Pixelated Perspective - Cross-Platform Hullabaloo

Standardization has always been a big component of the console gaming experience. Unlike on the PC, console games benefit from being developed on a standard platform with standard capabilities and (for the most part) standard input devices. This frees up developer resources that would have been spent on optimization and keeps the focus squarely on the content. It's for this same reason that development of cross-platform games has remained largely in the realm of the theoretical.

This is the big hurdle that team FASA has been trying for years to surmount with the development of Shadowrun, the first cross-platform game between Xbox Live and Windows. It's a title that has received intense scrutiny less because of its ambitious network architecture, and more because of the creative use of the original source material. As the game has gotten closer and closer to its launch date however, people are starting to take greater notice of the ways that FASA has tried to adjust for developing a game on two quite distinct platforms.

It's a conversation that gamers themselves have been having for a decade. Ever since big shooters started appearing on consoles, often exclusively, players have been debating which method of input provides for a superior gameplay experience. The conventional wisdom is that the mouse and keyboard layout provides the best, most efficient means for navigating a game world in the first-person perspective. Built on pixel-perfect precision, the mouse seems at first to be the natural choice. But as time has passed, as technology has improved, and with games being developed with consoles specifically in mind, this is far less of a truism than it once was.

In a recent piece on Shadowrun's official website, designer Sage Merrill confided that they've had to tweak the game considerably to get the balance between the two platforms in synch. Much to their surprise, it was the keyboard and mouse players who needed to be brought up to speed; the players using the Xbox 360 pad enjoyed a considerable advantage until they figured out how to bring the two closer together. Granted, Merrill describes how they'd spent months figuring out how to get the control-scheme on the 360 version to feel absolutely perfect, including tweaking the weapon ray and playing with the analog turning speed. Purists will likely scorn such trickery as some sort cheating or advanced noobery. But the fact of the matter is, even when the developers gave the same tricks to the mouse users, the pad users still won the day.

After exhaustive testing, the dynamic that FASA is left with, and the dynamic that is present in the beta I've played, is that the Xbox 360 pad lends itself to faster reaction times at close-range, making those players ideal melee specialists. Mouse users have more pin-point control by virtue of the mouse's greater range of movement, and excel at long-range combat. While this does nothing to settle the debate about which input device is better, it does reveal an interesting strategy for cross-platform games into which FASA seems to have fallen ass backwards.

Instead of viewing development on potentially disparate platforms as hurdles to be overcome in the pursuit of a single unified vision of a game, what's stopping developers from making a cross-platform game that actually embellishes these differences and exploits them as a gameplay mechanic? Instead of treating it as a potentially game-breaking flaw, call it a feature. Think of some other gaming clichés that came about inadvertently. Does the rocket jump ring a bell with anyone? That might come off as sarcastic, but there's a lot of truth to it. Imagine a game where you play a different class or race based on the platform you purchased it for. Or a game like Savage where PC users would view a giant battlefield like an RTS game while the console minions busted heads in a first-person shooter. It's not so far-fetched.

And while Shadowrun is still a few months from delivery, it's still too early to say whether or not the differences between the platforms will survive the play testing process. And this whole notion is predicated on the premise that players are open to the idea of cross-platform game to begin with, which hasn't been proven by any stretch of the imagination up to this point. Still, I think it's an intriguing bit of theory, and I'm interested to see what direction FASA takes once they've finished development on Shadowrun. With what they've learned on this project, their next project might be even more ambitious. We'll just have to wait and see.

Apr 4, 2007 - 4:09 pm | 0 comments
Chris Chester