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60FPS allows smoother animations across the board. Smoother controller reaction times. New feel to the game. No drop in framerate due to large maps(perfect example in Halo 4 is Complex and all forge maps). Campaign will look amazing if done right.
Cloud support allows enhanced physics, graphics, memory, and along with a greater scale of campaign opportunities.
Dedicated Servers reduces the possibility of lag and no more player host.
With all this said and confirmed I am excited for the new Halo.
I like how xb1 will have set standard of 60fps starting at launch while the ps4 is barely reaching 30fps and it drops a lot so much for better hardware >.>
60FPS is really going to help Campaign, Spartan Ops/Firefight, and definitely Forge. And Multiplayer And overall gameplay in general. 60FPS for Halo is going to be really sweet!
Dedicated servers is something that’s been asked for a long time, so it’s going to be awesome that we’re finally getting that.
Halo 5’s going to be running so smooth! Smoother than a baby’s butt! Going to be freaking awesome!
> Cloud support allows enhanced physics, graphics, memory, and along with a greater scale of campaign opportunities.
No, not really. Cloud computing isn’t good for any task that requires consistent updates every frame. That’s because of the latencies involved in transferring data over the internet, which average around 50 milliseconds, and can easily go as high as 100. At 60 fps, the length of a single frame is 16.666… milliseconds.
That latency difference has a lot of complications in terms of gameplay experience. For instances, for physics calculations that would mean that as you run towards a wall, the moment you are supposed to collide with the wall, you pass through it and will continue to do so for the next four or so frames until you get a confirmation from the cloud that there was, indeed, a wall there, at which point you teleport backwards when the game state is updated to correspond to the cloud’s discovery of a wall.
For graphics, it’s somewhat the same except with the addition of bandwidth restrictions. Texture rendering is out of the questions as at the speed of 10 Mb/s (that is more or less an average internet connection speed), it’d take 13 seconds for a single texture to update. And that doesn’t apply to textures only, all the objects in the game world are incredibly complex and consist of massive amounts of data. That’s why the consoles have tens of gigabytes of internal bandwidth, which is around 10,000 times more than your average internet connection.
For anything your cloud is capable of, the console does it literally thousand times better due to sheer data transfer speed limitations. In a best case scenario, doing any of the work in the cloud would negate any advantage brought by the framerate of 60 fps because of the latencies involved in internet connections.
> > Cloud support allows enhanced physics, graphics, memory, and along with a greater scale of campaign opportunities.
>
> No, not really. Cloud computing isn’t good for any task that requires consistent updates every frame. That’s because of the latencies involved in transferring data over the internet, which average around 50 milliseconds, and can easily go as high as 100. At 60 fps, the length of a single frame is 16.666… milliseconds.
>
> That latency difference has a lot of complications in terms of gameplay experience. For instances, for physics calculations that would mean that as you run towards a wall, the moment you are supposed to collide with the wall, you pass through it and will continue to do so for the next four or so frames until you get a confirmation from the cloud that there was, indeed, a wall there, at which point you teleport backwards when the game state is updated to correspond to the cloud’s discovery of a wall.
>
> For graphics, it’s somewhat the same except with the addition of bandwidth restrictions. Texture rendering is out of the questions as at the speed of 10 Mb/s (that is more or less an average internet connection speed), it’d take 13 seconds for a single texture to update. And that doesn’t apply to textures only, all the objects in the game world are incredibly complex and consist of massive amounts of data. That’s why the consoles have tens of gigabytes of internal bandwidth, which is around 10,000 times more than your average internet connection.
>
> For anything your cloud is capable of, the console does it literally thousand times better due to sheer data transfer speed limitations. In a best case scenario, doing any of the work in the cloud would negate any advantage brought by the framerate of 60 fps because of the latencies involved in internet connections.
If Cloud does nothing, then why does Microsoft say that it enhances gameplay, physics, graphics and so on.
> If Cloud does nothing, then why does Microsoft say that it enhances gameplay, physics, graphics and so on.
I’m not sure did they ever say it enhances graphics or physics. If they did, they could be partially right, and partially lying, but at least highly exaggerating. There are some potential tasks in games that don’t necessarily require consistent updates, here’s an excellent article on it that’s better than me, anyway. But none of the cloud’s advantages are really something that I could see enhancing graphics or physics.
However, that is not to say the cloud can’t enhance gameplay. I think Turn 10’s driveatar in Forza Motorsport 5 is a great example. Because what games really need is good AI, and if the cloud can help the AI to behave like a human, or at least to know how humans behave, that’s great. Alternatively, as said in the article, if the rest of the game world can be active in the cloud despite the player not playing the game, or being in some other part of the game world, that offers potential for more living worlds.
The concept of cloud computing isn’t really pointless, no. It just has been greatly exaggerated by Microsoft’s typical PR hype. In reality, it won’t make your Xbox four times more powerful, it won’t even double the performance of your game. It won’t make the game look better in the short term or more physically accurate. Its main advantage (and the only advantage I see) is in the long term capability to change the game while you are not playing.
