Gears 4 Won't Have Competitive Cross-Platform Multiplayer
In a move intended to cross-promote two of their biggest products, Microsoft announced during E3 that most of their major 2016-2017 releases would be available on both XBox One and Windows PC. However, that might not mean both versions of Gears 4 will play harmoniously with one another. The company confirmed today that competitive multiplayer matches will not be possible between XBox One and PC.
And the reason is this: concerns about balance. Lead multiplayer designer Ryan Cleven said to IGN that the game is built around the XBox controls first, and adapted for keyboard and mouse later. “We definitely work from the controller out,” he said. “We do play [with] mouse and keyboard, but the core of the game is around a controller.”
Cleven assured readers that this doesn’t mean the keyboard controls are an afterthought. However, the gamepad and the keyboard aren’t calibrated to go against each other. “We don’t really balance the PC versus the Xbox, right, so they’re each kind of balanced independently,” Cleven said. “They’re all using the same core tuning; so, when we look at the PC players versus PC players, they can choose to use a mouse and keyboard or they can use a controller. That’s up to the PC players.”
“On the Xbox, we tune the game internally with a controller, so everything is tuned to be balanced that way, and then we make sure that the two groups, when they’re playing competitively online, they aren’t actually playing with each other.”
Gears of War 4 will be out October 11.