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]
