| Snoopy said: Tell that to people who buy online only games already. Cloud will just enhance features that was never done before. For example, fable could have a very dynamic world that allows the world to be evolved based on little things. You can cut a tree and if you visit it later it can be a stump or if you mine out a certain area, the people in that area will start getting poorer and become a rougher place to live/visit. Things like this can make games way more fun and more complex/deep. We need things like this because I am tired of seeing the same games with a better coat. |
You don't need CloudEngine for that
http://www.strangeloopgames.com/eco/
It doesn't get a lot of attention or support though, just over 4,000 backers.
It doesn't add a lot to a story driven rpg though. A lot of effort for minimal returns. Maybe a huge from dust style world could make a fun rts, yet I doubt publishers will find it very attractive for single player games. Allocating server time for every individual user costs a lot more than hosting worlds shared by a lot of users. Besides consoles already have plenty of storage to simulate dynamic worlds, all you need is hdd space for that.
The problem isn't storage or computing power, the real problem is the extra complexity. Writing a game with story driven quests becomes a lot more difficult when the world and environment can change a any time. That npc you need, well his village got wiped out last week and that cave you need to visit became inaccessible due to chopped down trees. Plus it's a lot harder to profile render performance in dynamically changing worlds. That's why that eco game looks pretty basic, Crackdown 3 uses cell shading and Minecraft already struggles on consoles with its simple looks. Cloud isn't going to help with rendering.
Having the game world on the server is going to hamper performance as well. Think you have popup now, try getting all that data from a server.
