There was some guys on Reddit who calculated that you don’t really need that much bandwidth to pass that amount of data back and fourth between your Xbox and the server. Much less than streaming from Netflix for example. So it looks like this could actually become something real and not a tech demo. fingers crossed
Crackdown 1 (ignoring the second one) was one of my favorite games on the Xbox 360. It really nailed the superhuman sandbox type gameplay.
The problem I have with games that require online to play single player is that you cannot play offline. No internet? No destruction. Half the fun of the game is gone. I have a console and it’s in my room - far from my router. I get speeds of 300 kb/s.
Finally… one of the things I have been looking for in games for years. Actually a bit overkill in this example. But yeah interacfion is golden. People spend all of this time and effort modeling (or drawing) stuff that just serves basically as a painting hanging on a wall. Basically it is all either not really there or else is simply an indestructible wall of some set size.
Glad to see someone else out there actually finally got that idea. lol
True, but you could always play something else. It’s bad for folks that don’t have a reliable connection. Personally I have my XBONE hard wired CAT-5e to a Gigabit port and I have Gigabit fiber from my ISP (CenturyLink) so these types of things are an awesome proposition. Unfortunately any time you leave out a segment of folks it’s a tough sell I think.
There is a second problem that will probably keep creeping up more and more, which is there will be essentially an end date to the fun. Servers and cloud processing power costs money and this means the companies won’t fit this bill forever. Sports games tend to only support the cost for about 2 years now. Also, since nothing is directly p2p anymore that means you can’t use any online functionality at all after that. If the trend continues where fundamentals of your game are in the cloud, the game for all practical purposes has an end date.
That’s funny, that’s exactly the thought I had when I watched that video. When the beancounters decide running all these geographically diverse compute clusters is costing more than the game is bringing in - buh bye.
With how powerful PCs are I still like the idea of player hosted servers - or at the very least releasing a server binary that allows players to host their own servers.
While that is true, there are generally “greatest hits” and a segment of population that don’t buy at $60 and wait until it’s $20, which is usually at the 2 year mark. It may not be the majority, but it is something to be aware of when making cloud games.
It also would be rather unexpected to the layman if something I bought suddenly stops working.
Used games get recycled through game stop, not necessarily purchased at full retail value. Plenty of games have gone offline, often around the time the companies next generation product available, although I have seen overlap. Also, crackdown is probably going to be an expansion-centered business model. It’s a game that begs for expansions, my greatest lamentation about the previous games were that they ended.
Surely not crackdown 2. Crackdown 1 was unbelievably awesome but crackdown 2 was unbelievably horrible, and yes I completed both games, crackdown 2 just for the story but many times I thought about just watching the ending on YouTube and stopping playing.
2 was o.k. 1 had fewer restrictions. 2 had the squirrel suit. 1 spawned you near the vehicles each time which meant faster rollout, also 1 had car evolution which was amazingly funny.
Zombies were a big flop in 2.
I think we’re in for a treat with this one, though.
If the game is made backwards compatible and ported to newer consoles in 5 years, there will be no need for servers as the hardware should handle it. Still for the time being, games shouldn’t be using processing power online. Too many things are getting connected to the internet and your bandwidth will be getting lower with each device, especially if you have multiple people in your house.
