During Gamescom of this year, Microsoft finally showcased the potential of cloud gaming on Xbox One by demonstrating Crackdown 3. The tech used in the game’s multiplayer’s component is dependent on a set of remote servers that will provide volumetric effects such as enhanced explosions which is simply impossible to achieve locally on the Xbox One.
GamingBolt recently caught up with Lorne Lanning, the developer behind the famed Oddworld series. In a rather lengthy interview focusing on several aspects of the games industry, GamingBolt asked Lanning’s thoughts on Microsoft’s Xbox One and cloud gaming. It must be noted that at the time when this interview was being conducted, Lanning had not seen the Crackdown 3 Gamescom demo but he mananged to provide us with some fascinating insights.
“Regardless of your system’s capability, we can make you run a game experience of a much wider performance than your system is capable of. When David Perry was pushing Gaikai in the beginning before they sold it to Sony, he mentioned to me one day that “What really blew away the guys at Nvidia was that they realized that on the computer, whatever card it’s running as long as it has a basic video capable card and they have good internet connection, we can have them testing the new graphics cards on their old computer.”
“So if you’re you’re saying, “We’ve got a render farm over here in Hawaii that is a cloud computing farm which is 10 times the power of any console today in terms of the visual interactive experience they can deliver. And now if you use this cloud service, you’re not going to know the difference. But it’s going to feel like your console is playing it but it’s really coming from the ultra Xbox hub out there that’s giving you 10x cycles and computations that your machine won’t even give you but you’ll play it on your machine like it’s local.” That is a future. That’s inevitably a big future.”
According to reports, the cloud will make the Xbox One 20 times more powerful. It is different from Battlefield 4 who have multiple people at once and have an entire city that can be leveled. It’s not like a bunch of people are coming together to destroy one building. It’s more like something like “all of us can work together to destroy the whole city at once if we wanted to.” According to Lanning that is progress.
“Now that’s progress. Technically and theoretically speaking, that’s all possible. That capability could be going through your phone as well. You could be playing something that’s PS12, super computer, insane configuration that takes up 2,000 square feet in a server room somewhere running one game. It’s not impossible. Then that game is being streamed down right into your hand and you’re playing it at that full interactive, massive data base. And you’re playing it on a device that would never be capable of it. Basically what is cloud doing? It’s capturing a realtime cloud gameplay, it’s capturing your controller input, and it’s sending that back to the farm, and it’s processing that information and it’s sending you back the video so fast you didn’t notice the latency. If that’s happening then there’s no limit to how much can be computed off the farm.”
Lanning believes that Microsoft are taking a risk with cloud computing but risk is what is precisely wanted in the industry. “Then you get into all the logistics which is not a small promise. If they’re saying this, it’s not a small promise. And I hope they come through. Anyone taking chances, I hope they have success. The industry always needs those risk takers. So it will be interesting.”
Stay tuned for our full interview with Lanning in the coming days. It will be well worth the wait. In the meantime check out some amazing facts about Crackdown 3 in the video below.
