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When Microsoft first announced the Xbox One, it claimed developers and gamers could take advantage of Microsoft’s unique cloud infrastructure to boost game performance or create special effects that a single Xbox One couldn’t possibly handle. The company never said much about the feature after that, though we saw a glimmer of it last year, when Titanfall ran the game’s AI on Microsoft’s cloud servers. Now that’s changing, thanks to Crackdown 3. The upcoming game was shown off at Gamescom this week and its multiplayer mode has a rarely tapped capability: full environmental destruction.

Environmental damage isn’t new to gaming. It’s been featured in titles like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Battlefield 4, and the Red Faction series using the GeoMod 2.0 and 2.5 engine. What sets Crackdown 3 apart, however, appears to be the degree of damage players can inflict on a structure during the game’s multiplayer mode, as well as the sheer amount of computational power Microsoft is going to throw at the problem. According to Dave Jones, the creative director on Crackdown 3, the goal is to make the entire game world fully destructible.

“We thought: what about if, for the first time, we make the whole world fully destructible?” Jones told Ars Technica. “We asked ourselves simple questions, such as ‘why don’t my bullets go through walls when I shoot them?’ or ‘why can’t I step through big holes I’ve made in those walls?’ It’s a very different way of thinking about games. If there’s a guy behind the wall, I can just shoot him through the wall, shooting both the wall and the guy to bits. That’s the way we think game worlds need to evolve.”

Crackdown 3 is relying on a backend developed by Cloudgine, a company dedicated to developing cloud-based rendering and offload technology. During the tech demo, Jones showed how increased environmental destruction required more computational power. That need was communicated back to Cloudgine, and more servers were brought online to deal with the increased demand. The extra workload apparently averages out to roughly six Xbox One’s worth of number crunching, though that can burst as high as 13. The number 20 has also been batted around, though this may represent a maximum workload scenario with a full set of players blowing bits of the game into smithereens simultaneously.

Cloud offload could be the future of gaming

While it’s true that the Xbox one isn’t as powerful as the PlayStation 4, don’t be fooled into thinking cloud offload is just an attempt to paper over differences between the two consoles. If Crackdown 3 requires 6-13 Xbox One’s to render full environmental destruction in real time, that still works out to 4-10 PS4s, depending on the workload in question. The Crackdown team still needs to demonstrate that their solution can scale and perform under pressure, but assuming that it can, we could be seeing the beginning of a new model of game development.

If you can solve the latency and input lag issues, there are good reasons to do game rendering offline rather than locally. Moore’s Law no longer allows for the meteoric increases it once enabled, which means that if you want to really drive a game to the max, you’re going to need expensive hardware with a high power draw. That equipment tends to be both expensive and loud, which makes it a non-starter for console manufacturers. Bundle all that equipment up and drop it in a server rack, and you’ve got the best of both worlds — all the high-end gaming quality that demanding gamers want, without the cost and noise of running a high-end workstation in one’s living room.

When Jones talks about 6-13 Xbox One’s worth of compute power, it’s not clear if he’s referring to CPU, GPU, or combined compute performance. But it also doesn’t really matter — just deliver the compute performance in real time, and gamers will be happy. Splitting the capability between single-player and multiplayer has another advantage as well — it solves the very real problem of trying to design a single-player game in a way that gives the player tremendous freedom as far as environmental destruction, while simultaneously creating goals and challenges that have to be overcome without abusing that same environmental capability.

It’s almost hilarious, in point of fact, how poorly this maps onto real life. In the real world, very few of us have access to the kind of firepower that can destroy walls, level buildings, or infrared scanners that let us monitor body heat through walls. In video games, walls and doors are solid in a way that reflects their real-world immutability to us in day-to-day life. Even so, this can be maddening in-game when you come across a locked glass door with a rocket launcher slung over your shoulder.

Give the character the opportunity to destroy terrain and buildings realistically, however, and you create an entirely different problem. It’s much harder to create a sense of pacing or excitement when the player knows that they can simply melt, smash, burn, and plasmify their way through any conceivable obstacle. It’s also easy to design levels in which a poorly placed RPG round destroys a critical staircase, leaving the player stranded and unable to complete a mission (Red Faction had issues in this vein as a result).

But combine the flexibility of compute offload with a fully-destructible multiplayer environment, and you’ve got an awesome recipe for mayhem. Incidentally, while Microsoft has been the company to talk about this kind of capability, there’s no reason I’m aware of why the Sony PS4 couldn’t leverage it. If such approaches prove popular, I expect we’ll see much more of it — future game consoles might be explicitly marketed on the basis of what kind of cloud infrastructure they have backing them up. Ten to 15 years from now, a “local” game console might be little more than a branded hard drive enclosure with some security processors, network hardware, and an SSD for storing saved games.