OXMUK

Insomniac's Ted Price has been speaking to Game Informer about Sunset Overdrive, the Ratchet studio's surprise Xbox One exclusive. According to he, the gaudy open worlder is designed to be connected - it'll be updated continually, and offers extensive community features - but Insomniac doesn't intend this to be a requirement.

Always-online games for Xbox One include Titanfall, which offloads processing tasks such as AI calculations to cloud servers. "Some of the hardcore data collection, correlation, and translation that we expect to do is difficult and takes a lot of horsepower, and that is one aspect of the cloud that is attractive to us," Price commented of the much-hailed functionality.

"Our intent is that you will be able to play the single-player without an online connection," he went on. "The game will be updated with content we expect that all players will want. You won't be able to access that without an online connect."

Price sees a lot of "potential" in the cloud, but cautions that it's up to developers to prove its use. "When people say 'cloud' it's one of those broad terms that mean many things. How we use the cloud depends on the genre, depends on the audience, and it depends on the state of the hardware behind the cloud.

"We're learning that new opportunities and ideas are popping up every month when we discover how we can take aspects of the game offline [to the cloud]. We are going to be relying on heavy backend services to churn through the data we get from players to understand what they're telling us and what they're doing in the game."

The benefits of such systems probably won't be apparent for a while, he added. "The potential of the cloud for console developers is pretty large. Over the next five or six years, it's one of those technologies that will change in meaning as we see more games come out and take innovative approach to the more and more offline processing that's available."

"It is proven that cloud services can improve products and services in other areas, so it's cool that games are starting to take advantage of it. Looking at the world's approach to this now-massive amount of hardware we have that can be taken advantage of, these are things are going to change faster and faster. Not just for games, but for every industry. It's ultimately good for all of us who consume entertainment."

http://www.oxm.co.uk/57495/xbox-one-exclusive-sunset-overdrive-isnt-always-online-but-cloud-has-pretty-large-potential/

i wonder if it will be a launch title

Sunset overdrive is looking more and more appealing.

Nah it won't be, but out in 2014 for sure

Looks good!

I can see cloud offload helping with the pathfinding on all those monsters. If there's something that can make a modern system chug, it's lots of AI.

Again, more developers talking good about the "cloud" and how it'll make games better. And still no developers discrediting it.

So can people finally stop making jokes and claims about it doing nothing of note?

not sure if i like the look of this game.. need to know/see more

Once I hear it from a third party developer that isn't making an xbox exclusive game.

Hopefully this next Insomniac game doesn't suck. Their last couple of games have been complete disasters, but I like the art style of this game. Hopefully they go back to their roots and have fun with their games instead of being all serious with games such as Fuse.