A lot of info came out last week about Blur at the press event that Bizarre Creations held, and some of that info seems to have been lost in translation. It’s understandable; those Liverpool accents are thick. But I’ve seen some media reports that are spreading regarding how “cross-platform challenges” work and, well, they don’t actually work that way.
Kotaku is reporting that you can send challenges to other players on Xbox Live even if they’re Silver accounts. That’s true — these challenges are based on single-player, career-mode events, like coming in in X place with X fans and X number of crashes or what have you. You unleash a corker on LA Docks in your career, for instance, and then you can send an XBL message to a friend who is also working their way through their own indepedent career mode, and they get a dashboard message with your boasty challenge and all its rude details.
But the Twitter integration and how it lets you send challenges around is something different. Twitter built in to all three versions of the game (PC, PS3, and 360) and you can customize your messages before sending them out (i.e., you’re not stuck with whatever statement the game decides you should send out), but both Kotaku and MTV Multiplayer suggests you’ll be able to send each other challenges between platforms through that. Well, yes; if I’m watching my Twitter account and a friend on 360 says “Hey, @OneOfSwords, I just got this time on this track, try and beat it,” and I’m playing the PS3 version…that’s a cross-platform challenge. I can certainly read that message, then sit down at my machine and try to beat his time. There is no technical infrastructure or data link between those two platforms; you can’t send from Twitter directly to someone’s 360 or PS3 inbox. Blur makes it easy to send your gameplay information out from the game, but the player still has to process that info themselves.
Makes sense when you think about it. 360 sends info to 360 people, PS3 sends info to PS3 players, and Twitter sends data to Twitter. They do not cross-pollinate into each other’s internal messaging systems. Mind you, that’d be a cool trick. But it’s not a trick I’ve seen any game pull off yet. The world of multiplayer gaming would be a very different place.
Anyway…in case you were getting your hopes up, allow me to dash them. The Twitter and challenge messages are cool and few if any other games give you this much control over their content — but they’re not quite as far advanced as some of the reports suggest.
