Activision and Bizarre Creations are attempting to smash down the walls of platform-specific services by allowing players of their new title, Blur, to issue challenges to one another via Twitter. Though these challenges won’t affect in-game rankings and certainly won’t link Xbox Live subscribers to PSN users, it will still help to keep people with different hardware engaged in the same game world. This may be a smart play, considering the massive gap that exists between the three main gaming platforms.
From MTV News:
“A lot of us have kids and family and stuff, but we’re finding that as we’re getting older we’re just not able to get everyone together to play at the same time,” lead designer Gareth Wilson told MTV News.
In response, his group at Bizarre concocted ways for “Blur” players to issue challenges and responses to friends via a challenge system that doesn’t require any two players to have XBL Gold accounts or the same brand of console.
“I’ve got a friend from university who lives in Australia, and I can’t play with him, because he’s available at night time when I’m sleeping,” Wilson said. “So the Friends Challenge thing was really, ‘How do we get people together to play who might not be able to.”
Wilson walked through the process of issuing such challenges in a couple of scenarios.
“In the single player mode when you finish a race, it records all of your stats and information,” he said. “You can choose what you want to put into your challenge and send it to your buddy. He receives that as an Xbox Dashboard message, so he could be playing another game, he could be watching TV on Netflix.”
Because these challenges function mostly outside of the game and don’t actually have any direct impact on players, the field is wide open for community-driven events and true global competition. Additionally, though you’ll still need an Xbox Live Gold account to compete directly with friends in real time, the addition of Twitter challenges may help to provide new options to tight-budgeted households.
Look for Blur this May for Xbox, PS3, and Pc.
