Remember hearing about The Crossing, the game that was to merge single player and multiplayer aspects into a unique hybrid game? No? Me neither. But it hardly matters now, as it’s not going to happen.

The Crossing was a FPS in development by Arkane Studios, and aimed to make real players your opponents in a single-player game. In other words – take your typical FPS, and instead of AI enemies coming at you the entire time, they are all controlled by real people. Sounds weird, right?

Raphael Colantonio, CEO and creative director of Arkane said, “We ran into an unexpected financial challenge some months ago and we had to put The Crossing on hold.” EA was set to publish the title, and they recently experienced a bunch of layoffs. That was part of the aforementioned challenge.

Regardless of all that, a game designed on this platform poses interest, as well as a number of questions and concerns. Certainly, it could be a very cool experience to play a game where humans are your enemies, as humans will always be superior to video game AI, leading to creative and intelligent play. It’s a great concept; an elaboration on the player-AI controls in Perfect Dark.

On the other hand, it’d be tricky to regulate the system so the opponents wouldn’t be able to completely overbear the single player. Super good players could make the game utterly impossible for your average gamer to ever get through. The enemies would have to have a pathetic amount of health compared to the single player – and would that be fun for those playing as the enemies? And what happens when a year or two goes by and people aren’t playing it as much anymore? Does the entire package become useless, or could we turn on a traditional AI mode? There has been a lot of discussion about this – let’s hear what you think.

Tags: the crossing