I think there may have been a little more doubt from you at first, but the intent was there
Nah. I wasn't partying with everyone else when the xbox cloud was first announced. That much is true. Instead I was raining on peoples parades by pointing out how most weren't interpreting MS' comments correctly and building up false expectations. That stark contrast is the only reason you think I was being overly pessimistic, when in fact I was just being realistic. The fact that it is far easier to define what the xbox cloud can't do, than it is to define what it can do, might also have had an impact. :wink:
This article does a much better job of explaining what to expect, and it's exactly what I've been saying. Uncoincidentally, it's also exactly what you've been saying, but those weren't the same things the community was convincing themselves of.
Just for the sake of tradition, and for arguments sake, let me make another prediction you might find pessimistic:
The xbox cloud doesn't fundamentally change anything about game development. The Battlefield franchise has been running "in the cloud" for a decade. Anything a game developer might want to do with the xbox cloud would have been possible ten years ago without it. In that sense the xbox cloud isn't at all a technical revolution. If it's one at all, then it's a conceptual revolution, as it will bring game developers everywhere to comprehensively rethink which computations are done where and why. Those instances in which that rethinking leads to a direct and meaningful impact on gameplay will be those that reap the most success from using the xbox cloud.
So it's not about getting AI calculations downloaded to your console. The character actually exists outside of the console. The console is only rendering it.
That is an excellent way of putting it. It just may be that all of our games, even single player games, will end up living in the cloud at some point.
A console might be able to render all of the characters, but not at the same time that it is calculating the AI for each individual character. The cloud would take care of that, leaving the console to only worry about the rendering.
In all the excitement over what exactly the xbox cloud does, I think that aspect is being overlooked (what it allows a certain console not to do).
Everything you can offload to the cloud frees the console up to do something else. In a sense, the earliest and most noticeable benefit of xbox cloud gaming may turn out to be exactly what the xbox cloud can't directly help with... better graphics... because the console may be able to put a larger percentage of its local computing power towards that goal.