Square Enix Reveals New Cloud Gaming Interface Project Flare

It’s not just Microsoft and Sony – even Square-Enix is getting the Cloud computing business. It recently announced a new Cloud gaming architecture, Project Flare, to connect servers as a “virtual supercomputer” that will “revolutionize the way users interact” by effectively boost the efficiency of processing.

Square Enix director of business development Jacob Navok spoke to Polygon and stated that, “So up until now when we’ve talked about cloud gaming, we’ve mostly talking about streaming games. They weren’t really cloud games to us. Gaikai, OnLive and the other companies were just putting a console in the data center. They weren’t actually changing anything about it. There was a shift in the distribution model, there was a shift in the business, but there wasn’t a shift in the game design. It wasn’t a shift in technology.”

Taking Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the team rigged a tower of several hundreds of cardboard boxes together in-game and had the bottom box shout out, causing the remaining boxes to go flailing about. According to Square Enix, this wouldn’t be possible on a current console or PC. Another example of the “shift in technology” is showcasing the perspective of each party member in Final Fantasy XI all at once.

“Now we’re not saying the next Deus Ex game is going to be Deus Ex: Boxes, but you can imagine what we could do if these weren’t just boxes but people or NPCs or enemy characters or lots and lots of robots flying. We could possibly achieve real-time battles that look like battles in the Lord of the Rings movies.”

Project Flare is currently 2 to 3 years away from launch. What are your thoughts on it? Let us know in the comments.