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Why doesn't Perfect World games have crossplay?
snowwolf
Member Posts: 1,018 Arc User
I am still amazed why Perfect World games like Star Trek Online and Neverwinter still do not offer crossplay.
If you don't know what crossplay is, it's the ability for players on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation to play with one another.
The reason behind Star Trek Online and Neverwinter being on seperate platforms seemed logical at first, PC has been around for 6 years when the console editions were introduced. So PC players already had a very well developed and inflated ingame market and players.
So for new console players, things on the exchange etc would be too expensive.
So then it would be only logical, since both console platforms were released at the same that.. That at least Xbox and PlayStation can play with one another, but no.
I was thinking about this recently when my computer started to die on me, I've already migrated all my gaming over to the Xbox.. The only computer gaming I do is Star Trek Online, so moving that over too would be nice.. But I can't, since I'd have to start all over.
But I gave it a go, but OH BOY. The Xbox version of Star Trek Online is even MORE bugged than the PC version, the rubber banding is EVEN WORSE. Which is very weird, considering the 2 hours and 30 minutes I tried the game.. I saw two other players, yup. That's right. TWO players, now granted I did not visit Risa.
But oh boy, the game on PC feels empty at times when trying to do a TFO.. But the console version was a joke, even ESD was just filled to the brim with NPC's and insane rubberbanding.
With such a low playerbase on the console platforms, one would think crossplay would be a neat idea now that the game has aged a bit. Instead the game are bugged on all platforms, with lag on all of them. And a bunch of content missing from the consoles, or lagging behind..
Ugh, seems wasteful. Oh well. Rant over, I guess.. Cryptic logic.
Fun fact, even Need for Speed Heat.. A basic racer.. Was given crossplay by EA games to make-up for the number of players on platforms...
It's 2020, having a MMO without crossplay is just... Yeah, weird.
If you don't know what crossplay is, it's the ability for players on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation to play with one another.
The reason behind Star Trek Online and Neverwinter being on seperate platforms seemed logical at first, PC has been around for 6 years when the console editions were introduced. So PC players already had a very well developed and inflated ingame market and players.
So for new console players, things on the exchange etc would be too expensive.
So then it would be only logical, since both console platforms were released at the same that.. That at least Xbox and PlayStation can play with one another, but no.
I was thinking about this recently when my computer started to die on me, I've already migrated all my gaming over to the Xbox.. The only computer gaming I do is Star Trek Online, so moving that over too would be nice.. But I can't, since I'd have to start all over.
But I gave it a go, but OH BOY. The Xbox version of Star Trek Online is even MORE bugged than the PC version, the rubber banding is EVEN WORSE. Which is very weird, considering the 2 hours and 30 minutes I tried the game.. I saw two other players, yup. That's right. TWO players, now granted I did not visit Risa.
But oh boy, the game on PC feels empty at times when trying to do a TFO.. But the console version was a joke, even ESD was just filled to the brim with NPC's and insane rubberbanding.
With such a low playerbase on the console platforms, one would think crossplay would be a neat idea now that the game has aged a bit. Instead the game are bugged on all platforms, with lag on all of them. And a bunch of content missing from the consoles, or lagging behind..
Ugh, seems wasteful. Oh well. Rant over, I guess.. Cryptic logic.
Fun fact, even Need for Speed Heat.. A basic racer.. Was given crossplay by EA games to make-up for the number of players on platforms...
It's 2020, having a MMO without crossplay is just... Yeah, weird.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Comments
Because they prefer we play with ourselves.
It's because we would clean the cronometers of the console players, PC is always faster and direct (with the programable macros) than the console version, but one of the most important part is that the architecture of the servers are different, latency and all that stuff is quite difficult to compensate. Also, the market is not there for this game, they would have to invest a lot of resources for no income at all..
This is no longer going to be true once the new generation of consoles comes out. They're on par with high end gaming computers.
Iirc it's because the PS4 and Xbox versions were made before cross play became a common thing and it may cost too much to change how databases are set up to make it possible considering the age of this game.
The explanation is long, technical, and tedious, but the short, accurate-to-within-certain-parameters answer is that you'll have to go ask Microsoft and Sony about that. (Especially Sony - even in those games where Microsoft lets Windows and Xbox play together, Sony likes to throw in extra issues. It's one of the reasons why the Bethesda database of Fallout 4 mods is more limited for Playstation than either Xbox or PC - Sony won't use certain textures, so some items can't exist.)
Xbox and PlayStation works around this by having the option to set most Bridge Officer powers to Autofire, something you cannot do on PC.
Why isn't there cross-play? Too expensive to pay for itself.
Why isn't there a completely rewritten STO 2 with modern graphics? Too expensive to pay for itself.
Why isn't STO 100% bug-free? Too expensive to pay for itself, and no software application of any size is 100% bug-free outside of a few academic projects to create fully-verified programs that often have severe constraints. (Even those probably have a few design flaws that users would consider bugs.)
And something that's very important to remember here all these options are not easy, cheap or quick. To enable cross-play would essentially mean keel up rebuild for STO since simply connecting the servers won't do as code bases for the different versions aren't meant to interact.
This happening for a game as old as STO would demand that STO was a lot more popular then it is to justify the work needed for it.
I guess it's just an attitude/outlook thing. To me, expecting MMO crossplay is the weird thing. /shrug
Heck, MMOs that are on multiple platforms is a rare enough thing to start with. How many even have crossplay?
The way I see it - the simpler a game is (like "a basic racer") the higher the ability to have crossplay. Because the game is simple. Not "well, if simple games can do it, complex ones must be able to!'.
MMO's? Currently none.
There are a couple like Black Desert that are cross between the two consoles and one or two that are XBox or PS with PC.. but none that support true crossplay.
The closest you can get right now is No Man's Sky. Anyone expecting Cryptic to be the pioneer in this endeavor is absolutely deluding themselves. We can't even get a game that doesn't rubber bad with 2 players in a zone.. cross play isn't even on the radar.
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> MMO's? Currently none.
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> There are a couple like Black Desert that are cross between the two consoles and one or two that are XBox or PS with PC.. but none that support true crossplay.
>
> The closest you can get right now is No Man's Sky. Anyone expecting Cryptic to be the pioneer in this endeavor is absolutely deluding themselves. We can't even get a game that doesn't rubber bad with 2 players in a zone.. cross play isn't even on the radar.
FF14 is full crossplay between all platforms it is on, though I can't remember if there is an xbox version or not. That said it designed for that from the ground up and SE has alot more resources to use then Cryptic.
FFXIV is not on XBox, so it's not techincally 'full' crossplay. Though to be fair, it's not available on that platform at all, so it's not like it's being excluded.. it just doesn't exist.
There are a number of titles that are console to console cross play or one console to PC, but it's super rare for a game to have cross play between all 3 major platforms (Nintendo doesn't count.)
As you said, that studio is obviously far more capable then Cryptic. FFXIV isn't a game I am into, but those guys obviously know what they're doing.
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> FFXIV is not on XBox, so it's not techincally 'full' crossplay. Though to be fair, it's not available on that platform at all, so it's not like it's being excluded.. it just doesn't exist.
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> There are a number of titles that are console to console cross play or one console to PC, but it's super rare for a game to have cross play between all 3 major platforms (Nintendo doesn't count.)
>
> As you said, that studio is obviously far more capable then Cryptic. FFXIV isn't a game I am into, but those guys obviously know what they're doing.
At the moment yes, but from what I've heard FF14 1.0 was total disaster that makes STO look like a prime example of competense compared to it.
In fact FF14 2.0 was essentially a different game from 1.0.
You know how hard it is to combine them when console came out years and years after PC?
Yeah...and FF XI hasn't been through multiple developers and dealt with other personnel coming and going.
It took a long time just to get STO on consoles...plus FF is a game built on consoles and ported to PC...it's a lot easier than a PC game ported to console.
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> Yeah...and FF XI hasn't been through multiple developers and dealt with other personnel coming and going.
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> It took a long time just to get STO on consoles...plus FF is a game built on consoles and ported to PC...it's a lot easier than a PC game ported to console.
It should be remembered that FF14 and IIRC FF11 were designed from ground up as crossplatform play and it wasn't something added 10 years into the game's lifetime.
ding ding ding! We have a winner!
PC has a different code base than consoles, and doesn't have to go through certification, which lets patches go out faster. If you want to see this in all its gory details, check out the Warframe forums. (Their PC architecture lets them patch the game on the fly. The downside is a host of problems related to "host migrations," which other games don't have.)
For non-PC updates, they go through several stages, in development, submitted for certification, and certified and ready for deployment. Take their latest update, Heart of Deimos. It was originally scheduled to deploy on 8/25 on PC, and the week of on other platforms. On the XBox and Playstation, it got through certification in time to deploy the same day. Switch deployed later because Nintendo took longer to certify the update. Since then, PC has had 4-5 patches (in less than a week), and the consoles have had a couple of server hotfixes.
That's a game where the PC and console configurations are pretty similar. Console STO uses a different input scheme, with the ability to set Boffs to autofire when some conditions are met. (I don't play on a console, so I don't know exactly how it works.) They have a similar, but different codebase. Keeping them in synch would be a lot harder.
One thing was physics. Apparently it is much easier to do for PC than it is for Playstation, and the PC physics were better than the PS physics. It got to be a favorite trick for trolls to fire a Crimefighter (a sort of energy shotgun that fired bouncy green ball lighting) into a small room so it would bounce around rapidly and all the PS players would get dumped as their physics systems overloaded and crashed the box. They ended up nerfing the Crimfighter into near unusability in an effort to try and stop that.
And when it wasn't trolls and those shotguns it was always something else. Minor tweaks would give one platform an advantage over the other and instead of backing out the tweak they would nerf something, which would throw off the balance again in another way, and on and on. Unless you have an engine that is built specifically to be client-platform agnostic (and that actually functions that way) any kind of balance adjustments are a nightmare.
I'm currently playing Phantasy Star Online 2, which is Xbox/PC crossplay. For the most part, neither has overwhelming advantage. That underwent alot of tweaks for compatability, but seeing as it was a MS and Sega collab, they threw money at it which Cryptic could only ever dream of.
Because of the hoops they have to go through to get a patch approved for XBox and the PS4 as compared to the PC. To enable full platform crossplay, everyone's Client across the board would need to be patched to the same level - and no, Cryptic isn't going to delay PC patches for months.
Hell, I'm pretty sure rolling patches out top the PC first gives Cryptic the info and real world testing they need to even get the XBox and PS4 patches approved by Microsoft's and Sony's QA respectively.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."