Some possible problems with MS's cloud offloading. The announcement that Respawn chose MS over Sony for Titanfall due to this is the reason I'm writing; it seems devs are serious about doing this. None of these are insoluble, just something to think about. 

1. What happens if more people than expected log on at once, for example launch day? Consider the Simcity outages, but applied to a single player shooter.

2. Processing power in the cloud for every Xbox One is not free. The cost still has to be in the Xbox One pricetag or more likely an increased price for Live Gold. You're not getting something for nothing.

3. What happens when the servers are taken offline after 3-4 years? When multiplayer servers close you can't play multiplayer, but when single-player servers close the single-player experience you bought is permanently degraded?

4. The game cannot require said processing power because it has to handle internet outages. If the calculations materially affect gameplay, isn't that a problem?

5. If this becomes common in games, it is a large barrier to porting. Writing code to handle a huge network of computers is already hard, and handling two or more may be considered to be too costly to justify.

"The game cannot require said processing power because it has to handle internet outages"

I'm Glad that your specualtion is far from the truth...

By the way...How does Sony plan to finace Gakai..without charging for it?...perhaps they plan to pay for the service with microtransactions based on PS1,Ps2,Ps3 games..So basically PS a owner will have to pay just to transer their save files.....seems like your not getting something for nothing....But that's just my speculation...

I think what they currently get from live subs will go to this type of stuff. They will likely try to sell the hardware at less of a loss or subsidized by cable companies. I dont know how much it costs to set all this up but isn't live bringing in almost a billion a year? And once they are there it costs less to maintain. So over the course of 5-8 years of live subs I think it would be plenty profitable.

What I'm concerned about is bandwidth. My broadband is pretty low-speed but it seems to play fine (for the most part) on games like Killzone 3 or World of Warcraft. I do get periods of lag, of course, but it's normally smooth enough to play. However, what if that connection also has to handle extra data? Will it have a negative effect on gameplay? What happens during periods of lag or when my bandwidth drops during periods of heavy usage? I don't have a lot of confidence in this.

 Regarding #5 on the list, I can't see anyone making the effort to include wide-scale cloud computing for anything except an exclusive. There would be way too much overhead when porting it one way or the other.

Rol you were never a customer... please give some valuable points insatead of trolling.

And to the OP, don't you think these questions were raised when they were building the cloud structure?

Microsoft implements more servers.  There are 300,000 servers being added to the infrastructure.  If there are 7 data centers (as of 2011) across the globe, that's 42,857 servers added per data center.  More than twice the current capacity of the entirety of Xbox LIVE (15,000 servers) across the globe right now.  I don't think you understand how much capacity that really is.

 FUD.  No, the cost of Xbox LIVE is already paying for this.  Its the subscription costs that allow Microsoft to make major infrastructure improvements like this, and provide the level of service expected.   

The servers won't be taken offline.  The physical servers will never go away.  They will be continually used.  The virtual servers, for cloud processing, will grow or shrink based on usage.  Virtual servers can be brought up or brought down by the very request for the service.  In terms of a single-player experience, if the game usage were to disappear, than the virtual servers would go into a standby state, when a player began playing the game again, or players did, the virtual servers would pick-up where they left off OR calculate the changes to bring the server content current.  Nothing has to go away.

This has been discussed by Microsoft before.  Cloud processing won't materally affect gameplay.  Your world may not be as expansive or rich, but the single-player experience will still be possible.  Likewise, games will be designed to handle outages, temporary or prolonged.

Have you ever written a lick of code?  Writing code for many clients to access a small number of servers isn't difficult.  It's done every single day.  You send data up, you get data down, it isn't really all that much work.  Granted, in order to be effcient, the code will have to be efficient code, but it's not all that difficult. 

Don't try to derail the thread, this has nothing to do with what OP asked.

@topic:
Bandwidth and latency are what make me worry. Using WiFi to connect the Xbone to XBL could create problems. A ping of 30ms (judging by League of Legends many people are more in the area of 50-100ms though) might be acceptable for games like WOW or LoL, I imagine it to be very annoying if it causes artifacts/graphical glitches, though.

So instead of excitement that devs are doing this, we get threads like this.

Do you guys EVER turn it off???

Is the game completely reliant on the cloud? I thought it was an option for better graphics or something.

No game is gonna require cloud processing to be played. That's just an added bonus.

That's my 2 cents.