It's a game changing feature for an open world game, especially for one as explosive as crackdown.
Think about it, buildings wouldn't just be hollow shells anymore. Any building capable of being partially destroyed would need to have something going on inside it.
Not to mention how frickin cool it looks.
Unfortunately this feature would require a constant broadband internet connection, but it seems that it just wouldn't be feasible without the cloud, while maintaining the same fidelity.
And if that level of destruction is working that well this early in development, I say the trade offs are worth it.
And he said it was EARLY crackdown work.
He did not say the tech would be implemented in the game (yet) /
Interesting though, say a 500,000 games try to play crackdown online, how much CPU power would the data banks need if its 100 x a high end CPU for each game being played.
Cant get my head around that, seems a very expensive proposition...
That is the beauty of the dynamic server allocation that a cloud infrastructure provides.
Although, I don't think it requires 100 high end CPUs to function for one game