A good explaination of "the power of the cloud"

[MeachTheMonster]

Titanfall: Respawn's 'second skin' | Polygon

Respawn has conducted numerous blind player tests of Titanfall, and the results of its efforts to blend multiplayer and single-player tentpoles are encouraging. "They’re playing a multplayer game and they don’t even realize it for the first 45 minutes," said McCoy. "They see all this crazy stuff happening around them, but it doesn’t click that these are people in our office playing against them." And according to every Respawn employee interviewed for this article, this is due in large part to Titanfall’s cloud-implementation.

"One of the new things … is taking advantage of the cloud to put our dedicated servers there, to eliminate things like host advantage and things like that, and introduce more stable experiences for our players," Zampella says. But Titanfall’s server-based backbone goes beyond the traditional benefits of dedicated servers for multiplayer games. "It allows us to offload all AI processing, all that single-player stuff, onto the cloud."

The "single-player stuff" Zampella alludes to includes the basic scripting and control of the world itself. All non-player activity is determined server-side, whether it’s AI "popcorn" or the massive ships that often hover over the battlefield. There are multiple practical benefits to this arrangement. Instead of having world events determined in one player’s session and uploading that information to the multiplayer server, which would then be distributed to each player, locational and movement data for the various parts of Titanfall are distributed to each player simultaneously.

"Being able to know we have those servers available allows us to focus on other things," Baker says. It also frees up system resources for the game running on a console or PC. "Before we decided to do that, our plan was to have (two of six available) threads dedicated to that, to running the 'server' on one of the (player) clients. It gives us more CPU available on the console than we’d have."

"I don’t know that we would have tried this game, had we not had access to the cloud and the servers that it gives us," Emslie said.

The cloud

 

[Spliff]

Embrace the future of console gaming, friends

 

[daze23]

they should have found a different buzz word. when I hear "the cloud" I think of online data storage, not all this server-side processing stuff

 

[Ain't That Something]

PITY POST

 

[Dwight Howard]

oh you aint know? get a PS4 breh. We off Xbox One's my dude.

 

[Prodigital]

Hmmm, this makes sense kinda now. Seeing games like call of duty using scripted events in online maps when these events could be dynamic based upon another players actions, allowing for events like buildings falling this way instead of that way...

Thing is, xbox1 providing cloud isnt something a good developer couldn't do for them self.

 

[Ayo]

There are multiple practical benefits to this arrangement. Instead of having world events determined in one player’s session and uploading that information to the multiplayer server, which would then be distributed to each player, locational and movement data for the various parts of Titanfall are distributed to each player simultaneously.

This is the key element right here. Multiplayer gaming becomes a little more fair.

And I don't understand all of the hate for what Microsoft did. Microsoft built a huge data center and provided a couple of tools and an API. It's not like Sony couldn't do something like this for the PS4. They wouldn't have to redesign anything really. They would just have to build a huge datacenter and add a thing or two to the OS

But Sony don't got Microsoft $$$$$$$$$ so I see why they aren't going to do it.