As promised, Gabe Newell’s vision for making Portal 2 on the PlayStation 3 the best console experience has materialized. Valve announced today that a fully functioning version of Steam will be added to the PS3 game, and it sounds awesome.
It’s not a cut-back, stripped version of the Steam we all know, either. Complete cross-platform gameplay, chat, and Steam Achievements will all be present as well as the Steam Cloud, which will save co-op progress so you can continue where you left off from any PlayStation 3 console. Throw in the Steam overlay, and you have an almost perfect merge of Steam and the PS3’s functionality.
If you’ve somehow managed to avoid signing up for Steam account, Valve says that you can create one and gain access to all of the features “with a click of a button.” Who’s going to opt against doing that?
On the basis of this working seamlessly, I can’t see it being long before this capability is injected into all Valve games. Then everyone else will follow suit, and we’ll be in an I, Robot era of gaming. This isn’t the first time cross-platform gaming has been attempted, but it’s going to get a lot more traffic with Portal 2 than Shadowrun.
Read a full FAQ on what the Steam and PS3 collaboration will bring to Portal 2 (releasing April 19) here.
