Thursday, November 11, 2010

PS3 Multiplayer COD

I do like reading the Face-Offs in Eurogamer even though the PS3 seems to come off the worst most of the time. however I do dislike possible factual errors or phraseology that paint the PS3 in a bad light.

Take this paragraph from the COD: Black Ops Face-off regarding the multiplayer split-screen option:

Here, Xbox 360 does have what you might call an architectural advantage. Two players can each log in with their own profiles and play with their own unique identities. On PlayStation 3 though, the second player is represented as a sub-player of the main PSN login, so you'd have "DigitalFoundryUK" and "DigitalFoundryUK(1)" as opposed to individual handles. There's nothing Treyarch can do here, as it's the way things are set up on the PS3. Bearing in mind that so few online titles support split-screen, it's not exactly a major issue, but on the other hand this limitation was somewhat apparent on Sony's own Warhawk and the ability to log in with sub-accounts for multiple players surely isn't an onerous element to add to the PSN infrastructure.
So if you want to play with someone else who shares your PS3 they can't use their own profile, how sucky of the PS3. Except doesn't the PS3 only game Resistance 2 have a split screen option, doesn't that allow the second player to pick from an account on the system to use? Why yes it does.

Ah I'm sure what he meant was that two players couldn't be online at the same time using split screen. Wait though doesn't Little Big Planet and Mod Nation Racers allow a combination of 'local' and online players using the local sub-accounts? Why yes it does.

What I'm guessing is the problem is that the servers can't identify the second PS3 player individually and thus can't keep track of their rank using the non-local servers. So it's not a case that two local players can't be online at the same time, merely that the second player won't have their progress/rank tracked by the game's servers which indeed appears to be the case for the PS3.

In that case I agree with the closing sentence, if a game allows you to pick a sub-account to play with there should be no reason that unique log-in cannot be passed on to the game's servers.

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