Cross-Platform Play for The Agency “Up in the Air”
When The Agency, a MMO shooter for the PC and PS3, was announced, many speculated that cross-platform play between the two consoles would happen. However, in a recent interview, Sony Online Entertainment’s senior game designer Kevin O’Hara, talked about the design concerns cross-platform play would bring to the table.
“We have not decided if you can play between the two. They are cross-platform. We’re able to do it – it’s more of a design concern. We’re doing a lot of focus testing and we’re finding that people just, ‘oh they’ve got a controller, it’s not fair! Well they’ve got a mouse it’s not fair!’”
It is interesting to note that The Agency was playable at last month’s E3 convention, and cross-platform play was enabled.
“It’s what people say they want at first but when they actually play then… So it’s up in the air. We’ll go through beta with that and get strong opinions on which way to go. But technically we can do it if we want.”
Finally, O’Hara stated that while a 2009 release date is out of the question, both the PC and PS3 versions will release simultaneously in multiple territories.
“We haven’t done a release date yet for it,” he said. “We’re still in development. We’ve got a lot of new features in the game – it’s really coming along. We’re having fun with it. We’ve got a couple more features to work on before we’re comfortable with it.
“I don’t believe it’ll be [out in] 2009. After that the marketing people control that information.”
[Source]
5 Responses to “Cross-Platform Play for The Agency “Up in the Air””
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July 6th, 2009 at 8:43 PM
I say do it, and then if people don’t like it let them filter matches by platform. So if someone only wants to play against other PS3 users they can, or just PC, or both. It seems likely an easy solution to me, but I know big corporations don’t always have the capacity to come up with the “easy” solutions. They just want to do whatever makes it easier on them.
July 7th, 2009 at 1:15 AM
@giese095
that’s not a bad idea
July 7th, 2009 at 1:11 PM
What might seem easy to us may not be when you get down to the coding aspect. We think a simple filter will do it but when you get to testing it there might be some unforseen glitches that happen. If/then for/next can be a coding problem if you don’t have every situation covered and then there is the localization issues with language.
It could be done but then maybe they should charge a small fee for the X-platform version to make sure that they really want to play against another hardware platform…
July 7th, 2009 at 1:49 PM
just do it, the game is probably a year off anyway.
July 7th, 2009 at 5:55 PM
they should do it but I have yet to see any game do this so I am not holdong my breath.