Crackdown 3 Wrecking Zone: what happened to the 'power of the cloud'?

What happened to the power of the cloud? Crackdown 3 finally launched last week, its Wrecking Zone multiplayer mode presenting the final iteration of an astonishing cloud-driven physics showcase first revealed by Microsoft in 2015. Perhaps inevitably, the final game only bears a passing resemblance to that initial demo, and while Wrecking Crew itself is rich in potential, the actual game is rather lacklustre.

Of course, the story of Xbox One's pioneering cloud gaming system goes back all the way to 2013, before the system even launched. In the wake of an underwhelming, TV-centric reveal and a palpable specs disadvantage against PlayStation 4, Microsoft surprised us by revealing that Xbox One could interface with its Azure cloud infrastructure. There was talk of Xbox Live upgrades to 300,000 servers to enable this revolution, and even mention of 3x the compute power in the cloud available to every Xbox console at any given point. Looking back at the last five years of Xbox One releases, the claims look almost ludicrous now and it's safe to say that we've yet to encounter a single release on the system that offers any kind of cloud-powered advantage over PlayStation 4.

Once the generation kicked in properly, claims surrounding the power of the cloud began to fade into the background. Respawn's Titanfall ran some drone AI on its servers when it launched in March 2014, but it's difficult to square what is effectively a dedicated server for an FPS with the game-changing power apparently offered by cloud technology. Remarkably though, the 2015 Crackdown demo - embedded on this page and witnessed by our own John Linneman - actually saw Microsoft double down on the cloud's potential. The demo itself didn't run particularly well and ran at a low resolution, but the scale of the ambition on display here is staggering.

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