Skulls of the Shogun will feature cross-platform multiplayer play over Xbox 360, Windows Phones, Windows 8 PCs and tablets such as the newly unveiled Surface, developer 17-Bit has announced.
The new feature allows up to four people to play the same match with any of the aforementioned devices. Gamers can also start a match on one device and pick it up on another.
“Everyone’s connected via Xbox Live. And regardless of platform, everyone’s having the same great experience, because it’s the exact same game across all those devices,” explained 17-Bit CEO Jake Kazdal.
If you’d like to use the cloud saving functionality then you’ll need to buy the game on both the systems you’re playing it on.
Kazdai spoke about the likelihood of people paying for the same game more than once, saying, “We have long hoped we would be able to bundle them together but have not been able to drive it through on our own. I think that being one of the first Microsoft-published titles on a new Microsoft platform should be exciting and give us a real opportunity to stand out, and cross-platform play will soon become standard, glad we could be one of the first!”
He also made mention of mobile pricing, which he expects should be a little lower than the console and desktop counterparts.
Skulls of the Shogun is the first Xbox 360 title to achieve cross-platform multiplayer, an interesting feat so far into the console cycle. There’s even the ability to play across multiple games at the same time with a notification system to let you know when it’s your turn, also a first.
Asynchronous play (buzzword alert) in Skulls of the Shogun will allow gamers to play up to 10 games at the same time “but we think we will be able to expand it further” (how many games do people want to play?).
Currently we don’t have a release date for the game but we can tell you it’s coming out on simultaneously on Xbox 360, PC and Windows Phone this fall.
The Windows Phone 8 edition is apparently “as close as it can be, still not finished but getting very close!”
