The Crossing

Arkane Studios have announced that, “ We have placed The Crossing in "Hold position" mode so that we can focus on our project right now.”

Overview

The Crossing is a first-person shooter developed Arkane Studios. Powered by Valve's Source engine, the game promised to fuse singleplayer and multiplayer gaming together, a concept they've coined "cross-player". The story takes place in two parallel universes - The first universe is set in a modern day Paris that has descended into anarchy with the collapse of their government; the second universe features a still active Knights Templar that did not disband in 1307. The player will presumably traverse between these alternate universes.

Gameplay

The Crossing's big selling point is a blending of singleplayer and multiplayer. The developers hope to accomplish this by letting regular players control the enemies in a single player campaign. This makes it especially unfortunate, then, that the exact same concept was used in Mindjack, which also relied on other things for gameplay instead of relying on that one gimmick. For example, as in any regular single player FPS, there will be a player controlling the main character as he walks through the levels, however instead of his enemies being controlled by AI, the enemies can be controlled by other humans. The main character in this mode, called an Elite, will have better guns and can take much more damage than his enemies, who are named Skirmishers.

Also included is a team-based multiplayer mode called skirmish which uses a similar format.

Cross-play – story maps and skirmish

Skirmish maps are either populated by skirmish players only or populated by both skirmish players and Elites. When there are no Elites around, the game works like a normal multi-player shooter, where the skirmish players can play a team deathmatch, conquest, or capture the flag (CTF).

The Elites are playing their story maps and can join a skirmish map as part of their campaign. However skirmish players can also invade story maps and can take over an A.I of enemy creatures. Once the story mission is complete, Arkane Studios servers select a match according to different criteria, including difficulty setting and so on, which then places story players in the queue for applicable skirmish maps.

When a skirmish ends players go to the debrief screen. If an Elite player joins the next round, the system will tell and in this case, roles might be reassigned or not by the server. The skirmishes players will get roles according to the need of the story for the Elites.

For example, it's possible that the skirmish players were playing 10 terrorists Vs. 10 counter-terrorists for the previous round, but now that Elites are in the game, the system is going to assign them all to kill the Elites. E.g. there will be 20-counter terrorist that need to prevent the Elites from accessing the system data. Another example could be, that one team of the skirmishers needs to support the Elites, allowing them to complete theirs story mission.