The Crossing

The Crossing is a canceled first-person shooter that purported itself to be the first in a new genre: "crossplayer", which would have blended elements of single-player and multiplayer games. Specifically, the game would have featured a singleplayer campaign which could be joined by other players taking on the roles of enemy NPCs in certain areas. The story would have taken place across two different versions of Paris in separate but connected universes. The first universe resembles the modern day, with slums, ghettos, and organized crime, while the Paris in the other universe is ruled by the Knights Templar, which survived through to the present. A bridge is created between these two worlds when a group of scientists who have used time travel technology to create branching timelines in order to steal the technology of the resulting advanced futures discover that their technology has malfunctioned, allowing the Knights Templar to invade modern-day Paris. The player possessed a grappling hook to scale walls, as well as a variety of weapons including a sword, nailgun, and a throwable blade. When playing as a soldier to invade somebody else's campaign, the player would have teamed up with three other players to take down the campaign player, referred to as the "Archon". The game was revealed in a teaser in December 2006 with a cover story in Games for Windows magazine the following month. Although there was interest in the title, prospective publishers were deterred by Arkane's plan to prioritize the PC experience and the lack of plans to port the game to the PlayStation 3. After negotiations soured with one particular publisher, Arkane, realizing that they could not get the budget they needed to properly execute their vision, canceled the game in order to work on LMNO instead.