Cloud Processing won't mean a thing for the Xbone

[Shinobi-san]

Machiavellian said:

SvennoJ said:
Diablo 3 is not a good advertisement for enhancements by cloud computing. It was a big downside to the single player gamer. There is a crack out now that let's you play the game off-line.
Same with Sim city. Let me save, burn the city down, restore. And instead of bigger cities, you get a fraction of the size to play with compared to previous games.

I think it's a pipe dream. I still have regular connection hick ups and only a choice between bandwidth capped cable or max 5 mbps phone line. And no plans whatsoever to bring fibre here. Maybe in 10 years things will be better, and hardware will be a lot cheaper to actually have a single player mmo running for a million players on day 1 without problems.

Btw Fable pipe dreams can easily be done locally, all you need is a hdd. Updating world stuff for the time you have been gone is nothing new either. The scope can be much bigger with cloud computing, yet the bigger the changes, the bigger the download size as well. Personally I would prefer to find my world back the way I left it when I pressed save, but that's just me. (Keep it synched with the character's time frame)

Let's continue this discussion after E3 with hopefully some actual examples.

I will say the problem with Diablo and Sim City is the same thing that has been happening with most game developers when they attempt to institute the net within their infrastructure.  They only provision for a base load and not over provision just in case they find themselves getting more users then expected.  These type of growing pains happen all the time with MMOs when they first come to market.  Its definitely an issue that MS must get right on the first run or get hit with a ton of negative feedback like the Sim City fiasco.

 

Once the developers get the servers up to meet demand, then those issues go away.  As for MS, it appears that they might be ready at start with their servers because it appears they are providing more than is needed at the start so the experience might not be the same.

 

As for Fable pipe dream, I do not see any RPG game even attempting that kind of persistent dynamic world today. From Skyrim to Witcher or even MMO type RPGs like Guild Wars 1/2. I do not believe the problem is as simple as using a HDD to store the world since that would not have been something Stopping Peter and his dream or any particular RPG today.  How many CPU cycles will you take away from the game to process and maintain the game state as things like planting a tree or destroying a village starts to impact the global world around you.  The best case would be MMOs in such a scenario and this could be something we might see with Lionhead new game.

 

Personally I would like to see the game world change with the actios I perform.  If I kill a village.  If I come back to that village later, I would like to see it overrun by monsters, or nature has taken over and now the bodies are decompose and the homes are taken over by overgrowth.  I would think the world would be much more alive if your actions actually had some impact to the point where unpredictable things could occur.

 

I do agree "Let's continue this discussion after E3 with hopefully some actual examples."

I think your mixing up scenarios here.

MMO's (or any online game for that matter) dont really use cloud computing to improve the game itself....as far as im aware that is.