Modes Powerplay, Consoles, and Open Only

[jasonbarron]

With the recently proposed open-only change to powerplay Frontier have shown a desire to ensure everyone who is participating can interact with everyone else participating in powerplay. If this change goes through, and it likely will considering the large amount of support both in the feedback thread and from the existing powerplay community, the last major barrier to a unified powerplay experience would be consoles.

Crossplay has been brought up frequently in the past, some console players just want more people to play with, while others worry that the PC crowd would be overly dominant. Technical issues aside, nearly everyone can agree that an option for console players to be able to engage with the larger PC community would be a good thing.

By using a powerplay pledge as a way to opt-in to the PC galaxy Frontier could kill two birds with one stone. This would mean that the only thing stopping powerplayers from interacting is the relatively minor issue of mass-blocking the opposition. In addition, console players that struggle to find CMDRs to fight with/against would be able to utilize the larger PC playerbase.

Frontier, please double down on creating a single mode for powerplay, it would revitalize the game for many community minded players on both PC and Consoles.

OMG yes.

 

[Han_Zen]

Full cross play with the ability to play the same commander on all platforms would be nice.
I would also be nice to have 'Guest Commanders' as crew. If a friend is over, I could put them on the XBOX and have them as a crew member.

Even if there was just regular cross play, I would have bought an XBOX licence just for this.

 

[Warm Considering]

If that's true, then what's holding you back, FDev?

The XBOX One and the XBOX Live service use slightly different software. For example, Gears of War 4 is a straight Microsoft title, so cross play should be an easy feat? Right? Nope. In order for PC GoW4 players to play with XBOX One GoW4 players the PC players must install different adapter software. Otherwise, you will be able to see your console friends online, but will always fail to join them. Even when you do reconcile this software difference, voice still doesn't work for PC players in GoW4. And that's a Microsoft game title developed for a Microsoft OS and a Microsoft console. The two are just fundamentally incompatible. The differences are substantial enough that GoW4 cross play was--at least when I was playing--something Microsoft enabled and disabled multiple times, and would only allow cross play in the cooperative Horde game mode. Competitive was never--to my knowledge--permitted to be cross play.

With all that a third party developer like FDev doesn't stand a chance at fixing that.

Blizzard has taken the same stance on Overwatch. No attempt at cross play will be made for the same reason: Software incompatibility. You may be wondering, then, why not just build software that is compatible? Because, consoles are different beasts. In order to keep costs down software is optimized for hardware, which means cheaper hardware may be used, and also because console hardware isn't scalable. What's in the box is all that will ever be in the box with a few exceptions. PC software is actually more expensive to code, due to the flexibility demands from one configuration to the next. PCs are like snow flakes. Not consoles. Each console is exactly the same as the rest in the line, and so with prices going ever up, custom software for the assigned hardware is a must. Otherwise, your XBOX would be $2,000 rig. So, henceforth, PC games and console games will be developed on different schedules using radically different memory management strategies and network code, and never shall the two meet.

 

[tolm]

Won’t happen: Sony and Microsoft don’t want a “xBox players vs PlayStation players” scenario. There’s a reason literally NO existing games have this.