![]() Even when games were built using the technology, they often didn't seem all that different than what came before them. The cloud's quiet, nebulous nature is part of the reason that, over the last year or so, Microsoft's much-touted cloud services, once lauded as a feature that could "effectively over time" make the Xbox One "more powerful" faded into the background. The man in charge of Xbox at Microsoft knows it, which is why he hasn't been saying so much about the cloud lately.ĭave Jones showing Crackdown 3 at Gamescom 2015 SELLING THE CLOUD We take the technical wizardry that makes them possible for granted. Whether you're talking about smartphones or cars or on-demand streaming video or video games, we get used to things. This is the natural course of human events. The technology, at a certain point, became invisible. There's little reason to marvel at the ordinary, even if it was once extraordinary. Within a few years, most cell phone manufacturers stopped making so many candy bars and started making pocket computers with giant screens, too. It was a marvel to just touch the screen or flick through a web page or tap to type. It was a joy just to open up a map app and pinch to zoom in and out. In the early days, it all seemed magical. The iPhone was that rare invention that changed everything. Then in 2007, Steve Jobs gets up on a stage and says, "Check this out: We made a cell phone that a giant touchscreen! Use your fingers! Boom!" Microsoft's cloud servers may do fancy things - and in Crackdown 3, they sure seem to make some wild things possible - but if it works as intended, a lot of people will never see or know about it.įollow me back to a simpler time when cellphones were clamshells or candy bars and pretty much nobody liked theirs. ![]() Sometimes that's the rub with technology. And I wouldn't have had a clue that any of this was happening unless they'd pointed it out. ![]() Its developers created ways to show how it worked, what it was doing, how it made made the impossible possible. Last week, Microsoft made the cloud rain with Crackdown 3, and they wanted me to know it. The tech was supposed to be a huge differentiator over the Xbox One's competitors, but at best we've seen glances and hints since the console's reveal more than two years ago. And it is only possible because of a technology that Microsoft once touted more or less every time it mentioned its latest and greatest console, the Xbox One: cloud-based computing. It is built around pure, unadulterated destruction. Or I can chop down a building or two, head to the other side of the city and return to continue the demolition with my friends. In a persistent, destructible city, I can reduce everything to rubble. This is the havoc of Crackdown 3's online multiplayer mode. "Destructible environments are cool," I think, not for the first time. There's no more bridge for the other player to stand on, and he enters free fall. The first rocket lands, reducing a third of the bridge to rubble that tumbles toward the ground in rotating chunks of concrete and shards of glass. I keep pulling the trigger to launch another. It's trailing the red-orange glow of my rocket on a collision course with the sky bridge. I trace the billowing smoke over my shoulder. I pull the trigger, hear the WHOOOOSH! of the rocket as it flies. My eyes become slits as I center the bridge in my sights. It's a fourth person in this pre-alpha multiplayer session taking place in Microsoft's Gamescom 2015 headquarters, and he's running across the bridge. I'm trying to figure out the most efficient way to make that happen. I see concrete and glass and steel as piles of rubble at my feet.
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