With the recent Xbox One announcement, Microsoft have accidently managed to confuse a fair few people about how the Xbox One needs an internet connection every 24-hours or so. Today, new details have revealed that the reason the Xbox One will require an internet connection as certain times is because of the cloud gaming features the console provides.
Cloud gaming on Xbox One may be used to make your games look better graphically. For example, theres a few things in games which don’t need to be updated every second, things that don’t need to be updated when something happens within the video game. Lighting or fog could be sent from the cloud instead of being loaded from the console. “Those are perfect candidates for the console to offload that to the cloud—the cloud can do the heavy lifting, because you’ve got the ability to throw multiple devices at the problem in the cloud” claims Matt Booty, General Manager of Redmond Game Studios.
This is one of the reasons why the Xbox One will require being online as much as possible. Playing the same scenario while offline may reduce the games graphics, making it less beautiful. But don’t worry, the Xbox One will be intelligent enough to compromise when the internet does drop out, as it does every now and then.
