Watch Dogs will have more of a dynamic city on the Xbox One

[spaceelf]

Why did Sony purchase Gaikai for $380 million dollars if the concept of game streaming is so simple? Why didn't they just rent a bunch of servers themselves,and write some software?

sorry I felt that needed the bold bit haha

 

I don't feel that Sony can't add servers for enhancing games as MS did, but it'll take time for them to build out the network to do so and services is not their strength.  I wouldn't expect it for a long time.

[Showan]

Sony can do this... but it's very very expensive, and a lot of resources need to be dedicated to it (logistics, analyst, deployment)... 

MS has these server strategically placed around the Globe (the one in Iowa is one of many)... 300k Servers is a huge achievement that most fail to recognize... and if I'm not mistaken, that's more than WoW and Facebook combined at this moment in time.... PC gaming has had dedicated servers forever... But can anybody tell me (I honestly don't know) any PC game that has 300K dedicated servers backing them...

[Motoko.]

Not that this isn't cooI but I personally would buy the PS4 version since there's an additional hour of exclusive gameplay.

[HawkMan]

Not that this isn't cooI but would still buy the PS4 version since there's an additional hour of exclusive gameplay.

 

a single side mission that takes an hour if you take your time. 

 

not really something that sways me since I usually don't bother with these side mission DLC's on RPG like games. I suspect we'll see the same treatment on the xbox though, a different exclusive side mission. 

[Motoko.]

I suspect we'll see the same treatment on the xbox though, a different exclusive side mission. 

Idk about that.  It looks like sony cut a deal with ubisoft and branded their box art with that extra hour of content. It would hardly be a selling point for MS if they suddenly decided to do it way past Watchdog's launch debut.

[George P Global Moderator]

I get a little kick out of this, we went from "this cloud stuff is just MS marketing BS",  to "Oh well Sony can do this to if they want to."    I guess once people saw developers talking about how they're going to actually use it and take advantage of the option it's not just marketing BS from MS now? 

 

Thanks guys, it's always good to get some laughs from this part of the forums. 

[duddit2]

I have serious doubts that one of the first games for xbone will actually use the cloud effectively.

Esp. Considering that the always on req is gone and many people will expect to play offline.

 

Wow there son shine, did you just say that because the requirement is gone many will EXPECT to play offline? As in unplug the system or disconnect their broadband? I know not a single person that would do this, and from what I gathered by all the whooplaaa about the 24 hour checkin people seemed to be doing the whole 'I'm annoyed' dance without actually being affected by any of it in any way what so ever.

 

Everything now is online, your phone, your laptop, your PC, your tablet, your fecking DVD player/TV - how in the name of god do you derive that many will EXPECT to play offline?

 

Saying that though, a fallback method simply needs to be built in - so if online use cloud if not fall back to PS4 physics code? Simples ;)

[DirtyLarry Veteran]

you guys are really trying to stretch this,

who goes on a business trip and takes their xbox with them, what are we in 5th grade? you go for business not to bring your console and game it up

renting a summer home probably for vacation, most normal people go on vacation to leave behind electronics and actually do something, again we arent in 5th grade who plans a vacation then brings a console to sit around and play? just stay home

Going to a relatives house to visit, not to say hey im here and set up your games to play

Its like you are saying you just cannot live a day without playing video games which is pretty darn sad, especially for adults.

 

I feel those complaining are complainging to complain and exaggerating to complain. Anyone who buys this console at launch more than likely has internet, if you dont then i dont even know what to say.

First off, you ever hear of this thing called children? Yeah, THAT is who takes consoles on vacation. Grow up a bit and you may realize the world does not just revolve around what YOU do.

And why would you not bring a console on a business trip if you have 6 hours of downtime a night? That is childish behavior? Have you ever even been on a business trip?

And yeah, I brought my console to my dying grandfathers house who lived in the middle of nowhere so I had something to do as I had no clue how long I was going to be there.

I am a 5th grader for doing that????

 

Oh yeah, you are Mr Mature at age 26 throwing insults at me because all I did was provide real life examples of when people MIGHT want to play their console offline, only because a member said no one plays a console offline, and you call me a kid and say "our we in 5th grade again?"

 

Yeah, that is real mature there.

 

Seriously. You XBros really have ruined these forums. No one can say a single thing about your precious console without you all getting your panties so far in a bunch you have to resort to insulting other people. But I am the loser.

 

 

 

I get a little kick out of this, we went from "this cloud stuff is just MS marketing BS",  to "Oh well Sony can do this to if they want to."    I guess once people saw developers talking about how they're going to actually use it and take advantage of the option it's not just marketing BS from MS now? 

 

Thanks guys, it's always good to get some laughs from this part of the forums. 

Actually since I said "Sony can do it too if they want," which they absolutely can, I will take this as a direct comment at myself.

 

Not once did I ever say the cloud was not a useful feature on these forums. I said the online check in was. And I also said the Family Plan was not going to be what people expected it to be. But saying the cloud was just marketing BS? Nope, never said it. So yeah, another example of once anyone says anything negative about your the XBox, you all get so defensive and resort to rhetoric and BS. Actually, I said what made me finally preorder the XBox One WAS the use of the cloud in Forza.

 

Which ironically, I never said a single negative thing. Just pointed out the truth of the situation. That if the cloud winds up panning out, you know damn well Sony will also consider doing it.

 

I am SO sick of the fact I cannot say my opinion about the XBox One on these forums without being attacked and labeled a Sony fanboy.

 

This is my Amazon Orders page...

 

 

But oh yeah, I am a Sony Fanboy. Must be since I also preordered the XBox One? Right.  :rolleyes:

 

A whole lot of people on these forums need to grow up. God forbid someone says either the truth or has an opinion that is not 110% favorable of the XBox One.

[Razorwing]

I'm sorry.. but that Raphael figurine. :D! 

 

But yeah, back on topic. I don't think there really needs to be any judging of people of any kind on here. If Mr. Larry wants to bring his console with him, I'd say let him. It is his choice, not yours. Everyone's position is different, so I'll leave it at that. 

 

Now Back on the actual topic at hand. I personally can't wait for Watch Dogs. It kinda sucks for the people who are going to play it on the Current Gen consoles because it won't be as dynamic as the game on the XBone. 

[spaceelf]

A whole lot of people on these forums need to grow up.

The internet hath been pushing towards trolldom for some time.  Those among us who would rather talk about things than bash things get sick of dealing with it :/

[trooper11]

 

 

 

 

But oh yeah, I am a Sony Fanboy. Must be since I also preordered the XBox One? Right.  :rolleyes:

 

A whole lot of people on these forums need to grow up. God forbid someone says either the truth or has an opinion that is not 110% favorable of the XBox One.

 

 

I agree with you completely. No one should be bashed for expressing fair opinions.

 

I would point out that the reason some respond the way they do is a reaction to those that do make extreme statements concerning the X1 or anything else. Fanboys and trolls do exist, with some posting in these forums, so its tempting to overreact when someone makes a point. Blame the trolls/fanboys for some of the reactions you see.

 

I don't think your point was extreme. There are scenarios where people won't have internet access. Thankfully, neither console restricts that. There will be more and more games that offer a different experience for those that do have internet access. That you can count on this gen.

 

Regarding the cloud stuff specifically, the X1 will have an advantage in offering the server hardware/infrastructure for devs at least in the short term vs the ps4. Yes, Sony could offer a similar setup to developers, but they aren't right now. The only mention from Sony on this is a vague acknowledgement that developers can use servers with games made for the ps4. The Gekai infrastructure was designed for streaming gameplay to a device, not for broad application to leverage gaming assets, so Sony would have to add the proper access for devs to have the freedom to leverage their servers that way. I doubt Sony is working on that since they have enough to do just getting the Gekai services going (remember, Sony said that wouldn't be ready till late next year).

 

It boils down to this: MS is leveraging its cloud infrastructure experience to offer developers the software (Azure) and hardware (thousands of servers hardware wise) day one. Sony could in theory offer something similar, but it will take time for them to offer the same options. Any developer could build there own server system and offer a similar experience on both, but that's a lot of time and cost to pull off properly, so most will prefer something offered by the console makers.

 

Who knows what this means long term, but it sounds like developers see an advantage to these cloud options and are actively pursuing them. I'm sure Sony will consider pursuing this if it is a trend among developers to favor the X1. It only matters to us, the gamers, if there are games that are made better using such things.

The internet hath been pushing towards trolldom for some time.  Those among us who would rather talk about things than bash things get sick of dealing with it :/

 

Its pretty bad out there. I've left forums trying to avoid it, but its nearly everywhere. Its tough to find sanctuary lol.

[BajiRav]

Actually since I said "Sony can do it too if they want," which they absolutely can, I will take this as a direct comment at myself.

 

Not once did I ever say the cloud was not a useful feature on these forums. I said the online check in was. And I also said the Family Plan was not going to be what people expected it to be. But saying the cloud was just marketing BS? Nope, never said it. So yeah, another example of once anyone says anything negative about your the XBox, you all get so defensive and resort to rhetoric and BS. Actually, I said what made me finally preorder the XBox One WAS the use of the cloud in Forza.

 

Which ironically, I never said a single negative thing. Just pointed out the truth of the situation. That if the cloud winds up panning out, you know damn well Sony will also consider doing it.

 

I am SO sick of the fact I cannot say my opinion about the XBox One on these forums without being attacked and labeled a Sony fanboy.

 

This is my Amazon Orders page...

 

 

But oh yeah, I am a Sony Fanboy. Must be since I also preordered the XBox One? Right.  :rolleyes:

 

A whole lot of people on these forums need to grow up. God forbid someone says either the truth or has an opinion that is not 110% favorable of the XBox One.

Relax. You are not the only person on these forums doubting XB1's cloud features. You pretty much knew whom GP007 was referring to (the usual suspects if I could name them without getting a warn).

There are many who still say cloud is just a gimmick that MS came with after they saw PS4 was more powerful GPU wise.

[George P Global Moderator]

First off, you ever hear of this thing called children? Yeah, THAT is who takes consoles on vacation. Grow up a bit and you may realize the world does not just revolve around what YOU do.

And why would you not bring a console on a business trip if you have 6 hours of downtime a night? That is childish behavior? Have you ever even been on a business trip?

And yeah, I brought my console to my dying grandfathers house who lived in the middle of nowhere so I had something to do as I had no clue how long I was going to be there.

I am a 5th grader for doing that????

 

Oh yeah, you are Mr Mature at age 26 throwing insults at me because all I did was provide real life examples of when people MIGHT want to play their console offline, only because a member said no one plays a console offline, and you call me a kid and say "our we in 5th grade again?"

 

Yeah, that is real mature there.

 

Seriously. You XBros really have ruined these forums. No one can say a single thing about your precious console without you all getting your panties so far in a bunch you have to resort to insulting other people. But I am the loser.

 

 

 

Actually since I said "Sony can do it too if they want," which they absolutely can, I will take this as a direct comment at myself.

 

Not once did I ever say the cloud was not a useful feature on these forums. I said the online check in was. And I also said the Family Plan was not going to be what people expected it to be. But saying the cloud was just marketing BS? Nope, never said it. So yeah, another example of once anyone says anything negative about your the XBox, you all get so defensive and resort to rhetoric and BS. Actually, I said what made me finally preorder the XBox One WAS the use of the cloud in Forza.

 

Which ironically, I never said a single negative thing. Just pointed out the truth of the situation. That if the cloud winds up panning out, you know damn well Sony will also consider doing it.

 

I am SO sick of the fact I cannot say my opinion about the XBox One on these forums without being attacked and labeled a Sony fanboy.

 

This is my Amazon Orders page...

 

 

But oh yeah, I am a Sony Fanboy. Must be since I also preordered the XBox One? Right.  :rolleyes:

 

A whole lot of people on these forums need to grow up. God forbid someone says either the truth or has an opinion that is not 110% favorable of the XBox One.

 

First off you need to calm down and not be so defensive, second I didn't call anyone out as being a fanboy so I don't know why you even decided to go down that route.    Third I'm stating what I've seen and you can try to deny this as much as you want but at least on here what I said holds true.  When MS first talked about using the cloud lots of people called it marketing BS from them and a knee jerk reaction to not being as powerful as the PS4.  Now, do you want to deny this or not?   Regardless, now that a few developers are seen to being taking advantage of the option and talking it up it's not just marketing BS anymore.  Now it's turned into "oh well the other guys can do it to!".   That's cute, and it made me laugh a bit to see the backtracking stance.   But hey, whatever, god forbid I say either the truth or my opinion that is not 110% favorable with yours or someone else. 

[theyarecomingforyou]

I don't see cloud computing being a major advantage for next-gen consoles. Some assets could be outsourced but even those that aren't latency critical will still be latency sensitive, meaning you run into potential problems when you have latency spikes, server issues or dropped connections. If your internet goes down briefly will physics simply stop operating? Will the AI stop dead? How well will games be able to fall back into non-cloud mode? What happens when 20 million people try to play the latest Halo or Call Of Duty game on launch day? It doesn't strike me as realistic for physics to be processed in the cloud for fast moving objects / surfaces (water, smoke, etc).

 

I don't see the cloud features of the X1 making up for the performance advantage the PS4?by all accounts?has. It makes for a nice marketing point, especially as it is impossible to tell how much power is actually available, but I imagine that very few games will make use of it.

[George P Global Moderator]

I don't see cloud computing being a major advantage for next-gen consoles. Some assets could be outsourced but even those that aren't latency critical will still be latency sensitive, meaning you run into potential problems when you have latency spikes, server issues or dropped connections. If your internet goes down briefly will physics simply stop operating? Will the AI stop dead? How well will games be able to fall back into non-cloud mode? What happens when 20 million people try to play the latest Halo or Call Of Duty game on launch day? It doesn't strike me as realistic for physics to be processed in the cloud for fast moving objects / surfaces (water, smoke, etc).

 

I don't see the cloud features of the X1 making up for the performance advantage the PS4?by all accounts?has. It makes for a nice marketing point, especially as it is impossible to tell how much power is actually available, but I imagine that very few games will make use of it.

 

 

It's all about developers coding in the right fallback options.  Everything will just go to local processing and a scene will end up, to use their own wording, less dynamic than before.  I think these fears that ones connection could drop and thus the game will go from looking great to looking like it was made back in 2005 are overblown.   I'm sure developers are taking this into consideration from the start and targeting things that they can offload without much issue so that in the case of latency spikes due to server problems or connections going down they'll be able to fall back to local hardware resources without issue.   It's all about planning ahead, and if you can pre-process things, like elements needed for the next area of a map before a player reaches it, then you should have enough time to safely fallback if the cloud isn't working right.

 

There's also things like level of compression we just don't know about.  I think some might believe that lots of data will be going back and forth but that's probably not the case at all.   Some could be mixing this up with what Sony is doing with their own streaming game service, but that's streaming the whole thing from the cloud in which case if your connection does start to have problems then you'll notice it right away.   There's no local element to that so you're bottlenecked by your connection in the end.    With what the XB1 is doing it could be firing off smaller chunks at random times depending on how the player is moving through the map.  It doesn't have to be a constant stream of data going back and forth.    If you think about it, specially for SP, we're seeing lots of SP games that are pretty linear in nature, in those cases the developers know that the next part coming up will be so and so and can have things sent out to the cloud and sent back with enough time to make up for any latency issues.

 

I'm more interested in how it can be used for games like Watch Dogs or GTA5 and so on where we're talking about very large open worlds.  The offline mode could be pretty average, scripted and how we've always had it.  But once you can use the cloud then I figure we're in for more "real" worlds where the NPCs maybe don't act so "fake" and other little details come into play that just adds to the effect.

[engii]

I don't see cloud computing being a major advantage for next-gen consoles. Some assets could be outsourced but even those that aren't latency critical will still be latency sensitive, meaning you run into potential problems when you have latency spikes, server issues or dropped connections. If your internet goes down briefly will physics simply stop operating? Will the AI stop dead? How well will games be able to fall back into non-cloud mode? What happens when 20 million people try to play the latest Halo or Call Of Duty game on launch day? It doesn't strike me as realistic for physics to be processed in the cloud for fast moving objects / surfaces (water, smoke, etc).

 

I don't see the cloud features of the X1 making up for the performance advantage the PS4?by all accounts?has. It makes for a nice marketing point, especially as it is impossible to tell how much power is actually available, but I imagine that very few games will make use of it.

it seems to me you have absolutely no idea of what the power of cloud services will bring to gaming, especially massive persistent online worlds...Think Warcraft and larger but with fps gaming, lets choose Titan fall as an example.

 

You are obviously dreaming if you think you could host hundreds of players on a PS4 in an open world with all the detail we've been seeing in next gen gaming trailers and expect there to be any possibility of realtime play with no lag in a changeable environment i.e. building explodes and stays exploded over the net month of play and things of that nature...

 

Now on the topic of whether or not Sony could bring cloud computing services to PS4, you'd have to be fantasizing even more than some of these game creators are if you belive that is going to happen and with anywhere near teh same reliability as Microsoft. Why? well you need to look at which companies offer huge clouds currently and of those companies who offer world class development tools and have data centers across the planet...who of these companies has to pay for teh services as opposed to running their own infrastructure...what kind of history does the company have in cloud delivery...

 

When you wrap all that up your basically left with Microsoft (over 50% of fortune 500 companies are currently utilizing Azure for their businesses) with the company providing killer development experiences at next to no cost, globally. They didnt have to borrow case to buy a game streaming service which they wont be launching at consoe launch and have have had close to 10 years delivering xbox live as a service to tens of millions of customers. not getting their site hacked to pieces and then faffing around working out how to apologize..

 

Ubisoft is making some the worlds largest and best games and if this guy is saying they will push further, you better believe its because hes looked at what is possible and what is cost effective and what is available NOW with MS and compared it to Sony and said....just aint gonna happen...If Sony attempts to bring cloud services to their platform they will be paying Google r amazon a fortune to do so!!!! and who do you think they will pass the costs onto???

 

Wake up....realise what next gen gaming is going to be about - its all about massive multiplayer gigantic open worlds experiences...not single player offline....Cloud is going to MAKE A MASSIVE IMPACT on gaming and its already coming day one on Xbox One with forza, watch dogs, titan fall and others....

[blerk]

It's all about developers coding in the right fallback options.  Everything will just go to local processing and a scene will end up, to use their own wording, less dynamic than before.  I think these fears that ones connection could drop and thus the game will go from looking great to looking like it was made back in 2005 are overblown.   I'm sure developers are taking this into consideration from the start and targeting things that they can offload without much issue so that in the case of latency spikes due to server problems or connections going down they'll be able to fall back to local hardware resources without issue.   It's all about planning ahead, and if you can pre-process things, like elements needed for the next area of a map before a player reaches it, then you should have enough time to safely fallback if the cloud isn't working right.

 

I think that as this new generation gets older, and as cloud capabilities get better and more complex, the fall-back option will be something that may very well be discarded as the fall-back is not at all representative of what the developers envisioned. 

 

To me the always-on internet sounds more like not only was it intended to allow things like family sharing but to guarantee to the game developers a minimum level of online connectivity that they could use for cloud computations. Maybe MS research has some secret instant internet connection device that Xbox are going to use but hasn't yet fully matured! :shiftyninja:  

 

Wake up....realise what next gen gaming is going to be about - its all about massive multiplayer gigantic open worlds experiences...not single player offline....Cloud is going to MAKE A MASSIVE IMPACT on gaming and its already coming day one on Xbox One with forza, watch dogs, titan fall and others....

Perhaps not day one - no developer sounds like they have figured out anything particularly noteworthy or revolutionary. But I agree that next-gen will likely be defined to a large extent by massive persistent multiplayer worlds; at the same time incorporating single-player "experiences" into MP  ? la Titanfall.

 

But they better not forget single player. I for one do want to play story-based single player games with absolutely no MP or "social" aspects involved.

[Skiver Veteran]

Going away on a business trip and internet access costs extra.

Renting a summer home for a week that has no internet.

Going to a relatives house for the weekend that does not have internet.

I can keep going, but I think you get the idea.

And before you say none of those are realistic, all are conditions just I alone have personally faced.

So yeah, having a console that can work offline is a nice feature.

 

And this sounds pretty kick ass. Like the use of the cloud here. The good news is there is nothing stopping Sony from also implementing a cloud of their own down the road if it does wind up panning out. Or developers for that matter hosting their own cloud. So if this really does take off eventually, I hope people are not expecting it is somehow going to be exclusive to the One. All MS is doing is providing it for developers initially. 

 

No I completely agree there are circumstances that will need to be offline, may just be my interpretation of the comment I replied to but I read that as in a majority of people will want offline for the majority of the time. Agree with you're experiences but they are the odd week or two out of the year every so often. I used to travel a lot but the places I went didn't really allow for taking a console so it didn't happen for me.

 

 

If you're going fon a business trip, you or the company WILL be paying for Internet anyway.

if you're going on a summer home, well Internet should be one of your last worries, just as your games console should be your absolute lats worry.

OH NO, a whole weekend without Internet. yeah that would kill me /s

 

I feel like you keep embellishing and exaggerating your examples a lot in these situations.

 

In any case, the Xbox One version without internet available will be playable, it'll just revert to a less dynamic city like the PS version. so don't get to worked up. 

 

interesting stuff anyway, more dynamic environments is one of the things that have kept immersion behind in games. And no nothing prevents Sony from doing this, EXCEPT, first they need to hire a BIG chunk of either Azure or Amazon, and theywill need to do it at full price. MS rents it from itself at a very low price, and then provides it to the developers. and even if Sony where to do it. they would also have to create the API's and SDK's and all this for it. Best case scenario Sony is 2-3 years away from implementing it if they could spare the money. 

 

Developers doing cloud on their own however is EXTREMELY unlikely. the very reason this hasn't been done yet it because it doesn't make economic sense. Maybe for EA since they're so big they could do what MS did a create one cloud system shared between all their games. but developing a cloud solution and renting cloud power for single games is way to costly, especially since you need to provide for peak usage, not median. Whereas when MS does it,. they give everyone a huge pool of power to use from, shared between all Xbox one games, this means they can balance the load and necessary server power a lot better, and the developers/publishers themselves, they only pay a small sum for access. They don't have to pay for constant availablility of peak usage. 

 

I think your completely missing his point, he is saying that it may be needed more than someone would imagine. Company paying for Internet, not all the time, why should my company pay for internet unless its work related? They never fought a claim of mine for internet in a hotel but it was always claimed when required for work not pleasure, especially considering some of the prices hotels charge.

[JonnyLH]

I don't see cloud computing being a major advantage for next-gen consoles. Some assets could be outsourced but even those that aren't latency critical will still be latency sensitive, meaning you run into potential problems when you have latency spikes, server issues or dropped connections. If your internet goes down briefly will physics simply stop operating? Will the AI stop dead? How well will games be able to fall back into non-cloud mode? What happens when 20 million people try to play the latest Halo or Call Of Duty game on launch day? It doesn't strike me as realistic for physics to be processed in the cloud for fast moving objects / surfaces (water, smoke, etc).

 

I don't see the cloud features of the X1 making up for the performance advantage the PS4?by all accounts?has. It makes for a nice marketing point, especially as it is impossible to tell how much power is actually available, but I imagine that very few games will make use of it.

I do on the other hand but I feel its what ever the developer makes of it. Regarding local power and the cloud ideology your right, its not going to make up for the extra local power of the PS4, but thats because the cloud isn't a tool for making up for lost power, it gives developers a different way to think to make the games interact better. I've got a feeling MS may of changed the specifications due to developer comments of them being "comparable".  Since both consoles are X86 and of similar architecture, then like said before, its not going to be the raw specs what make a difference this generation, but more so how it all fits together architecturally. Something MS is being really great at recently and we're already seeing proof of that unfortunately. 

 

I'm very interested how it manages high latency and packet drops and other bad things which happen on the internet. Like you said, will things just stop working in front of you? More than likely, this will probably not be left to the developer and the logic between local and cloud processing is dealt with in the API. That'd be very smart because it means developers won't have to code failbacks which'll differ between games and there's a single and solid process for handling such events.

 

Also, for Sony to make a service like Azure wouldn't be commercially viable for them. They wouldn't be able to subsidize the cost to developers and it'd probably end up cheaper for the developer to implement a solution itself. Server farming is very expensive and to do it on the scale the PS4 would need, they would need to offer a solution professionally to cover the costs. That market is not Sony's and they'll probably not look into it.

[blerk]

<snip> I've got a feeling MS may of changed the specifications due to developer comments of them being "comparable".  Since both consoles are X86 and of similar architecture, then like said before, its not going to be the raw specs what make a difference this generation, but more so how it all fits together architecturally. Something MS is being really great at recently and we're already seeing proof of that unfortunately. <snip>

On the topic of raw specs has anyone else seen the rumors floating around that the XB1 is going to have a RAM increase to 12gb and a GPU clock increase?

[spaceelf]

no developer sounds like they have figured out anything particularly noteworthy or revolutionary

I would say the functionality itself is particularly noteworthy and revolutionary...even without immediate developer usage never having underperforming servers or relying on client machines to host, matchmaking services not being taken down, developers or publishers not having to invest millions on server farms to use online services in whatever way they see fit is a huge deal IMO.

 

I'm still kind of shocked MS is doing this in the first place.

 

On the topic of raw specs has anyone else seen the rumors floating around that the XB1 is going to have a RAM increase to 12gb and a GPU clock increase?

Sounds like a load of crap.

[JonnyLH]

On the topic of raw specs has anyone else seen the rumors floating around that the XB1 is going to have a RAM increase to 12gb and a GPU clock increase?

Just read up about that, it seems like the changes are been driven by development feedback and completion which is completely expected. They also seem to be driven by Respawn which actually gave MS the idea of using Azure for games. Starting to love those guys.

 

Source: http://www.examiner.com/article/xbox-one-rumors-point-to-a-higher-clock-speed-but-doubtful-on-increase-ram

 

One thing regarding cloud, we haven't heard anything from Epic Games. I can honestly imagine them baking in Azure support into UE4 on the X1, that would be absolutely insane if so!

 

EDIT: The rumor seems to have started on the Beyond3D forum which has a lot of game developers on it:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1763732&postcount=4689

[blerk]

I would say the functionality itself is particularly noteworthy and revolutionary...even without immediate developer usage never having underperforming servers or relying on client machines to host, matchmaking services not being taken down, developers or publishers not having to invest millions on server farms to use online services in whatever way they see fit is a huge deal IMO.

 

I'm still kind of shocked MS is doing this in the first place.

 

 

Oh I completely agree that what MS has made available is noteworthy and revolutionary, more so since they're apparently making it free for devs. I was just stating that I doubt that any killer applications for this technology will be found at launch. But who knows, the killer features may simply be dedicated severs and easy multiplayer and that might be enough. 

 

 

Just read up about that, it seems like the changes are been driven by development feedback and completion which is completely expected. They also seem to be driven by Respawn which actually gave MS the idea of using Azure for games. Starting to love those guys.

 

Source: http://www.examiner.com/article/xbox-one-rumors-point-to-a-higher-clock-speed-but-doubtful-on-increase-ram

 

One thing regarding cloud, we haven't heard anything from Epic Games. I can honestly imagine them baking in Azure support into UE4 on the X1, that would be absolutely insane if so!

Baking an unreal cloud  :D

And Respawn do seem pretty cool.

 

I would like to see a ram increase for the simple reason that I think it would make multiplatform games better - developers can target a higher minimum of ram therefore PC and PS4 also benefit. (Slightly confusing statement is slightly confusing.) 

[JonnyLH]

 

I would like to see a ram increase for the simple reason that I think it would make multiplatform games better - developers can target a higher minimum of ram therefore PC and PS4 also benefit. (Slightly confusing statement is slightly confusing.) 

+100

 

What people don't realise is, if the RAM got increased to 12GB that means the lowest common denominator for RAM is 8GB rather than 5GB so it will matter to this generation astronomically later in life.  

[George P Global Moderator]

Adding more DDR3 RAM to the system shouldn't be a big deal, and won't change much since developers can just have the games use more memory if more is there.  The whole idea behind adding more also makes sense if you take into account the info/rumors out there that say 3GB is going to be reserved for the OS and apps/multitasking.  So maybe developers have pushed to get full 8GB for game use which would have forced MS to add more RAM for their multitasking/app plans.  

 

I'll believe it when MS says it though.