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Forums > Home› Star Trek Online General Discussion

cross play

sleven#0805 sleven
sleven#0805
 Member Posts: 1 Arc User
edited September 2023 in Star Trek Online General Discussion
why cant cross play happen when other games are doing it and making banking? I don't understand why because of servers problems not sure how that works when its all code or to give console player time to get better in 2016 that might have worked as an argument then but its 2020 and the teck is there so why its what the game is not on the same update for all version that dose not work either take games like ARK or No Mans sky and fallout 76 and GTA V so why its a matter of time and effort in my perspective so
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on

Answers

  • spiritbornspiritborn Member Posts: 4,258 Arc User
    I suspect those games were made from start to support cross-play, it's not just a switch you flip to enable to it. It takes a lot and I mean a lot of work to get the different versions to talk to each others in such a way that none of the versions are hampered by the crossplay and that's when doing on a new project. Getting a game that wasn't designed to support crossplay to support it, is practically rebuilding the game from scratch.

    So it's not a case of Cryptic being lazy or hating making profit but rather you're underestimating the work needed by several orders of magnitude.
  • darpendragondarpendragon Member Posts: 200 Arc User
    The main reason STO does not have cross play is because they are on separate servers, one for PC, one for Xbox and one for PS4. The separate servers do not talk to each other. Also they cannot update console versions the same way they can for PC.

    Also, GTA V might be on various platforms but does not support cross play. PC players cannot interact with consoles and vice versa. Also Xbox players cannot interact with PS4 players and vice versa.

    I'm pretty sure that a game has to be programed with the intention of supporting cross play from the beginning and cannot simply be added in after.

    Take for example Diablo 3. It is on all current consoles and PC, but cannot interact with each other.

    The only game that I know of that added cross play after launch is DCUO when they did a server merge.
  • spiritbornspiritborn Member Posts: 4,258 Arc User
    darpendragon wrote: »
    I'm pretty sure that a game has to be programed with the intention of supporting cross play from the beginning and cannot simply be added in after.
    from what I've gathered it can be added post launch, but the work involved means that few developers want to do as it demands a lot of man hours to do.

    In fact IIRC even today crossplay is the exception not the rule due the additional work it demands even for new releases, let alone adding it to a 10 year old game with tons of legacy code.
  • allyoftheforceallyoftheforce Member Posts: 735 Arc User
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  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc
    phoenixc#0738
         Member Posts: 5,500 Arc User
    edited August 2020
    Defiance has cross-play and it was a real headache to support. Practically every time they did an update it broke on one of the platforms and the patch for that often broke one of the others, around and around in circles for months. By the time they got it to work on all the supported platforms it was time for another big update so the "fun" would start all over again.

    Cross platform games generally do not work unless you use the least common denominator method, which means all the best stuff from each platform goes bye bye because too often of the others cannot do it or does it in an incompatible way.

    For instance, in Defiance a common trolling trick was to fire a Crimefighter (a shotgun that fired bouncy energy rounds) into a small room and watch all the PS2 players (it was back when PS2 was the current version) dump out because the physics load crushed their inferior physics systems.
  • seaofsorrowsseaofsorrows Member Posts: 10,918 Arc User
    edited August 2020
    sleven#0805 wrote: »
    why cant cross play happen when other games are doing it and making banking? I don't understand why because of servers problems not sure how that works when its all code or to give console player time to get better in 2016 that might have worked as an argument then but its 2020 and the teck is there so why its what the game is not on the same update for all version that dose not work either take games like ARK or No Mans sky and fallout 76 and GTA V so why its a matter of time and effort in my perspective so

    Where are you getting your information? Of the games you listed, No Man's Sky is the only one that actually supports cross play. Ark has some cross play in very limited cases and Fallout 76 and GTA V don't support it in any form at all and never have.

    Cross play is apparently a difficult thing to pull off and it's never going to be possible from such a limited studio like Cryptic. The fact that Hello Games was able to pull it off so well is highly impressive. There is a reason Cross Play is something you almost never see in any game.
    Insert witty signature line here.
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