As I say, it’s obvious that with the exclusive launches for the Xbox One, Microsoft really wants to show off how the compute cloud will improve gaming. For an understanding of this, see the notion of three cloud machines for every Xbox console and how that would affect MMO gaming on Microsoft’s console. Listening to the keynote speech for Microsoft’s Xbox One, it’s obvious that promoting the Xbox compute cloud is a very big part of it.

FORZA Motorsport 5 and Titanfall both mentioned its use—and both of these games were announced during the Xbox One press event.

FORZA Motorsport 5

In the racing car game, FORZA makes use of the Microsoft compute cloud in two ways: once to develop better AI for vehicles in the game that act like other players (via vast data collection and analysis) as well as computing textures and light diffraction across vehicle surfaces. The latter seems like an obvious use of the cloud—it’s offloading highly parallel processing to guess at what reflections will look like while cars are driving past objects and through changing angles of light and scattering photons, this is what GPUs do well already and it’s an intensive detail that adds to quality of life. However, it’s the former that caught my attention.

First, people listening to the marketing gimmick soundbytes should jettison the terrible “the end of AI” nonsense—what FORZA is doing by profiling human players in order to make computer-controlled cars smarter and act more like people is exactly what AI is about. As explained this profiling and the massive amount of data generated by a single player is poured together into an analysis to produce a “drivatar” (a cute portmanteau of driver and avatar) that will provide a more challenging or real-world experience to other players by “acting similar to other players.”

From what I’ve heard, giant amounts of data is being pulled from the player as they drive the courses and interact with other cars. The position, velocity, and reaction are all going to pour together in a very Big Data type of application and—according to what’s been said—a Bayesian algorithm will be applied to distill those behaviors into AI-behaviors that can be then delivered back into the game.

This property of the game will have multiple architectural challenges. It means that the profile of the player that exists in the Xbox compute cloud (in FORZA’s portion of it) will constantly update every time they play—and as that AI is used against other players it’s behavior will be used to contextualize the behavior of those players, producing their own profile.

Titanfall

Early reports have said that EA/Respawn’s Titanfall will make heavy use of the Xbox cloud for both physics and enemy AI. Information allegedly leaked from Game Informer July 2013 issue gave us this view of expectations (forum post on NeoGAF on the subject) and these thoughts have been mildly supported in the speech at the Xbox One reveal.

Representatives from Rewpawn Entertainment mentioned that the Microsoft compute cloud will figure heavily into the game. The compute cloud will most certainly allow much of the physics engine to offload less-critical information about moving objects so that the console itself can pay attention to whatever is up-close-and-personal; and secondarily teammate and enemy AI can keep moving even when it’s out of sight (but not out of mind) which will produce a more dynamic battlefield.

According to the leaked information and what we’ve seen Titanfall will provide giant battlefields with lots of soldiers and titans rolling through crumbling cityscapes and other shattered terrain. In order to track that many different enemies clashing together and still allow the Xbox to focus on the FPS element would require a lot of offloaded computation and analysis.

“Thanks to the more open maps, healthy mix of enemy AI and real players, and the ultra-powerful titans, the gameplay loop in Titanfall is more accommodating to newcomers,” NeoGAF quotes the article. Much of what’s known is that the the Xbox’s limited amount of RAM and processing power could only be augmented hugely by cloud virtual machines.

By implementing cloud architecture to support the Xbox, Microsoft is really going to expand the horizon that game developers can take players into.

Although, right now it’s hard to tell if this is entirely a good thing–it means single player games that will not play as well without an Internet connection, and it also means that when those virtual machines vanish (or the Microsoft cloud changes so that it won’t connect anymore) that game will diminish greatly. Legend of Zelda still plays the same today on a Nintendo as it did when it was released, so now we’re looking at something amazing that exists in an ephemeral state between gamer and gaming experience.