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When Microsoft first announced the Xbox One, it claimed developers and gamers could take advantage of Microsoft’s unique cloud infrastructure to boost game performance or create special effects that a single Xbox One couldn’t possibly handle. The company never said much about the feature after that, though we saw a glimmer of it last year, when Titanfall ran the game’s AI on Microsoft’s cloud servers. Now that’s changing, thanks to Crackdown 3. The upcoming game was shown off at Gamescom this week and its multiplayer mode has a rarely tapped capability: full environmental destruction.

Environmental damage isn’t new to gaming. It’s been featured in titles like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 4, and the Red Faction series using the GeoMod 2.0 and 2.5 engine. What sets Crackdown 3 apart, however, appears to be the degree of damage players can inflict on a structure during the game’s multiplayer mode, as well as the sheer amount of computational power Microsoft is going to throw at the problem. According to Dave Jones, the creative director on Crackdown 3, the goal is to make the entire game world fully destructible.

“We thought: what about if, for the first time, we make the whole world fully destructible?” Jones told Ars Technica. “We asked ourselves simple questions, such as ‘why don’t my bullets go through walls when I shoot them?’ or ‘why can’t I step through big holes I’ve made in those walls?’ It’s a very different way of thinking about games. If there’s 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.”
Crackdown 3 is relying on a backend developed by Cloudgine, a company dedicated to developing cloud-based rendering and offload technology. During the tech demo, Jones showed how increased environmental destruction required more computational power. That need was communicated back to Cloudgine, and more servers were brought online to deal with the increased demand. The extra workload apparently averages out to roughly six Xbox One’s worth of number crunching, though that can burst as high as 13. The number 20 has also been batted around, though this may represent a maximum workload scenario with a full set of players blowing bits of the game into smithereens simultaneously.

Cloud offload could be the future of gaming

While it’s true that the Xbox one isn’t as powerful as the PlayStation 4, don’t be fooled into thinking cloud offload is just an attempt to paper over differences between the two consoles. If Crackdown 3 requires 6-13 Xbox One’s to render full environmental destruction in real time, that still works out to 4-10 PS4s, depending on the workload in question. The Crackdown team still needs to demonstrate that their solution can scale and perform under pressure, but assuming that it can, we could be seeing the beginning of a new model of game development.

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