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[EvB]

I personally think the title is not really that misleading in the sense that this game will use the cloud and the whole system will be symbiotic. It is one system rather than a console/server. They need each other to function as regards the multi-player experience.

It does make the console more powerful than any other while running this game mode.

It makes your console more powerful in the same way that you "own" a game.

 

[whitehawk]

So what happens when you play offline? Destruction is turned off? Or is this game online only?

 

[RealityCheque]

So does this mean that in 10 years Crackdown 3 will become non-functional as the servers are shutdown/reassigned to other more modern games and tasks?

If so, the retro collector in me hates the idea that games have a very set shelf life beyond which they cannot be played in any real way.

Outside of that, sounds kinda cool. It'll be interesting to see how other big companies (Sony/Valve) adopt this sort of tech and leverage it with their platforms.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

So Crackdown 3 is going to be an online-only single-player game? What happens when the servers inevitably get shut down? Or there's a network outage?

1) Destruction on this level is for multiplayer only. It would be game-breaking in single player. The single player can be played offline and will have more limited destruction.

2) You won't be playing the game online at all if the servers for Xbone live ever turn off.

3) You won't be playing the game online at all if your Internet sucks out XBL is down for maintenance.

4) Azure servers will outlive just about every other modern MS venture.

 

[wanderjahr]

So is this going to be a game actually worth playing? Or is it mostly a tech demo?

 

[EvB]

So what happens when you play offline? Destruction is turned off? Or is this game online only?

There is a separate single player campaign being made by SUMO digital, this is set in a different city. Presumably this is going to be a bit more missions based and set-piecey, that allows the game to show off in a more controlled way.

 

[Raide]

So what happens when you play offline? Destruction is turned off? Or is this game online only?

Full destruction is MP only. SP will be reduced. They have not said exactly how much it will be reduced but I don't expect SP to be anywhere near as impressive.

 

[Flavius]

The Crackdown 2 all over again doomsaying is particularly hilarious, since by all accounts, the development of this iteration of the franchise could not be more different than the development of CD2.

For me, the first Crackdown defined the last generation with its emergent "do it any way you please" gameplay. This is what I was hoping the sequel would be, but quickly realized it wouldn't when I learned more and more about how quickly Ruffian came together and what a ridiculous timeline they were working on.

 

[llAuburnll]

No, we won't.

Always Online as a concept in relation to single player experiences is beyond toxic - it's radioactive.

You'll never see it applied as a console-wide "feature" again, seeing as how this generation has played out. Consumers will be on the watch for any hint of that creeping back in, and rightfully so.

I disagree in the sense that the main market will shift there and accept it as the internet of things comes into fruition. I think there will be an offering of offline play in some form obviously, but I do see always online or something very similar being the norm. Not arguing whether that is good or bad though. It does have some worrisome consequences or it could.

 

[jimbobsmells]

It does make the console more powerful than any other while running this game mode.

Oh come on, no it doesn't. Your console has done nothing but stream the result.
This is great tech but don't get sucked into the PR nonsense.

 

[60EffPeeEss]

Man, they're really building themselves some bad PR here.

They've talked about this being a big thing for Crackdown 3, but then in interviews, they state its going to be multiplayer only, not in co-op, meaning it could be anything. You could be stuck in tiny arenas and have all that destruction, but its meaningless because people expect it in single player now.

They really have to clarify their damn words. And I can only imagine the problems if the game sells multi-million and the servers totally shit the bed, crippling one of the biggest selling features of the game.

 

[EvB]

So does this mean that in 10 years Crackdown 3 will become non-functional as the servers are shutdown/reassigned to other more modern games and tasks?.

In theory no, because they don't have servers allocated, they are automatically allocated and distributed as users require them.
In Practice....that's another thing. Having P2P gaming didn't stop EA from turning off multiplayer in old games.

 

[JaggedSac]

Auto-scaling that is domain-specific is not part of what IaaS providers can offer. Especially since it is domain-specific. Generic auto-scaling features are often pushed as a sliver bullet by marketing, but technologically they are not. To have a solution that really works for you, you need to have a scalable software architecture, as well as appropriate workload prediction heuristics, both specific to your use case. So you can make money by building such things for particular domains.

Since multiplayer gaming in the traditional sense involves a single VM running a single match, dynamic scaling is simply creating a configuration for resource thresholds, min/maxes, increment steps, etc. Nothing one would need a third party for. This is inherently horizontally scalable since the unit to scale is a single VM.

 

[bishoptl]

I'm not sure why it's so out of this world to have a healthy level of skepticism based only on "We've heard things like this before. . ."

This isn't Milo or Kinect, though.

 

[Fletcher]

Man, they're really building themselves some bad PR here.

They've talked about this being a big thing for Crackdown 3, but then in interviews, they state its going to be multiplayer only, not in co-op, meaning it could be anything. You could be stuck in tiny arenas and have all that destruction, but its meaningless because people expect it in single player now.

They really have to clarify their damn words. And I can only imagine the problems if the game sells multi-million and the servers totally shit the bed, crippling one of the biggest selling features of the game.

Well. I imagine that the game will really be designed to be played online always. To have an online world where your friends can jump into and out of your game at any given time.

The single player seems more of an, "well you can play it offline."

 

[rob305]

I cant believe people still bring up red faction on ps2.

"Guys, I dont understand why everyone is freaking out about uncharted 4...jumping and moving in 3D has been around since mario 64"

 

[Mushroomer25]

No, we won't.

Always Online as a concept in relation to single player experiences is beyond toxic - it's radioactive.

You'll never see it applied as a console-wide "feature" again, seeing as how this generation has played out. Consumers will be on the watch for any hint of that creeping back in, and rightfully so.

I'm not so sure if the XBox reveal was so poor that it has actually burned the whole gaming populous out on always-online content. Again, I think it's a matter of confidence. Until the whole of the US feels as confident in their internet connection as they do electric, water, etc - it will be a hard sell.

I'm sure some people said that after horse armor, DLC was scorched earth territory as well.

 

[EvB]

Since multiplayer gaming in the traditional sense involves a single VM running a single match, dynamic scaling is simply creating a configuration for resource thresholds, min/maxes, increment steps, etc. Nothing one would need a third party for. This is inherently horizontally scalable since the unit to scale is a single VM.

Does it, they've demonstrated how different physical servers (or VMs) are actually responsible for different structures within an area. It's not a case of a single server being given higher priority or more resources.

Unless that is not what you are saying?

 

[HardRojo]

Not really interested in Crackdown but I expect other games to use this feature.

 

[RiccochetJ]

So is this going to be a game actually worth playing? Or is it mostly a tech demo?

If it's like Crackdown 1? Absolutely.

 

[gamechanger87]

So does this mean that in 10 years Crackdown 3 will become non-functional as the servers are shutdown/reassigned to other more modern games and tasks?

If so, the retro collector in me hates the idea that games have a very set shelf life beyond which they cannot be played in any real way.

Outside of that, sounds kinda cool. It'll be interesting to see how other big companies (Sony/Valve) adopt this sort of tech and leverage it with their platforms.

Azure is the future of MS. They are investing billions into it so I wouldn't expect them to shut it down.

As XBL compute and pretty much all stuff in Thunderhead, the VMs are spooled up on usage. If no one plays for years, then they sit dormant and will only come up when requested.

 

[LookAtMeGo]

It's basically just sending loads of data about where every piece of geometry should be (over simplifying I bet but you get the idea). Normally those calculations would be done on the cpu in your xbox but instead they're taking the input data you would normally process, uploading it to their servers which has a simulation of the game running, doing the calculations there (like what happens if this rock hits that floor) and sending back the result. What happens to it after you've sent it is up to them, they can throw as much power at it as possible but all you'll ever get back is a tiny amount of data that tells things where they should be. It's the same way multiplayer games work now really but Microsoft have so much computational power available to them instead of just updating where 12 players are in a world they can work out where thousands of pieces of geometry are and how they collide (stuff that can scale way beyond what a single console can do)

Thanks, I'm starting to get it. I'm cautiously optimistic to see how this particular level of destruction plays out in the retail version. There is no denying the potential here and I think its amazing.

 

[60EffPeeEss]

Well. I imagine that the game will really be designed to be played online always. To have an online world where your friends can jump into and out of your game at any given time.

The single player seems more of an, "well you can play it offline."

Not everyone wants to play online, not everyone wants to play with strangers. Not everyone has friends who are always around to play with. A common complaint about things designed to be played with friends, like Destiny, is that you have to dedicate a specific time to get everyone together to play. Playing with strangers can often cripple that experience.

The co-op will just be tacked-on to the SP design. Increased enemy numbers, health, damage, that kind of stuff. Easiest to do while satisfying the most.

 

[Listonosh]

No. Crackdown can be played offline with limited destructibility.

This actually clarified this whole thing for me. I couldn't grasp how this works, especially if someone has an outage is playing the game, but this approach makes a lot more sense. I guess I'm not seeing is as the game-changer that everyone else is. Maybe I need to see it first-hand.

 

[Peltz]

I'm not sure why it's so out of this world to have a healthy level of skepticism based only on "We've heard things like this before. . ."

But we were clearly being shown a playable demo. People are playing it on the show floor. The question we should be asking isn't whether it's real, but rather whether it adds any fun to the game itself.

 

[AyaisMUsikWhore]

Since it's physics based, I still want to see it in real life. But it sounds cool right now. I don't know however if it physically makes the Xbox more powerful but feels like a crutch to get them where they need to be. Whatever works tho

 

[ElTorro]

Since multiplayer gaming in the traditional sense involves a single VM running a single match, dynamic scaling is simply creating a configuration for resource thresholds, min/maxes, increment steps, etc. Nothing one would need a third party for. This is inherently horizontally scalable since the unit to scale is a single VM.

Replication of single VMs is inefficient (we are only doing it because it is simple, but research is heading towards more fine-grained scalability, for instance, through implementations of the Actor model), and if you really want to offload some heavy number crunching, inadequate. If we take the figure of "20x" provided by Microsoft for granted and apply it to CPU power, that would translate to almost 2TF of CPU performance. (20 x 7 x 1.75 x 8 FLOPS) You cannot provide that with a single VM. That's where the necessity for scalability on the level of a distributed software architecture and distributed algorithms comes into play.

 

[JaggedSac]

Does it, they've demonstrated how different physical servers (or VMs) are actually responsible for different structures within an area. It's not a case of a single server being given higher priority or more resources.

Unless that is not what you are saying?

That is what Crackdown is doing, which ElTorro is saying is not economically feasible. ElTorro is saying a 3rd party tool for auto-scaling remote game resources would be useful. I was saying it was not since cloud service providers provide enough base functionality to where that is unnecessary.

 

[gamechanger87]

IB Times Preview Up:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/crackdown-3-gamescom-hands-preview-xbox-one-takes-series-cloud-nine-fourteen-1514395

For, years 'the cloud' has been touted as the next revolutionary thing, when really it's just the internet. Your photos aren't stored on a mythical techno cloud – they're stored on someone else's server that you can access through the web. 'The cloud' as a marketing term has been around for a while, making many audiences groan whenever it's mentioned. At Gamescom 2015, however, during a demo of long-awaited Xbox One sequel Crackdown 3, I was blown away by the applications of it for the first time.

At its press conference for the event, Microsoft showed off the game in action (see the video below) and its multiplayer section, which uses cloud servers to render the map's many buildings fully destructible. This total destruction is limited to a separate multiplayer mode; the campaign itself – which can be played co-op with four players – will not feature destructible buildings in the same way.

Let's begin with that campaign. It is structured exactly the same as the celebrated original, with your Agency enforcer tasked with taking out warlords who have an entirely new city in their grip. There are orbs, of course, the same five abilities to power up (strength, firearms, driving, agility and explosives) and a transforming Agency super-vehicle. The map is also roughly the same size as the original, only with a greater sense of height, we're told.

There are some changes, however. Firstly, developer Reagent Games – led by the original game's director Dave Jones – is looking to expand the roles of the warlords by making them more fully realised characters, with personalities rather than mere targets.

During a behind-closed-doors demo, Jones was eager to point out that the team didn't want any additional narrative to alter the flow of play – so Crackdown 3 uses the "digital fabric" of its environment to allow warlords to speak directly to you. This means they can appear on billboards or as massive holographic heads, such were the two examples we saw. A new "hate meter" will also play into how gamers draw out and take down these warlords. The more of their foot soldiers you dispatch, the more strongholds you take back from them and more destruction you cause, the more the warlord will hate you until eventually they snap and decide to take you on.

The warlord in our demo was far more of the bastard, though. Donning a large mech suit, he didn't go after the player, but civilians – making a point of taking innocent lives to get to the Agency he despises. The mech itself requires different tactics to dispatch. Bullet fire isn't effective, so players must use grenades, rocket launchers and the environment. Following the demo, we were shown and then allowed to get to grips with a small and simple destruction sandbox area showing off the separate multiplayer portion. This basic set-up didn't include climbing: this was purely to show off the physics and how far beyond the Xbox One's capabilities the destruction stretches.

Immediately in front of the player were two towers. Equipped with three weapons – naturally, we went with the grenade launcher – we slowly blew chunks out of the buildings, watching each piece of the tower crumble and fall away. Rather than evaporating when they hit the ground, pieces of rubble then become physical objects in the environment, and can even be thrown if your strength is high enough.

In the corner of the screen was a series of bars that filled up as the destruction escalated. The first bar shows the computing power of the Microsoft console, and it fills up quickly. Underneath this were a second and third bar – the first representing cloud servers being used, of equal power to the console. A coloured overlay of the environment showed that the two buildings in front of us were being handled by the two different servers, with further ones coming in when needed.

As these two buildings crashed to the ground, the bars filled up, and then a fourth bar (a third server) popped up – then a fifth and a sixth. As the towers collapsed – none of it scripted; everything being handled by the physics engine – the bars filled and more appeared. I asked Jones how far this goes, and he said the most servers they've managed so far during the show was fourteen. In our demo we managed 12, and it induced no slowdown.

The game's website states that the cloud offers Crackdown 3 some 20 times the power of an Xbox One, indicating that 20 servers is the maximum per game.

The manner of the destruction also opened up methods of play. A collapsed building can be climbed, it can be brought down with players and enemies on or in them, and it can create ramps. Buildings can also take out other, smaller buildings, should they fall that way.

Gameplay implications were clear, but initially shallow. Reagent will have to be inventive to make full use of the impressive tech on display. As for the feel of the game, fans will be pleased to hear that combat and movement are handled in the same manner as the original. So the campaign will be familiar, and looks set to bring with it all the same joys – but in the multiplayer arena, Reagent have something with massive potential.

Crackdown 3 is set for release in summer 2016.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

Man, they're really building themselves some bad PR here.

They've talked about this being a big thing for Crackdown 3, but then in interviews, they state its going to be multiplayer only, not in co-op, meaning it could be anything. You could be stuck in tiny arenas and have all that destruction, but its meaningless because people expect it in single player now.

They really have to clarify their damn words. And I can only imagine the problems if the game sells multi-million and the servers totally shit the bed, crippling one of the biggest selling features of the game.

The gamescom demo specifically says multiplayer, both in voice-over and in text. The press release says multiplayer only for this mode. The only people confused about it or assuming SP have completely ignored the released media of the last two days, for whatever reason. People are playing the demo right now. They have been nothing but clear about what it does and what it's for.

And why would this game be any more susceptible to crashing than any other game with dedicated servers?

 

[serikson45]

This game looks like an important first step towards a natural evolution of technology. Offloading calculations to powerful server farms will allow for Microsoft to release cheap hardware and continue the Xbox brand as a software service 10-20 years down the line. People laugh at it now, but when internet connections are fast worldwide there will be a sharp decline in consumers owning physical hardware. Microsoft's baby steps will turn into giant leaps in the next decade.

 

[NoMoreTrolls]

I think this tech is really interesting. Bad, misleading title and PR aside, this could be an amazing step forward for multiplayer games. As far as this specific implementation is concerned, I'm not exactly sure why Crackdown 3 needed this tech in the game; the franchise hasn't exactly been known for large-scale destruction before, and it doesn't seem that the single player or co-op campaigns are going to change that. This is a superfluous multiplayer mode that is totally disconnected from the core gameplay loop of the base game. Obviously, having this feature is more of a proof-of-concept for Cloudgine and Microsoft, a built-in tech demo of sorts. This doesn't mean that it won't end up being a blast to play, only that it seems that the feature is bolted onto Crackdown 3 for the express purpose of showing people that it can be done.

I'm excited about what the use of this technology could mean for games like Battlefield or Red Faction, or any forthcoming titles that are specifically built with this level of destruction in mind. Games that are expressly built around such destruction could really benefit from this level of simulation.

 

[EvB]

Alright. I think I need to learn about how it all works.. I don't get it. Either way, I'm excited about it.

The cloud servers are making all the calculations as to how a piece of building should fall apart, how it should break, how it should fall and how it should change direction.

Once these calculations are performed, they can be sent or streamed to the consoles , simply as a set of instructions that says exactly where everything should be.


Think of a replay in a racing game or a replay in an online FPS. The people playing the game are calculating and reacting to everything around them all the time. They calculate and then decide when to fire and how to position themselves.

However, once this has happened, you can replay the entire game from a tiny tiny replay file, which is simply a recording of where you jumped to, when they chose to fire, how they chose to avoid a grenade etc.

 

[Fletcher]

Not everyone wants to play online, not everyone wants to play with strangers. Not everyone has friends who are always around to play with. A common complaint about things designed to be played with friends, like Destiny, is that you have to dedicate a specific time to get everyone together to play. Playing with strangers can often cripple that experience.

The co-op will just be tacked-on to the SP design. Increased enemy numbers, health, damage, that kind of stuff. Easiest to do while satisfying the most.

Ok. Cool. I'm glad you had a better description of what this game actually is. I'll hold judgement until they actually announce what this game is, how it will play, and what objectives it has.

I however am in the camp of not caring about my systems and/or games requiring an always online function. So...I can be excited for these types of games?

 

[ironcreed]

This isn't Milo or Kinect, though.

 

[Frog-fu]

Basically in DBZ terms it's like

Goku (XB1) < Brolly (Crackdown 3 MP)
Goku (XB1) + Z Fighers' Ki (Azure) > Brolly (Crackdown 3 MP)

On his own, Goku ain't shit against Brolly. Combined with the help of his boys though, he is effectively stronger.

Simple shit.

XB1 ain't going to get magically stronger, but effectively it will be.

 

[Pandy]

Nothing is being streamed, data is being off-loaded for server side calculations then sent back to the console.

There is no streaming! The compute heavy physics calculations are outsourced to servers in the cloud which will give back the geometry/physics data for the destruction. The content has still to be rendered by the Xbox One GPU. Streaming means that a (partial) scene was rendered on a server and the rendered data was sent to a streaming client (application/process/thread on the console). Totally different!

Given that this is happening constantly, then there is a constant 'stream' of physics data being sent to the connected XBOs from the server.

And I don't know what else you want to call it as neither of you supply an alternative 'correct' word, and I don't see why we need a different word just because MS marketing would rather talk about it making the XBO more powerful.

XB1 ain't going to get magically stronger, but effectively it will be.

I like your DBZ analogy, but you missed a trick.

Crackdown multiplayer will effectively be magically stronger, not the XBO.

 

[usp84]

Why console only?Why not more powerful than most logically priced PCs too?

 

[EvB]

That is what Crackdown is doing, which ElTorro is saying is not economically feasible. ElTorro is saying a 3rd party tool for auto-scaling remote game resources would be useful. I was saying it was not since cloud service providers provide enough base functionality to where that is unnecessary.

Do cloud server providers provide tools and middleware that allow a developer to implement these features into Unreal engine?
I doubt they do, I'm pretty sure that's exactly why Cloudgine exists.

 

[Quixzlizx]

So this is like the N64 expansion pack? They should definitely start bundling these with the console.

Exciting times ahead!

 

[malfcn]

This is not going to end well. Impressive tech though would love to see it in a blast corps game.

I just want a Blast Corps game, cloud based or not. It could be a great budget / arcade game.

 

[ironcreed]

IB Times Preview Up:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/crackdown-3-gamescom-hands-preview-xbox-one-takes-series-cloud-nine-fourteen-1514395

In other words, what we are seeing is the real deal and this is just the start of it.

 

[EvB]

Why console only?Why not more powerful than most logically priced PCs too?

Because PC is nebulous term and means nothing in relation to computational power.

 

[JaggedSac]

Replication of single VMs is inefficient, and if you really want to offload some heavy number crunching, inadequate. If we take the figure of "20x" provided by Microsoft for granted and apply it to CPU power, that would translate to almost 2TF of CPU performance. (20 x 7 x 1.75 x 8 FLOPS) You cannot provide that with a single VM. That's where the necessity for scalability on the level of a distributed software architecture and distributed algorithms comes into play.

Replication of VMs is exactly what cloud providers allow. MS Azure in particular. One would just have a pool ready to go and spin up more when things pass a certain threshold, and shut down after it goes below that threshold.

Given Crackdown is allocating and deallocating remote resources at such a fast rate, they either have a large pool available, or are not using their own VMs and instead are using something similar to Worker Roles(which are still technically VMs) in Azure or Docker.

But since you say that solution is unfeasible, I was providing examples for the general MP scenario.

 

[justgames7604]

Man, they're really building themselves some bad PR here.

They've talked about this being a big thing for Crackdown 3, but then in interviews, they state its going to be multiplayer only, not in co-op, meaning it could be anything. You could be stuck in tiny arenas and have all that destruction, but its meaningless because people expect it in single player now.

They really have to clarify their damn words. And I can only imagine the problems if the game sells multi-million and the servers totally shit the bed, crippling one of the biggest selling features of the game.

This isnt ms PR though.

 

[JimmyBoy]

I have concerns about scaling this to millions of players and what happens during high latency situations. Tech demo is certainly impressive, though.

 

[FaintColt388301]

It's silly to say it makes the console more powerful. It just helps it do things it wouldn't be able to do on it's own. The console is what it is.

It's like me trying to bench press. I can only do so much with what muscles I have. If I put 300 pounds on the bar, get another person to help me lift it and it works, then great. It doesn't make me more powerful though.

But yes, it is a great way to go beyond the restrictions of the hardware. I can't wait to see this fully running and what other devs can do with this kind of tech.

 

[Faenix1]

Had no idea until this thread that the cool destruction stuff was only in the multiplayer mode. That's kind of disappointing.

 

[JaggedSac]

Do cloud server providers provide tools and middleware that allow a developer to implement these features into Unreal engine?
I doubt they do, I'm pretty sure that's exactly why Cloudgine exists.

What Cloudgine is doing is unique to the game and could theoretically be added to middleware such as UE. They list Epic as someone they are working with. Cloudgine is however utilizing capabilities of a cloud platform such as the ease of scalability offered.

 

[Cidd]

Sure, we'll see when the game is out and not just a demo.