COLOGNE, GermanyThe time has come, it seems, whereby a single console is no longer sufficient to provide the raw power required to run the most processor-intensive multiplayer games. With so many players running around and potentially creating carnage, that humble black box under the TV is beginning to buckle under the strain.
We've already seen this happen with Titanfall, the Xbox One mech-based shooter, which relied on Microsoft's Azure cloud service to drive its AI. The game demonstrated that the cloud can indeed power games in a real time environment. But with the upcoming Crackdown 3an Xbox One-exclusive action game due for release in 2016developer Reagent Games has an all new and much bigger way of employing computing power from the server side to back up a multiplayer game.
"We really wanted to do something [with the multiplayer] that was very much within the heart of what Crackdown is," explained Dave Jones, Crackdown 3 creative director and Reagent Games founder. "It's a very physical game with you being able to go into the world and pick up every trash can, rip stuff out of the street, tear car doors off and use it as a shield, or even pick the whole car up. It was all about physicality, so we really wanted to bring that physicality to the online [multiplayer] space."
In order to live up to that original ideal, Jones and his team decided that each and every element within Crackdown 3's world should be destructible. Moreover, total destructivity is something Reagent Games believes more open-world games should evolve towards.
"We thought: what about if, for the first time, we make the whole world fully destructible?" continued Jones. "We asked ourselves simple questions, such as 'why don't my bullets go through walls when I shoot them?' or 'why cant I step through big holes Ive made in those walls?' It's a very different way of thinking about games. If theres a guy behind the wall, I can just shoot him through the wall, shooting both the wall and the guy to bits. That's the way we think game worlds need to evolve."
Buildings, then, are made to a specification that Jones describes as "physical." In essence, they're more than just geometry within a digital space that has been plastered with textures to make them look real. Instead, glass acts like glass, concrete like concrete, and steel as steel. Blow up a concrete pillar and a floor of a skyscraper might come down. Destroy the steel core of a structure and the entire thing might collapse.
"My friends might be in the top of a building and shooting at me," Jones described. "I want to bring that building down with them still inside it. That's absolutely what I want to do. Our buildings are made physically and to do that we need make sure everything stacks up in terms of the physics. Everything in the world is physical and everything persists. There's no fakery here."
As an example, Jones shows himself shooting a simple concrete wall with an assault rifle, tiny chunks peeling off of the structure with every bullet that hits it. There are no pre-defined "rules" of destruction: where you shoot is where the disintegration will occur. This allows you to undermine a structure in a way that suits your needs. You might want to create a new doorway to flank an enemy, which you can do by defining a new hole in the exact place you want to. Alternatively, you might want to create only a small hole in order to give yourself a sniper spot with fuller cover, as opposed to relying on windows or doorways. Or as Jones hinted at, you can take out key supports to bring down an entire hostile building.
All of this destruction comes at a price, especially when you consider that there's also four-player co-op and competitive playa price too high for the Xbox One to pay by itself. It's here that cloud technology, courtesy of the Scottish company Cloudgine, comes into play, making up for the local shortfall in processing power and providing the oomph required to create an entire destructible city.
Pulling up a custom HUD overlay, Jones showed us how much processing power is being used during his live demo. "This doesnt represent the power of the entire box," Jones was keen to explain. "It shows the amount we need normally deploy to physics on an Xbox One. As you create more and more destruction you can see that youre actually using the power of the servers youre connected to. Do enough damage to the base of a building and, eventually, it should fall down. The whole thing will fall and everything that falls to ground will react physically to that fall. You can see that the debris falling to the ground is taking up the equivalent of an extra Xbox One worth of power. The console takes that extra power from the server when it needs it."
Another overlay shows precisely which bits of debris are being powered by which server, some chunks of concrete pasted green and others blue. These objects are located on different servers that are all powering the same game, allowing for greater detail when necessary. Should you enact so much destruction that you need even more power, a new server will automatically come into play and distribute the processing workload further.
"When [a building] does fall down it crushes the building next to it, and that crushes the next one to that and you can see that that's using roughly six times the Xbox One's power," Jones says with pride. "That can continue across the whole city map. You can see how you begin to think about using collapsed buildings as a ramp for cars to jump off of and get to places that you couldnt reach before. Were doing a lot of destruction for destructions sake here, but this is a tremendous technology test bed, which opens up a lot of new areas of multiplayer gaming and makes games much more physical."
Despite just how impressive the level of destruction demonstrated in this demo is, Jones refuses to get emotional. After all, what he's just witnessed represents little in comparison to what he has already seen.
"We're hitting about nine times the power of the Xbox One here in this demo due to the way the guys are playing. I think 13 times is our record, though. You really can raze the entire city if you want to."
