Xbox One and PC may have cross platform play

Gamers on both The Xbox One and the humble Windows PC, may be able to play with and against one another on cross platform games, according to head of Microsoft studios, Phil Spencer, who said in an interview with AusGamers, that the company learned a lot from the cross platform gaming of Shadow Run and that a few elements of this type of gaming had already been trialled.

He did suggest at one point that he wasn't allowed to leak things, making it seem unlikely any concrete beans would hit the floor, but he did give some tantalising hints about what might be possible.

“Now you have differences in Windows gaming and console gaming around control and input. In fact if you go back to Shadow Run on Xbox 360 – something I worked on – we had PC players playing against Xbox 360 customers. We didn’t have tremendous success with that, but we learnt a lot from it.”

The problem with Shadow Run being a first person shooter, meant it gave PC gamers a massive advantage. Purportedly in internal testing, Microsoft witnessed first hand how average PC gamers could stomp all over the world's best console players. This was more to do with the controllers though than anything else, which makes you wonder how Microsoft could ever implement something like this again, with only its basic revisions of the Xbox controller to aid console gamers.

Give me a G, give me an E, give me an N, give me an E, give me… you know where this is going. 

However, it seems like Spencer might have meant something more along the lines of games that interact with each other, rather than gamers on different platforms butting heads:

“Earlier this year we released Skulls of the Shogun, which was a game we launched on all three platforms on the same day, and you could start on one platform and then save the game to the Cloud and play across any of the screens and progress. And then Halo: Spartan Assault has some links between Halo 4 and Spartan Assault, even though they’re very different games.
“This connected ecosystem across all the different devices is definitely where I think the future of gaming is going; you don’t have to do it as a developer, but you have the capability and I think a system like Xbox Live across all those screens where you know who someone is and who their friends are, what their Achievements are and their progression is really critical to that.”

KitGuru Says: It seems like the only way to pit “console gamers” against PC gamers, is to have them use either Sony's Dualshock 4 controller on a multiplayer PC title, or to make use of Valve's upcoming Steam controller. What do you guys reckon? Is the console vs PC paradigm more about the gamers themselves, or the controllers?

[Thanks MCV]

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