Alongside TV, Sports, and Call of Duty, “The Cloud” was one of the big buzz words that Microsoft was throwing around yesterday. The Xbox One looks to leverage the cloud in interesting ways on the new console, ways that we’ve yet to see on any device.
In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft’s Don Mattrick explains how the company will give developers access to new servers, that can do some of the work creating images or other assets for a game, as opposed to the console itself.
“The cloud can work on background items, while Xbox One focuses on impressive visuals”
“Imagine a typical game: there are characters in the foreground that interact with the player, and a background landscape with trees, hills or an ocean. Mattrick said Microsoft’s new servers, which the company increased to 300,000 from 15,000 currently used by the Xbox 360, will be able to do some of the work creating images for that background landscape and then stream them back to the console and TV, while the Xbox One focuses on making the characters look as impressive as possible.”
While this certainly sounds like ground breaking stuff, it definitely begs for many questions to be answered. Like, how does this affect players who don’t have a solid internet connection? Is the quality of games lessened? Is the feature shut off completely? Surely we’ll be hearing more details as we head towards E3 2013.
