Alpha Till said:
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. |
MS built the Orleans platform to to offload console processing to the cloud if a developer so wish to do. This is different from what most dedicated servers do as they just run an instance of a multiplayer client on the servers. MS Orleans platform allows developers to program directly to the cloud platform where they can utilze the cloud ability to process pieces and parts to build that game world instance. I believe the singleplayer and MP was suppose to be integrated within Titan Fall. It should be interesting to see how this game turns out and what Respawn can do with MS cloud compute.