Microsoft recently showed off how it foresees developing games, as well as issuing updates for those games in the very near future. The company has come up with a way where someone can change various aspects of a game, including the very mechanics that govern it in real time. The updates to those mechanics are then demonstrated in the gameplay immediately, without having to download a new patch.
Microsoft showed off this feature using Project Orleans, which has already been implemented in parts of Halo: The Master Chief Collection‘s online play. Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich showed the feature at the Build 2015 conference on a little game that has been dubbed Actoroids. The “Reliable Actors API” allowed Russinovich to go into the cloud and make new uploads and builds and then apply those changes to the way asteroids and other virtual actors behaved in the game right away.
While Actoroids might be a very simple game, it seems as if Microsoft is dedicated to bringing this kind of feature to bigger and more detailed games in the very near future. It seems likely that there will be a day, not too long from now where an Xbox One player might complain about a particular bug and that bug will be ironed out in a matter of hours or days, instead of weeks. The fact that the bug would be ironed out as the player was online using the game sounds pretty attractive as well. For now, take a look at the video below and see how the cloud could be changing game development in the near future.