There has been a lot of mystery surrounding the use of the Xbox One’s promised cloud support. Essentially the question is this: Will all games utilize the dedicated server support, or will Cloud be useful on a game by game basis? Microsoft’s chief platform architect Marc Whitten shed a little light on this question in a recent interview with OXM.
“Every title can take advantage of our cloud services. Think of it as a tool in the toolbox for our developers to drive their vision and our goal is to make it easy and simple for them to do so.”
Senior product manager at Microsoft, Mike Lavin, commented as well, saying that “free” Xbox One cloud features would help eliminate “unfair advantages” in multiplayer.
“Because we’re offering all of this free compute power to Xbox One game creators, we’re really advocating for server-based hosting. You’re going to see a lot of that in Forza – Forza Motorsport 5 is server-based, so it kind of eliminates the ability to screw with your router and give the other person an unfair advantage. We believe that en masse, as people take advantage of our cloud compute offerings, that we should start to see a major drop in that problem, with player-hosted multiplayer.”
The Xbox One is currently due to launch on November 22nd across 13 territories.