Apparently Microsoft DROPPED the ball.

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a huge Blood Bowl fan. I played the miniatures game back in the day, and proceeded to buy the PC game when it was released earlier this year. I gave that game a glowing review, and intended from Day One to buy the 360 version upon its release as well.

Microsoft, however, have given me less reason to do this. Want to know how they’ve screwed over the consumer this time? Hop on over the jump with me…

The Xbox 360 SKU of Blood Bowl was released today (Friday), in Europe. All was well with the world, until people began reporting certain omissions from the original PC game. Persistent online leagues cannot be set up, Star Player Points (Blood Bowl’s take on Experience), are limited to Single Player games only, and teams are only customizable to the point of the player choosing a team name.

At first, the entire player base revolted against the developer, Cyanide. It seems that they’re not the ones to blame in this case though. The game of Blood Bowl weighs heavily on statistics, art and animations. This led to the PC version requiring lengthy load times at the beginning of each match in order to run each [hour-long] game smoothly. Microsoft, it seems, has decreed that they have a “maximum amount of time a loading screen can be displayed,” and in its original form, Blood Bowl exceeded that time.

In order to meet Microsoft’s demands, Cyanide have cut several features from the game to decrease loading times. This is their official stance on the subject, at least. I’m no game programmer, so I couldn’t even venture a guess as to whether this all makes for good sense. All I know is that if you had plans to level your players whilst playing with your friends, you’ll be needing the PC version.

As far as I can tell, the player’s Single Player team can be used, SPPs and all, in multiplayer games. But the inability to gain further SPPs against other players almost makes the whole process moot.

I’ll probably pick this one up anyway. If nothing else, in the hope that Cyanide can release a patch that fixes these issues without increasing load times. It just depresses me that Microsoft have essentially chopped a perfectly good leg off a game just because it walks a bit slow.