Respawn Entertainment gives more detail about the Cloud and Titanfall

[Alpha Till]

ethomaz said:

Alpha Till said:

There are, as the developer mentioned, dozens of AI-soldiers. That would be possible without the cloud as well, but remembering online gaming this gen, as soon as the host had to calculate lots of AI instances and transmit their data to clients, significant lags became more common (obviously depended on the hosts bandwith).

In a way these AI soldiers are part of the game hosting, so the answer might not satisfy you. But it makes the gameplay unique.

Any game with dedicated server on PS360 or PC works like that...

MAG, SOCOM, Battlefield, etc... all these games do that.

I agree dedicated servers are better than P2P but what is new in the Cloud?

And no... it won't change the gameplay.

As far as I remember, MAG, SOCOM and Battlefield don't have AI soldiers. Furthermore, Titanfall's gameplay is unique regarding the fact that there is a certain amount of human players (6 vs. 6) and a certain amount of AI controlled players (don't know how many). There are games this gen that had AI controlled players (Black Ops 2, Quake Live Arena, etc.) in Online Multiplayer, but as far as I know, there was no FPS in which those AI controlled players didn't just replace human players. So that would be new in Titanfall.

You are correct, for Titanfall the Cloud seems to be used solely as dedicated servers, what would have been somewhat possible this gen already. But that not only frees the gameplay from the limitiations of the hosts bandwith, but also from the limitations of the hosts processing power, because the host doesn't have to compute the AI behaviour. We will see, how complex that behaviour will be.

In the end the Cloud is just a big dedicated server, but what I get from that developer highlighting the benefits is that there is a comfortable API for developers to offload stuff. That is very different from dedicated servers today, where there would run an altered host version of the game that communcates with the clients and everything has to be set up by the developers.