Those concerned that Crackdown 3 will need some kind of advanced internet service package or additional data bandwidth to run properly can rest assured that it works the same way any other multiplayer game would. Investment in data centers has solved that. We were worried about population density, from an Xbox install base perspective, so we had to think about transferring server control from one data center to another. There used to be regions where we just had unacceptable ping times. There are some problems that we would have had in the past, that we don't have anymore. Stone noted how Microsoft's on-going investments in datacenters and Azure hardware upgrades have helped mitigate some of the potential issues. We were told that Crackdown 3's Wrecking Zone can use anything up to and beyond 12 times the power of a base Xbox One X. The demo Stone was referring to was the above clip from Build 2014, which shows how physics calculations done over your internet connection can vastly increase the processing capability for what you see rendered on your home console. That when you're starting out, only a few cores are needed, and then as destruction scales up, depending on what's happening, we can dynamically throw more cores at the computation. Being able to dynamically scale the amount of servers we throw at the problem, so that we're not spending compute unnecessarily. Marshalling that data to the game server, and then from there to the client, that was a lot of hard work. The ability to distribute computation across multiple servers, and because objects can get thrown from one spot to another, seamlessly hand off ownership of every chunk from one server to another without dropping a frame. what if we did physics in the cloud?Two years of pure engineering work to. 'What if we actually made that real? What if we made a space where everything you shot at was destructible?' We knew we couldn't do that online if we limited ourselves to just the console client that you have in your living room. From him:Ĭollectively, a lot of people working on the vision for the game at that time had made this bet - something that's always been true of Crackdown: you're this badass guy or woman, this character who can just light shit up. Stone gave us some further insight into how the tech works, and a glimpse at the depths of complexity Microsoft's team had to deal with in order to get these features to work. The match-making is old school to the point of you having to return to the main menu and enter into a game mode of choice after every single match, the lock-on functionality just doesn’t work in a competitive multiplayer space and no matter how cool or exciting destroying the neon-soaked environment is, the foundations just aren’t there to keep anybody interested long-term.Microsoft encountered a range of unforeseen technical challenges as a result of that vision. The multiplayer only comes with two modes, one a “kill confirmed” style death-match and another one that involves capturing and protecting zones, which feels counter-intuitive to the whole bouncing around the map thing that Crackdown 3 does so well. While it works as a sort of tech demo for this destructive technology (which is fun initially for sure, slamming through walls and watching the debris fly), the rest of Wrecking Zone is so archaic that it only warrants a brief look before it gets old. Being paired with random players isn’t my preferred method in team-based multiplayer, but I digress. The decision to not allow you to party up with friends in this mode is puzzling, although they have said this will be fixed in a future patch.
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