They're handy if you do more than gaming. "Xbox, snap Twitch" to set up a broadcast without interrupting the game. "Xbox, play Plants vs Zombies" since it's a digital title, meaning I'd have to scroll through my pins or my Games list. "Xbox, record that" to capture a video of the last 20 seconds for those random funny…

It's not about being into the culture, and the show definitely doesn't glorify it. The main character paints a pretty picture to himself, but it's brutal and nasty what he goes through. Things definitely don't go well from an overall perspective. Nobody watching that show thought "Huh, maybe cooking meth IS a good…

Yeah... people like that are probably 60% of my replies any time I talk positively about anything controversial relating to Microsoft. You'd think Bill Gates ate their dog's liver with a nice Chianti or something.

It'd have to be "Xbox, turn off" *pause for a second-ish* "Yes"

And much less power used.

This is for a reduced game, only for playing as somebody's co-op buddy through parts of the gameplay. An expansive partner-requiring demo or reduced full version with forced co-op, depending on your point of view.

It's not crippled without. I don't see where you're getting that. It just makes explosions less pretty and debris-y. It switches to local calculating instead of remote, downgrading the results but (if made properly) not impacting game performance if service is interrupted mid-game.

I just wrote a long post of my own outlining how the cloud can be used if you cared to read it.

A good developer will use option 3, and it looks like they're building it this way. The game doesn't offset ALL physics to the cloud, but it uses it to create richer destruction if it's available.

They don't use it to calculate physics the traditional way. It's not a per-frame entire-scene request, it's "hey, player fired Rocket_A with ExplosivePower_X, vector V, HitSurface S and I need you to tell me what pieces of debris that will create and what vectors each of them has at the first frame. GO!" Then the…

The game doesn't require the cloud, it benefits from it. Notice in the linked tech demo how they showcase the same physics calculation with and without the cloud. I would be very surprised if the game doesn't work offline, just with less impressive physics and none of the asynchronous online gameplay elements…

It's larger than that, but the greatest impact is felt on the developers, not the end users. That's the entire point.

They do clearly label when a game requires online. They showcased a tech demo in the article showing the online/offline difference of the physics destruction.

The Xbox One uses the Microsoft Azure cloud service. It's been around for years and is used by multinational companies. It's not going anywhere any time soon.

They showed an anonymous video in the past showing how the engine handles the physics with and without cloud connection. It sounds like they've built it airtight so that those cloud components aren't required, they just benefit.

3) The local hardware is capable of rendering better graphics because the remote server crunches numbers that don't require immediate response. The developer implements failbacks to catch connection issues and handles it with local hardware in a less-intensive way that doesn't impact performance.

I doubt Microsoft's cloud will be brought down by Xbox Live. It's just one cog in the larger Azure cloud system that also hosts multi-national corporate intranets, websites, commerce, etc. Xbox One just uses that vast already-built global network as a platform.

Cloud computing is a still-new yet widely-used concept that tends to get over-branded for specific cases and create a stigma based on past experiences. SimCity, for example, gave us a good idea of how the cloud could help; simulating each Sim's daily routines, traffic patterns, global markets and letting our city…

If anything, I would've been pissed. I was a late adopter and haven't even level capped once yet. I play a lot of games in my limited time in rotation, and it fell to the bottom of the playlist amidst other new games around the same time I got it at a reduced price.

I think I read you can free roam around the city co-op, you just can't do main story missions or probably some types of side missions.