Team Fortress 2 Has PC/360 Cross Platform Play

IGN has an in-depth article with Valve Engineer Robin Walker, TF2 Project Lead Charlie Brown, and Marketing Director Doug Lombardi, talking all about the Team Fortress 2 project. Along with details on class clarification, the look of the game, and map design decisions, the Valve folks confirm that 360/PC cross platform play is already in the game. "IGN: So you're actually playing now on Xbox 360s connected to PCs? Doug Lombardi: Technically it's done. Robin Walker: From our perspective, we did the Xbox port of Half-Life internally, and we did that because we wanted to have the expertise from doing that. Like controller expertise and all the sorts of decisions you've got to make that are different on consoles we wanted to have that in-house because we knew we'd be doing more Xbox titles and more console titles. And so the same guys that did that are working on TF2, we have all the tweaks we did to the controls, the sticks and everything."

Comments

finally

[Anonymous Coward]

a chance to demonstrate why KB+M > gamepad for FPS

Re:finally

[Mprx]

This was already demonstrated with Dreamcast Quake 3 vs PC Quake 3. Overwhelming victory for keyboard+mouse, as expected.

Joypad vs Mouse+Keyboard

[onion2k]

Looks like the old "Joypad vs Mouse+Keyboard" debate might finally be resolved then.

When all of us PC gamers pwn the 360 players to hell, daily, using our superior control mechanism.

Err...yeah...sorry...that was my inner fanboy speaking.

Re:Joypad vs Mouse+Keyboard

[oni]

When all of us PC gamers pwn the 360 players to hell, daily, using our superior control mechanism. I just came in here to say the same exact thing - but I see that you have everything under control.

I predict 360-only servers will be set up after a very short time due to all the whining.

Re:Joypad vs Mouse+Keyboard

[Das Modell]

I recently played Doom 3 on the Xbox. I eventually got pretty good at controlling it, but it was still a far cry from playing with a mouse. Pad users will be totally slaughtered in a high speed game like TF2 unless mouse users are gimped or pad users are given heavy autoaim. Gimping mouse users will obviously make them extremely unhappy.

This can only end in tears. What is Valve thinking?

2 options

[ben there...]

1) Console players will get owned by PC players. Console gamers will either segregate to their own servers or give up.

2) They give console players auto-aim or some other cheat. There won't be a level playing field so you won't be able to tell how good a player actually is.

Re:2 options

[tacroy]

To be fair, if the dev's put in autoaim then it wouldn't be a cheat but a game mechanic that is a pro/con of the control you choose to use. Its class balancing for control schemes.

Not the original plan...

[Tickenest]

It should be noted that back when development on TF2 started, they had this feature working, but at that time it was to connect the Commodore 64 and the NES versions. Due to delays in development, though, they switched to more modern systems over the years several times (I was most looking forward to the Tandy-SNES linkup, myself.)