While much has been made about the power of the Cloud for games like the upcoming Crackdown 3, Frontier Developments’ Elite: Dangerous will also be making use of its power on Xbox One.
This is according to Gary Richards, senior producer for the Xbox One version, who was asked about his take on Xbox One’s Cloud and whether Elite: Dangerous could utilize it in the future.
Richards said that, “We already use it. The cloud is essential for Elite Dangerous. The entire galaxy lives on our cloud servers, and it’s those servers that make the game’s unique features possible. It means we have a power struggle spanning countless star systems that every player can participate in. It means wars are won and lost based on player actions.
“It means players can cooperate towards massive community goals like building star ports or preventing plagues. It means whenever you’re the first person to discover a start system or planet, you’ll forever have your name attached to it as the discoverer. It means we have an economy players can manipulate. And most important of all: it means whether you play on PC, Mac or Xbox One EVERYONE is participating in the same galaxy. There’s one story, one economy, one Powerplay state and one galaxy – all living and changing based on player actions on the cloud.
Also, with regards to realizing the vision of Elite: Dangerous on the Xbox one – which is fairly less powerful than the PC – especially given the console’s fixed hardware state, Richards said, “The new generation consoles are actually considerable machines, and development is aided by the set benchmark. PC is always a ‘moving target’ in a sense, but you always know what’s inside an Xbox One. And that means we can keep optimizing with that target in mind.
“One thing that’s remained consistent is that we’ll never throttle one version of the game to benefit another. We shipped on PC last December and on Mac in May, with the optimizations we made on Mac all fed back into the PC version. The same goes for the Xbox One release. We didn’t cut content or features on PC to make the game work better on Mac and Xbox One; we actually improved the game’s performance, wherever you play.”
Elite: Dangerous is out today on the Xbox One. What are your thoughts on it? Let us know in the comments.