FF14 possibly coming to XBox-1!?

[Kosmos992k]

Reading in the news right now at Microsoft is finally opening up their systems to allow cross-platform play with PC and PS4 (if Sony agree to it) starting with Rocket League on the XB1..

Sony already allows it...said the PS4 and PS3 user who plays FFXIV with other platforms...

removed because it's entirely possible I am mis-remembering and therefore wrong. "SIZE="1"]and played Burnout Paradise on his PS3 along side Xbox360 players and is[/SIZE]

...still wondering why this is considered ground breaking news.

Edit: It's interesting to note that PS4 and PC players already play together on Rocket league. The lack of a single central player ID/Account prevents some elements of partying up from being cross platform, but the matchmaking is. So, when Xbox One players get there, they'll run into PS4 players as well.

as long as the publisher chooses. that's the keyword. if lets say EA says no to battlefield playing with ps4, then it won't be cross platform.

Sony took the stance (when it released PS4) that it was up to the developers to decide whether or not they implemented multi-player within PSN & PS Plus services or using their own infrastructure.

If the game uses Sony infrastructure for anything other than authentication and checking that the game is licensed, it will require PS Plus, and that would require some bridging because it's happening on Sony's network.

If the game only uses PSN for authentication and license checking but the multi-player is peer to peer or uses 3rd party servers (like FFXIV) then multi-player doesn't require PS Plus, and the ability to cross play is determined by the developer and their infrastructure.

PS3 & PS4 have always had open access to the Internet facilitating cross play from Day 1 - if the developer supports it.

That said, both Xbox One and PS4 are fairly outdated in terms of hardware. They run very similar GPU's reasonably equivalent of my old card a Radeon HD 7870 - which was a middle range card 4 years ago.

PS4's GPU has a unified cache and 50% more compute units.

Oh, one thing that might be more interesting going forward for all players of PC/Xbox games. Microsoft already has an Xbox App running under windows. Xbox One uses an OS based on an embedded version of Windows. Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP) & Open Windows Platform is aimed at making applications a little more platform agnostic between PC and Xbox and any other device capable of running the RunTime environment. This blurs the lines further between Xbox and PC. Architecturally Xbox is a PC, and already runs a version of Windows. The Next Xbox may very well be your PC running a much expanded Xbox application that makes use of the whole UWP concept to virtualize the Xbox itself within the Windows running PC. In essence that would make Xbox and PC gaming synonymous, and would make cross-play even easier than it is today, as long as Windows gaming did not become locked into a proprietary UWP network.