How far along are the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions?
(Robin Walker) So the Xbox one, we have people in on Xboxes, while you were playing [referring to IGN] there's people playing on Xbox 360s.
In that play session we just did?
(Doug Lombardi) Yeah there's always at least one guy, in there, that's an Xbox 360 guy.
So you're actually playing now on Xbox 360s connected to PCs?
(Doug Lombardi)
Technically it's done.
(Robin Walker) From our perspective, we did the Xbox port of Half-Life internally, and we did that because we wanted to have the expertise from doing that. Like controller expertise and all the sorts of decisions you've got to make that are different on consoles we wanted to have that in-house because we knew we'd be doing more Xbox titles and more console titles. And so the same guys that did that are working on TF2, we have all the tweaks we did to the controls, the sticks and everything. One of the advantages of TF2, relative to something like Counter-Strike, is that it's not so much about aim.
What about the PS3 version?
(Doug Lombardi) The PS3 version is being done by EA over in the UK, and they don't have all the networking stuff in yet to do anything other than [pause] it's rending and running the games and whatnot, but they're still dropping in the network layers. They're going to be using a piece of code that EA uses for its PS3 multiplayer stuff. Chances are the PS3 version will only play other PS3s. There's zero chance of them talking to 360s.
Is each version roughly at the same stage of completion?
(Doug Lombardi) No, everything starts on the PC and then migrates over. Because the Xbox 360 stuff is being built internally here the loop on that is like hours or days, and the PS3 stuff, naturally, because it's going over to the UK with a different team lags by a week or two. But they're not months apart.