Arkane puts The Crossing on hold News

Arkane and Valve have put ambitious multiplayer shooter The Crossing on hold, deciding to focus on a first-person RPG and an iPhone strategy game instead.

"We ran into an unexpected financial challenge some months ago and we had to put The Crossing on hold," Arkane boss Raphael Colantonio told Joystiq. "Since then, we shifted our efforts to other very good projects."

The Crossing was in development for PC and 360, and aimed to ditch campaign AI in favour of real-life players, a bit like Left 4 Dead. The two heroes - the Elites - were to be beefed up, whereas enemy-players would fill many different roles while trying to stop them progressing. The story was supposed to be quite close to Nicole Kidman film, The Others.

The last we saw of The Crossing was in a trailer published early last year.

Arkane Studios is the developer behind Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, the first-person fantasy action game that used clever Source-based physics to dispose of enemies with; patches of ground could be frozen for enemies to slip on, things could be set alight, boxes could come crashing down and so on.

Head over to our Dark Messiah of Might & Magic PC review to see what we thought. Avoid the Xbox 360 version, incidentally.