The technology has a lot to offer, especially to single-player games that don't rely as much on a low latency connection

Apr 20, 2015 12:49 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has already teased us regarding the potential benefits of using cloud computing in tandem with the Xbox One home console, and now it's doing it some more.

The company even integrated remote server computing in one of its Xbox and Windows exclusive video games, Titanfall.

Microsoft's Azure technology was tasked with controlling the non-playable combatants that players encounter during matches in Respawn Interactive's futuristic first-person shooter, and the feature highlighted both the potential of the technology and some of its downfalls.

For starters, offloading complicated calculations such as the ones pertaining to procedurally generated content of advanced artificial intelligence frees up the local machine for rendering more graphics, which is always a neat benefit.

However, it also means that whenever your Internet connection is less stable, your in-game performance will suffer, with the game even becoming borderline unplayable if you happen to live somewhere where there aren't any nearby servers, and your data has to travel from another continent.

The good outweighs the bad

In any case, the technology still has the potential to offer us some neat features, as outlined by Stardock Chief Executive Officer Brad Wardell, in an interview on the Inner Circle podcast, which you can see in the video embedded at the end of this article.

The exec and developer believes that there are some very tangible benefits that cloud computing can deliver on the Xbox One computer entertainment system from Microsoft, and that the latency issue isn't nowhere near as bad as some people make it out to be.

He pointed out that for many people, the transfer speed of their DVD drive is often much lower than their broadband download speed, and that there are many things that can be done in order to achieve even more performance.

For starters, the data received from the cloud can be utilized for procedural creation of assets, which would enable a much higher degree of sophistication than the classic, static data can offer.

Cloud computing can be used for many things, not just real-time computing in high-speed action games. Wardell offered the example of a game of chess where the AI calculations are done in the cloud, and the console is free to take care of the rendering process, as a very basic premise for the viability of the tech.

A more complex example would be simulating an entire world, such as a sprawling role-playing game realm, or an entire planet in a game like Cities: Skylines. The whole simulation can run in the cloud, with the console only having to render the portion that the player is looking at at every given moment.

This would also mean that latencies that would prevent competitive multiplayer action from taking place effectively, such as having two whole seconds of lag, would be unnoticeable in a single-player experience where twitch action is not of the essence.