Microsoft Hopes for Matchmaking in all 360 Games

1up reports on comments from Phil Spencer, the Head of Game Development for Microsoft Game Studios. Speaking with the news organization at DICE Spencer clarified that, ideally, all 360 games should have matchmaking services ala Halo 2. Why didn't Epic's Gears of War ship with the feature? "The Epic scenario and why we don't have that code in Gears of War is really more of a scheduling issue than a 'We weren't going to share the code with them, or help them add that feature to the game' because it's clearly a great feature in online shooting play. For us, it was just 'could we get this done on time in order to get the game to come out when it needed to come out.'" Spencer does say that they have no problems sharing Halo 2's matchmaking code, and that future first-party titles should definitely offer it. Gears may even offer it one day, via a patch to the game.

Comments

Re:Sony Teaching Microsoft How To Do Onlight Right

[Dogtanian]

No idiotic fees just for the privilege of playing - milking cash out players for online shouldn't be a way to hide the high cost of your console like Microsoft does with the 250 dollars they charge people to play over the life of the console on top of the 400 dollar base price. Dumb Microsoft. Dumb. Assuming MS's aim is to make money (which it is, obviously), and assuming that they successfully "hide the high cost of [their] console" and manage to get more money out of consumers this way, there's nothing "dumb" about it.

It's only dumb if it's unsuccessful.

Re:Meh

[twistedsymphony]

I'd like to disagree... on all accounts.

"Match Making" in addition to matching you in skill also filters out anyone you've previously marked as someone you'd like to avoid. Without match making, I have to continually re-encounter those "insufferable asses" or "hyperactive children" that I've already found and identified as undesirable. And while it's impossible to filter them all out, I've found that there are a limited number of them that game the same time as me, play the same games and game modes, and are of similar skill. Once you manage to get 20-30 people on that list it becomes a rare occurrence that you encounter them... of course that all goes out the window completely if the system isn't doing the match making for you.

As for making your own matches "working just fine"... sure, if you're playing unranked. I have a group of friends, we want to be on the same team and play against another group that's similar in skill. You know... like a professional clan. There is NO easy way to do that, not even close. Basically you have to message everyone on your team to search for some specific game criteria then hope the pick the right room out of the list (and hope it's not full up by the time they get there) then if by some miracle they do manage to find the room there's a high probability that you wont all be on the same team. That is not even close to acceptable for a AAA, first party, killer app that supposedly exemplifies Xbox Live's superiority. Sorry but in a straight up ease of use and requisite feature comparison Resistance blows GoW out of the water (and I loathe Sony). Not to mention that "match making" isn't some elusive code that Bungie has in a vault somewhere, it's built right into the friggin XDK, and while it wasn't there when Halo 2 was made, it's been there LONG before GoW arrived.

The features missing from GoW aren't just annoying, it's embarrassing.