Let’s play together (Too Human, The Crossing)

Silicon Knights’ Denis Dyack has broken the post-E3 silence on Too Human in an interview with IGN. He says they’re working on a drop-in, four-player cooperative experience. While not revolutionary, this is an interesting development.

In last month’s Edge magazine’s coverage of Arkane’s The Crossing, Valve’s Viktor Antonov (designer of Half-Life 2’s City 17) explained about their vision of how single-player and multi-player could be brought together for a brand new experience. It sounds very intriguing. The basic idea is that you can play The Crossing as a Counter-Strike-esque multiplayer fragfest or a single-player game.

When playing the single-player game, you will be opposed not by AI cannon fodder, but real live humans. The multi-player games take place in the same levels as the single-player game. When the system notices a single-player gamer incoming, it pauses the multi-player session and gives everyone new goals to provide opposition to the single-player.

While there is a ton of problems with the setup – will it work without live opponents? What about unpopular maps? – the idea is something I’ve thought about before and it’s very interesting to see how they pull it off. Something to look forward to in the FPS arena, then.