 store but who cares! I say good stuff 🙂
Multiplayer game balance: If M+KB completely dominate the Xbox Controller there will be a lot of complaints. If they allow M+KB support for Xbox it’s just not well suited to couch gameplay and there will be lots of complaints. If auto-aim for controllers are too good, you guessed it, there will be complaints…
TLDR: There will be balance complaints on both sides until the game dies.
I’m not saying it’s impossible or shouldn’t be attempted. I just think the PR and Customer Support teams would start sweating after the announcement. Take a look at the Space Sim communities, it’s an eternal conflict over “M+KB Versus HOTAS” balance.
Didn’t’ expect this but then i look at my Steam library and it sours somewhat.
I’ve always said that Microsoft should just ditch any kind of pretence of a separate Windows gaming brand and actually just unite both platforms under the Xbox brand. I’d genuinely love to have an app on my computer that just essentially emulated the Xbox One. Why not go further then that – they could pull one over on SteamOS and actually allow for us to boot into a lightweight DOS operating system, with a similar sort of Xbox One interface. Even though it wouldn’t have the same sort of locked in hardware optimisations that the regular Xbox has, I bet it would still show a noticeable improvement, not having to run any other processes in the background, nor have them potentially cause bugs in games through unexpected behaviour and interactions.
I do often miss the simplicity of just being able to switch on, put a disk in, and start to play a game, on my Xbox 360…
They could connect with the original xbox just fine. That was never the issue. They tried cross platform at launch for the xbox360 on the game shadowrun, the fps that was released, and learned the lesson that you CANNOT put PC players on keyboard mouse in the same FPS game with people on standard controllers as the entire user base basically died, accused every PC player of cheating etc within days of launch.
There is a reason when people do things like computer drafting they use a mouse, not a joystick, its MUCH faster and MUCH more accurate.
Same goes for aiming a gun in an FPS. It is not close to fair because of the controller. However, playing football with keyboard/mouse sucks, etc. It’s not always the case that the PC players would just trounce the players on other platforms, but they made the move of testing cross platform on an FPS then judged the way it would perform based on how THAT game performed, which is not representative of how everything would work.
It already happened once with Shadowrun at the Xbox360 launch and they saw the results and they were hilariously bad for the console players.
1 PC player in a match would ruin it for the entire game and they got accused of hacking etc, seemed unkillable to everyone else because of turn rates, aim speed, etc.
However, having said that, I got a keyboard/mouse hooked up to my xbox once to play halo 1, just for purpose of beating people like that because I knew about how much better I was with that control method. I was banned from using it in a fraternity house in person within 3 days because it was that unbalanced no one would play in a game with me.
Exactly, and if they artificially hinder or boost the performance of either then it has to be perfect otherwise it’s the dev’s “fault”.
Idk I played Advanced warfare with a xbox controller and destroyed everybody