Respawn: Cloud Is What Enables Us To Have All This AI

There has been a lot of talk on Microsoft‘s claims around their Cloud system for Xbox One and its supposedly unlimited power. Many have scorned this as PR talk, while others still believe that this will prove an asset for Xbox One sooner or later; at any rate, we haven’t seen many practical examples of it yet.

This is why it’s refreshing to read Jon Shiring, Programmer at Respawn Entertainment, explaining Titanfall’s implementation of the Cloud in a two-pages long interview released to OXM.

All these things are what actually let us have all the AI and all the players and huge Titans running around with all these physics. The extra bandwidth is what lets us fill the world with moving things, and the available CPU is what lets us do things like AI, you know? And it’s not just a bullet flying through the air, that’s moving and causing network data, it’s an actual AI that’s making decisions and trying to shoot at things and looking around

It also seems like Respawn actually had an input into the development of what Shiring calls “Xbox Live Compute”:

That’s something I went to Microsoft on pretty early into Respawn and said: ‘We want to make a game, and we’re going to need dedicated servers, how can you guys help us out?’”

And we had an interesting dialogue there, and that’s really when we came back with all this Xbox Live Compute idea - so we’ve been working on it with them for a long time, and all of the versions of our game will be using it. But on all platforms it’s letting us make a game that obviously nobody’s been able to make in the past, so it’s really exciting, the capability that we now have

This very last statement, however, confirms that this Cloud system is not Xbox One exclusive, and will instead be featured on Xbox 360 and PC as well, at least for Titanfall. This is not entirely surprising, and games have been known to offload AI, pathfinding etc. to cloud for a while, especially MMO titles. Are you convinced of Microsoft’s Cloud yet? Let us know below.