Planetside Players, Have You Seen What Microsoft Is Doing?

This swill be a MMO shooter. Every building and every floor is destructible. It will handle unlimited physics thanks to Microsoft's cloud. Their Azure server infrastructure can call up as many servers as it needs to use at the moment--far more than a set bank of game hosting servers could do. Games done this way can support physics, AI or other processing that a single machine can't. The game is Crackdown 3 and article is here.

What do you think of the possibility of this? Could we see more games like this and Planetside in the future?

I'm sure this will just be a run and gun, but I would love it if you could use different team tactics and utilize the environment. I could see snipers taking shots between buildings, gunships shooting up the side of a building then special forces fast jetpacking to the building to infiltrate. Or use ziplines to get to the next building. Crashing helicopters that take out part of a building as a regular occurrence would be awesome.

It seems that the impressiveness and granularity of a game world can only go up from here, but that extra space and processing doesn't automatically come with more depth or strategy--ie, the ability to plan and coordinate in order to control, by various means, different parts of the map for different strategic reasons or goals. Leading and coordinating across and entire platoon in Planetside is a step in the right direction, but just like Planetside, I fear that games won't put too much thought into potential strategic elements.

I know that Forgelight has been tweaked for EQN, to handle a destructible environment. I don't think they will ever implement that tech in PS2, but it would definitely be a cool new dynamic though.

That whole "cloud" term is such an overused cliche'.

Honestly, you can say any centrally-hosted MMO is a "cloud-based" game. Most MMOs can probably offer world permanence, but choose not to for good reasons as such events are limited in scope to who can do them (those initial few can experience it and it's gone forever).

But Microsoft's system has servers on standby that kick in to flawlessly handle an infinite load. No one else has but a few servers to handle a single game. Microsoft's Azure is for any use including business enterprises-- all on the same server system.

They cant even get skype running properly a lot of the time, im skeptical

HAHAHAHA

believe me, everything can be broken

syncing destructible physics in an MMO style shooter between all clients... i have to see that one before i believe it

Is it just me....I hate fully destructible environments. Lack of hard cover is so annoying...half the time it really isn't very fun as with in twenty minutes every building is destroyed. In battle field the first thing people do with tanks is destroy every inch of building cover to stop infantry from being able to hide.

That said...I doubt it will be MMO in a sense that you think. Fully destructible environment + MMO doesn't mix well. I'm guessing it will be instanced as hell just like all the games that claimed to be MMO shortly after PS1 came out. There was a lot of games that tried to claim MMO status just because they had a lobby where several hundred avatars could hang out...then matches were like 20 v 20 not very massive.

Microsoft, go home, you're drunk, and you're getting buzzword everywhere.

For clarification, Crackdown 3's multiplayer will be the full destructible city for you and your mates to go piss around in to your hearts content. The single player is limited in it's destruction due to be off-line.

Any word on actual scale of the city? What about team numbers?
As far as I can tell, it's just a glorified Battlefield with a different aesthetic and a few tech gimmicks to back it up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all kinds of down for blowing stuff up, but this seems like a Crysis situation to me, where they're just selling the tech rather than the game itself.

From the Polygon article, "In the multiplayer, it's 100 percent destructible, and it's forever — forever, as long as the game lasts. We haven't said what structure of the multiplayer game is yet, but it is … 100 percent destructible environments and 100 percent persistent over whatever sort of game session we're talking about."

I guess it doesn't say it's an MMO but it sure looks like it could be, but Microsoft should theoretically have unlimited processing power for all clients.

Somethings fishy about the OP.

There is absolutely no such thing. It just flat out does not exist, and anyone telling you otherwise is a snake oil salesman.

Google has virtually unlimited storage and Microsoft has virtually unlimited servers to serve any number of businesses from the cloud.

Did I ever tell you about this person who developed a lossless infinite compression algorithm?

Smells like someone took a shill in here. Can we get that cleaned up?

I definitely agree there, lack of cover is pretty much a death sentence in an FPS. They just need to take the destruction at a slower pace, so everything actually lasts a bit longer, and you have to think about what to blow up. The only way it'll ever fit an MMO is if players can clear the rubble and construct a new building in it's place.

Thats why I was asking about the scale of the game, which apparently, they don't even have a clue yet. I just find it funny that they would try to shill an instanced TDM game to an open-world community currently complaining how TDM-ish this game has gotten. Guess they never took the class about knowing your target audience

I can only give you one like for this post, so here are the other 42 million.

The ultimate way to end spawn camping. Just blow the entire room down and move on to another. Destructible environments in round-based games are more acceptable than in persistent environments. I imagine the destroyed objects could magically rebuild themselves over time or heaven forbid someone has to actually repair them. They think ANT runs would be tedious and boring well just wait lol...

Communication between servers is dependant on ping. It won't be as flawless as you might think.
For instance: normal MMO's often have multiple servers running one environment, as well as AI being run in these environments. The AI is anchored: they have a maximum distance that they can travel. This means that they can stay in one server environment and do not need to have their data communicated to anther server while traveling, lowering the necessary load to only the players running across it. Attacking at the edges of the servers rarely happens, and when it does most MMO's are very simple. They ask 'is there line of sight yes/no, are they in range yes/no. If both yes, roll dice for hit chance and damage'.

Firefall is an MMO FPS (PvE) has two servers for their gameworld: one keeping the entire game-world working and one that governs AI. This stretches the resources of that one server. They did that because it meant the AI can walk across the entire map without hangs or problems at the edges where their data is transmitted from server to server. However it does give many problems with exponential resource increase per extra meter distance the AI needs to travel.

Now this game of yours sounds interesting, but imagine when more servers need to be activated to handle the calculations: There's a lot of players about shooting and destroying stuff. Suddenly the load starts going towards a critical point, so they add another server... In one moment, they need to throw a ton of data on another server. Player position, direction, speed. The speed, direction and type of bullets flying about, buildings, debris... It's not hard to imagine that these servers need to take over during a building collapse or other type of resource-heavy environmental destruction. By luck of the draw it could be that the server taking over has to pick up a collapsing building, all the pieces, the way they fall, how they break and shatter etc. Either it will take a long time transmitting and you'll experience lag, server hangs and weird-physics.

Only people with madazz computers would be able to handle a game like this. Even then, I bet it would have 64 or less. You can have the best environments, but it wouldn't matter if all you can see is two people fighting each other.