The success of Microsoft's first person shooter, ShadowRun looks likely to determine whether Epic follow suit with Unreal III and use the Live Anywhere service to bring together PC and Xbox 360 gamers in the ultimate online battlefield. Ask any hardcore PC gamer and they'll confidently predict that years of using a keyboard for first person shooters will see them victorious when the two rival factions meet. E-sports in the PC world is continuing to grow rapidly, whereas the Xbox 360 has only recently stepped into the world of competitive gaming, so PC gamers are sure to have an advantage. We'd predict that PC gamers will be the victors, after all they'll be able to tweak their performance settings and will have a wide range of joysticks to choose from, but 360 gamers are also a committed bunch who will be desperate to win the fight.

In an interview with Game Informer, Geoff Morriss lead producer of Unreal III has said that he currently has no intention of bringing both platforms together online, but he did suggest that his opinion may change if Shadowrun proves to be successful:

The Live network also makes it not a trivial task to make it integrate with the open network of the PC and the PS3. We’re very interested to see how Shadowrun does it and if people will want that. As a consumer of games myself, with Battlestations: Midway I’ll violate my rule, because I really love Battlestations: Midway." said Morriss. There’s a great PC version and there’s a great 360 version, but I want to play with the biggest number of players. I want the biggest server pool. I don’t want to have to decide and artificially split my audience between the two. I’m going to go where the bigger audience is. With UT, I don’t want to have the PC players to play with just half of the UT players just because of the platform. There’s a real motivation to make it interchangeable with one big pool of servers out there that everybody can play in. If I can have a hundred servers with great ping to me by having all those servers shared, that’s really compelling to me. Oftentimes, you’ll see something like Battlefront 2, which is another game I love - there are much more players on Xbox, more servers, than there ever were on PC. As a player, I want to play better servers with more people.

Morriss also took the explain how the Xbox 360 version will be enhanced to bring it closer to the PC version: "We are making tweaks for the console versions to make sure it’s as much fun as it is on the PC with that input device. Those kinds of tweaks are movement-speed based, collision cylinders—we certainly don’t want to have tracking, but we’ll probably have some sort of adhesion and friction when you’re moving the cursor around. At the same time, we don’t want something that’s basically an aim-bot.

At CES 2007, Microsoft showed gamers how Shadowrun will support 16 players online using a combination of PCs and Xbox 360s and so far reports are suggesting that it runs smoothly using the Live Anywhere service.

Shadowrun will be the flagship title for the Live Anywhere service that allows Windows Vista PC users to be fully integrated into Xbox Live. It's is a first-person shooter engaging mild cyberpunk elements to the gameplay. The game takes place in Brazil, year 2031, which is before the events that shaped the Shadowrun universe.

The player will choose from two factions to play as, the megacorp RNA Global and the resistance group known as The Lineage. Playable races are Human, Elf, Troll and Dwarf. Each race has their own racial traits (Humans can equip more Tech, while Elves can regenerate health, and Dwarves suck essence, while Trolls turn to stone while taking damage, etc).

Players will purchase magic, tech, and weapons in between each round of play. Magic will include teleportation, resurrection, and a castable tree of life that will slowly heal any players that stand near it, turning into smoke for invulnerability, summoning a monster to do your bidding, casting a field of lethal crystals, and blowing a powerful gust at enemies and objects. Purchasable tech items include enhanced vision, which allows the player to see through walls, a glider, which enables short distance flight, wired reflexes, which greatly increases your physical attributes, anti-magic generators, Smartlink, which gives you greater accuracy and other specific advantages. Weapons include a sniper rifle, SMG, a shotgun, a minigun, a semi auto rifle, a rocket launcher, and a katana for assasinations and ninja style tactics.

We've had this debate a million times, but it's time to start it all over again. Who will win the ultimate gaming battle? PC gamers? or Xbox 360 gamers?

Sources: Game Informer, Wikipedia