Just ran across this interesting article detailing how Sea Of Thieves uses the Cloud.
Sea of Thieves releases on 20 March 2018 and the whole game is only possible thanks to the fabled Cloud.
Just about everyone remarks on the graphics and physics of the titular Sea, but very few people even question where the physics calculations are run. Hint: The waves are shared with other players, and your Xbox isn’t responsible for any of them.
The Cloud is responsible for more than just making waves too. Rare have spoken about how they’ve deliberately designed the game so that players encounter fellow industrious, galivanting pirate-types approximately every 20 minutes. Most people that have played the game will be able to appreciate just how fundamental these player encounters are to the whole experience, but nobody has spoken about how Rare can realistically control and achieve this in an ocean of wild, unpredictable player behaviour. So if the waters aren’t clear enough; players and ships are seamlessly connected in a way made possible by the cloud.
Your pirate in Sea of Thieves ages. When I logged on this week, my pirate was still entirely recognisable…. but he’d changed significantly. Significantly, to the tune of about 40 years. He still has the same hook and peg, the same scars, the same rolls of back fat, the same mischievous expression. The hair is gone though, he’s picked up some wrinkles, and he generally looks spent. The fact that the game has an ageing mechanic is something of a justification for the controversial Infinite Pirate Generator, but that isn’t what this article is about. This article is about the cloud, and one harsh truth about the life story of my fat pirate speaks to that. He is no Pirate Legend; the tapestry of his life is dominated by a vast emptiness. He’s not lazy (not in the backstory I’ve given him anyway), he achieved nothing for a very valid reason: The game wasn’t actually available between beta sessions. He’s aged those 40 years without me even logging on; growing old thanks to the power of the cloud. I don’t know what else happens while I’m away, so I’ll assume he mostly ate cheese. One thing Microsoft promised from the off was that the cloud would deliver persistent world gaming. Ageing is a big hint that Sea of Thieves delivers exactly that, and makes me wonder how I can leave my mark.
The last point is a bit less glamourous. A note from Rare about the nature of the scale tests, wherein they warn that as part of those tests, they will be deliberately taking some servers offline. Not to implement fixes, or just as a standard beta disclaimer; They’re shutting off servers to prove that the service is resilient enough to pick up the slack and deliver the quality of experience players expect. I hear arguments that “dedicated servers aren’t new!”, but this level of uptime and quality of experience takes more than dedicated servers. It takes the power of that cloud we’ve all derided. http://www.gameondaily.com/avast-ye-microsoft-finally-showing-power-cloud/
