Crossplay

[Vepra]

Hello everyone,
I own and play this game on Nintendo Switch. As there is no forum for Nintendo that I am aware of, I'll ask here. Is it possible to play with Xbox users? Crossplay is quite a thing now and I am more then happy to have games like Paladins or Fortnite on Nintendo Switch that I can play with my friend who owns Xbox.

Is it possible to play with Xbox players while on switch? If not, are there any plans for that?

Thanks for any answer

[Darkness]

Hey there, welcome.

There's no crossplay nor plans for that, unfortunately.

Some official quotes on the matter scattered around here:

Originally posted by JLarja:

Cross-platform gaming, however, isn't really up to us. Consoles don't have standard networking interfaces, so you can't directly connect an Xbox to a Playstation. Some publishers have negotiated special deals with console makers, but for a small independent studio like us, it's hardly an option. It is also likely that if we were to negotiate some deal for Nine Parchments, it wouldn't translate to next project. It would also make patching and QA much harder (you could say exponentially harder).

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

Originally posted by MarjutFB:

Unfortunately I doubt we can bring cross-platform multiplayer to Nine Parchments, but thanks for the idea. I'll forward your wish ahead, but we indeed don't have plans for this at the moment. Enabling it wouldn't be easy, and the feature is not being asked very often.

By the way the game has a Discord channel with plenty Switch users, if you're looking for people to play with, or want to ask questions about this version in particular:
https://discordapp.com/invite/gXgYMDv

[Vepra]

Originally posted by Darkness:

Hey there, welcome.

There's no crossplay nor plans for that, unfortunately.

Some official quotes on the matter scattered around here:

Originally posted by JLarja:

Cross-platform gaming, however, isn't really up to us. Consoles don't have standard networking interfaces, so you can't directly connect an Xbox to a Playstation. Some publishers have negotiated special deals with console makers, but for a small independent studio like us, it's hardly an option. It is also likely that if we were to negotiate some deal for Nine Parchments, it wouldn't translate to next project. It would also make patching and QA much harder (you could say exponentially harder).

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

Originally posted by MarjutFB:

Unfortunately I doubt we can bring cross-platform multiplayer to Nine Parchments, but thanks for the idea. I'll forward your wish ahead, but we indeed don't have plans for this at the moment. Enabling it wouldn't be easy, and the feature is not being asked very often.

By the way the game has a Discord channel with plenty Switch users, if you're looking for people to play with, or want to ask questions about this version in particular:
https://discordapp.com/invite/gXgYMDv

Thanks for the answer and Discord link.

[JLarja]

We'll probably be looking for crossplay for our future projects, but there's zero change of anything from that getting to Nine Parchments. Even if all the red tape was cut (not going to happen, there's lots of red tape just to publish a single player, non-networked game on any console platform), Nine Parchment's code base is already far from what we are developing new projects on.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte

[Darkness]

Originally posted by JLarja:

...Nine Parchment's code base is already far from what we are developing new projects on.

Wait, do I heart Nine Parchments 2 is under development? Just joking, haha...

Heck, it actually made me wonder how would a sequel be called...

[nardomaa]

And what about pc and ps4 crossplay like Fortnite for example?

[Darkness]

No crossplay between anything.

My bet is when there's a primary server, crossplayer is more feasible than compared to a peer-to-peer game.

[JLarja]

Yeah, no crossplay for 9P, unless something really surprising happens.

Crossplay has never been about technical difficulties. It's about console platforms being closed and developers having to comply with whatever rules the platform owner comes up with. Note that this is not (directly) about console manufacturers wanting to close their ecosystem for higher profits. Closed networking APIs are also easier from security point of view, and make it easier to achieve good quality of connections.

From our perspective crossplay via dedicated server is somewhat unoptimal. Currently, our server for 9P and Trines (PC versions) is a simple matchmaking server with no persistent state. If it crashes or someone blows up the datacenter where it is running, we'll just restart on another (virtual) server. Because of that simplicity, it hardly ever crashes.

Having a real server, even if it just translates between platforms and transmits peer-to-peer data, it will need much more resources. Not to mention that US (or Asian or African) players will not be happy, if their "peer-to-peer" connection to next door will be running via Europe, so we'll need several servers and a way to choose correct one (which will be complicated, if 3-4 players are relatively far apart).

So yeah, we'll be looking into this, but there's no guarantee that it will amount to anything.

-JLarja / Frozenbyte