Data provider fickleness is the bane of Internet service contracts, the killjoy of 4G smartphone coverage, and, potentially, the wet blanket of online mayhem in Crackdown 3, Reagent Games' superhero-city-pummeling Xbox One exclusive.
Crackdown 3 sounds a lot like Crackdown 1 and 2 (Grand Theft Auto-like open worlds, only with superheroes), save for the "one more thing" unveiled at Gamescom last week: fully destructible urban jungles, powered by Microsoft's Azure servers.
Azure is Microsoft's buzzword for its angle on cloud computing, which is in turn a buzzword for a bunch of computers holding hands to parallel-crunch much grander computing tasks. With Crackdown 3, Azure apparently will offload stuff the Xbox One couldn't handle by its lonesome to deliver virtual metropolises you can clobber to bits and pieces.
The trouble is, whether it'll work as advertised remains anyone's guess—including Microsoft's.
"We can ensure that what leaves the data center is in a particular state, but not what happens between then and when it gets to people’s houses," Microsoft global publishing general manager Sharron Loftis tells Game Informer.
This, you might argue, is a bit like saying your power's no guarantee in an ice storm, or that tires sometimes go flat (that is, self-evident). But the Internet in 2015 is still a fussy, mercurial creature, as anyone who employs it often or exclusively for telephony or video dialoguing knows well.
Loftis says the game is designed to mitigate some of this, adding "There’s code on the client side that ensures that all the instances stay synced and that you’re seeing what I see and that it all runs smoothly."
In other words, a lowest common denominator baselining thing. The question's how much of a load Azure's going to place on ISPs, and what players have a right to expect. We'll get our first taste next summer, when Crackdown 3's multiplayer component launches by itself in beta.
