Does Microsoft's future plans for the Xbox brand sound like a good idea for us gamers?

You're thoughtful to try Enen but it's like those kids in Electronic Boutique kept trying to tell the staff that the "Soul Calibur" demo running on the TV was a Playstation game. Not a Dreamcast game.

When you rain on the parade by showing the wires connecting from the Dreamcast to the Television... you kind of spoil the illusion.

So let's try and keep some perspective here.

Microsoft is bad, the cloud is evil. The XBox ONE cannot run games at 1080p (the games does run at 1080p don't actually count).

Have I left anything out?

Oh, silly me.

I've been a loyal follower of Microsoft since April 3rd 1975 and unless they stop showing up the competition I'm gonna totally buy a PS 4 so I can play great games like "Knacked" and other Next Gen classics like "The Last Of Us: Let's Do It All Over Again
Edition".

Well, I guess Enen. But I think that developers can have and need to have their own imagination. And it short changes them to thing they do not. Then again, a lot of current gaming is really similar to what we have had for a while. Is it the money or
lack of imagination and creativity?

As for back up I am sure there will be. But imagine how many you would need for this to run a stable match with the features. And then all the matches. Pretty much would need a sizable back up for that. Those could be idle a lot waiting. But then they
have to be on a ready so they cost money. And money is a huge issue.

Not to mention what it does when these things falter. A while back I was doing a physics simulation. The server dropped and the back up has to pick up the slack. Very solid and quick set up. Caused major issues. And it was a simple thing compared to
what a game would have to do with all those players and in game stuff.

The issue with things like these is that there is always going to be information out there to make ones service or game sound great. Not always is this stuff totally true in the purest sense. Sure, they are true. But they can be way over exaggerated.
The "cloud" is a thing. It could have huge effects. But not anywhere close to currently. Not just because of a sizable player population not being able to take advantage. There is the massive cost and a few other big things.

I think we will see more of this kind of stuff, working great, in no less than 5 years and I would bet it will be at least 10.

"Because you the gamer don't see a difference, is a very very good thing, and I don't know anyone that faults TF's gameplay."

Could be. But the difference I did not see was something that could not have been done before. It is not like they where doing something special here. The AI was not the smartest, honestly have played games with better AI, and it was not like the matches
were overcomplicated with the amount of players.

Forza has a cool idea. I like the AI learning and then racing like players. Racing against people on my friends list without them being there is fairly cool.

Crackdown seems to show what this kind of thing can be. Mostly in terms of AI and Physics. Physics stuff more so in the case of Crackdown. The inherent weakness is keeping these things running. It is one thing to rely on the servers to run matches. But
when you need other servers to run the physics, AI, and things that grows the potential problems exponentially. So, a group of servers drop. Typically you would have matches running that would end. Well, now that group is AI only or Physics only. The question
becomes: Can the match proceed? And then, How does it effect gameplay/

Imagine the servers running some of the AI for a game crashes. Now the AI is mindless and does little until a connection is re-established. Could, and probably would, be game breaking no matter.

Same situation with physics. All of a sudden the game loses the connection to that part. A lot of those features would not work.

Yes, in these situations you could have a backup that kicks in. But that makes the amount of servers a whole lot larger overall. Not really viable. Plus, it would still create issues that would be, almost certainly, game breaking for a time.

There are many issues here. We are nowhere near close enough to make this viable on a large scale outside of MP for sure. MP already requires the internet and servers and stuff so that is not new. It is just that the system becomes so much more complicated
and a small issue can now seem huge when they happen.

I could see this being a bigger thing in 5-7 years. Still think that, even then, it will be a lot longer than that before any of these kinds of things like Crackdown shows become viable for most.

if you mean this one:

www.respawn.com/.../lets-talk-about-the-xbox-live-cloud

it says;

Your saying the Ms cloud is just a bunch of servers, and they say.

But it’s not just for dedicated servers – Microsoft thought about our problem in a bigger way. Developers aren’t going to just want dedicated servers – they’ll have all kinds of features that need a server to do some kind of work to make games better. Look
at Forza 5, which studies your driving style in order to create custom AI that behaves like you do. That’s totally different from what Titanfall uses it for, and it’s really cool! So it’s not accurate to say that the Xbox Live Cloud is simply a system for
running dedicated servers – it can do a lot more than that.

www.respawn.com/.../lets-talk-about-the-xbox-live-cloud

Point 1 under dedicated servers