Another interesting feature on the season premiere of The 1Up Show (Episode 61) is a bit of an interview with the folks from Arkane Studios behind a new game they’re working on called The Crossing. It aims to solve two big problems with games today in an eye-opening way. The problems are:

1. A.I. enemies are never good enough. Humans will always beat them.
2. Multiplayer skirmishes are meaningless.

How they propose to solve this is the hook behind the game. Basically, it’s a cross between a single player game and a multiplayer game. When possible, the game will bring in live players to play the enemies in your game, and those opponents will have their own set of goals. Each side will have different goals, and there may be multiple sides competing within the same game. Players would be picked from queues waiting to enter. There’s more to it than just this, but the basic premise of people taking over for A.I. characters is the common thread.

The name they give it is “cross-player”, replacing single-player and multi-player with a single game mode. The 1Up staff talking about it seem to see it as a possible major leap forward in game evolution — if Arkane Studios can pull it off.

That’s a big IF, and while it would definitely make me sit up and take notice if it works, there are a zillion things I could see going wrong with it, almost all of them having to do with their choice of platform, engine requirements, and game type.

We all know that the Source engine still has sizzle these days, but the load times just trying to get into a Half-Life 2 Deathmatch are long. Add in overhead from lag and the idea of merging in players as you go and you have to wonder if it really can be done and run well enough to work. I am not optimistic.

What do you think?