@frylock1987 @Zicoroen One simple example for Kinect´s voice use, Sir:
Multiplayer on XONE: playing Battlefield 4 while "smartmatch" produces a Titanfall perfect gameplay. Match done. You say: Xbox, play Titanfall. You´re there.
Multiplayer on PS4: playing Killzone...lag...server changes...still waiting...lag...Message: "Please restart your console".
Multiplayer on XONE: playing Battlefield 4 while "smartmatch" produces a Titanfall perfect gameplay. Match done. You say: Xbox, play Titanfall. You´re there.
Multiplayer on PS4: playing Killzone...lag...server changes...still waiting...lag...Message: "Please restart your console".
PS4's innovation for gameplay: share function, cross chat, central button, and joystick's lights. Xbox One's innovation for gameplay: share function, smartglass, smartmatch, cloud powered, player recognition, voice control, gesture control, force feedback on triggers, multimidia integration, skype engine. Which one brings you more? P.S. Listed is for gameplay only...
Amazon has a cloud that powers websites. Sony has a cloud that streams game video so you can play a game that you don’t have on your machine. Now Xbox Live has a cloud that somehow powers games. Cloud doesn’t seem to actually mean anything anymore, or it has so many meanings that it’s useless as a marketing word.
Let me explain this simply: when companies talk about their cloud, all they are saying is that they have a huge amount of servers ready to run whatever you need them to run. That’s all.
So what is this Xbox Live Cloud stuff then?
Microsoft has a cloud service called Azure (it’s a real thing – you can go on their website right now and pay for servers and use them to run whatever you want). Microsoft realized that they could use that technology to solve our problem.
So they built this powerful system to let us create all sorts of tasks that they will run for us, and it can scale up and down automatically as players come and go. We can upload new programs for them to run and they handle the deployment for us. And they’ll host our game servers for other platforms, too! Titanfall uses the Xbox Live Cloud to run dedicated servers for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox 360.
But it’s not just for dedicated servers – Microsoft thought about our problem in a bigger way. Developers aren’t going to just want dedicated servers – they’ll have all kinds of features that need a server to do some kind of work to make games better. Look at Forza 5, which studies your driving style in order to create custom AI that behaves like you do. That’s totally different from what Titanfall uses it for, and it’s really cool! So it’s not accurate to say that the Xbox Live Cloud is simply a system for running dedicated servers – it can do a lot more than that.
How is this different from other dedicated servers?
With the Xbox Live Cloud, we don’t have to worry about estimating how many servers we’ll need on launch day. We don’t have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don’t have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server. That lets us focus on things that make our game more fun. And best yet, Microsoft has datacenters all over the world, so everyone playing our game should have a consistent, low latency connection to their local datacenter.
Most importantly to us, Microsoft priced it so that it’s far more affordable than other hosting options – their goal here is to get more awesome games, not to nickel-and-dime developers. So because of this, dedicated servers are much more of a realistic option for developers who don’t want to make compromises on their player experience, and it opens up a lot more things that we can do in an online game.
Wrapping up…
This is a really big deal, and it can make online games better. This is something that we are really excited about. The Xbox Live Cloud lets us to do things in Titanfall that no player-hosted multiplayer game can do. That has allowed us to push the boundaries in online multiplayer and that’s awesome. We want to try new ideas and let the player do things they’ve never been able to do before! Over time, I expect that we’ll be using these servers to do a lot more than just dedicated servers. This is something that’s going to let us drive all sorts of new ideas in online games for years to come.
I know this got pretty technical and long-winded, so I thank you for reading this far. Hopefully I’ve cleared some things up, and you can see why I’m so excited about what Microsoft has done here and how it is letting us do awesome new things for our game. I’ll see you online in the spring to play some Titanfall on our dedicated servers!
This is something I have worked on for years now, since coming to Respawn. A developer like Respawn doesn’t have the kind of weight to get a huge price cut from places like Amazon or Rackspace. And we don’t have the manpower to manage literally hundreds-of-thousands of servers ourselves. We want to focus on making awesome games, not on becoming giant worldwide server hosting providers. The more time I can spend on making our actual game better, the more our players benefit.
I personally talked to both Microsoft and Sony and explained that we need to find a way to have potentially hundreds-of-thousands of dedicated servers at a price point that you can’t get right now. Microsoft realized that player-hosted servers are actually holding back online gaming and that this is something that they could help solve, and ran full-speed with this idea.
The Xbox group came back to us with a way for us to run all of these Titanfall dedicated servers and that lets us push games with more server CPU and higher bandwidth, which lets us have a bigger world, more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that!
Dedicated servers are when a computer sitting out on the internet handles all of the host duties, leaving every client free to just be a client.
You can get even more CPU on your dedicated servers to do new things like dozens of AI and giant autopilot titans! Suddenly you have no more host advantage! Bandwidth for the servers is guaranteed from the hosting provider! You can use all of the available CPU and memory on the player machines for awesome visuals and audio! Hacked-host cheating isn’t an issue! Matchmaking can be lightning fast since it’s guaranteed that everyone can connect to your servers. And since the servers aren’t going to go disconnect to watch Netflix, you don’t need to migrate hosts anymore! The player experience is so much better. This sounds awesome!
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