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The ‘power of the cloud’ remains a key USP for Xbox One despite Microsoft’s ditching of its unpopular DRM plans.
"Our vision around Xbox One and what you can do because of the power of both the architecture of the console, and also the cloud and the Xbox Live service, remains unchanged," Xbox Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten told Joystiq.
"We’re going to continue to really invest in how those experiences work."
Whitten added that Xbox One will now effectively offer an offline mode akin to the one seen on Steam.
It remains to be seen whether there will be wider implications for Xbox One games that have been designed around the console’s former connectivity requirements.
Respawn’s Titanfall, for instance, is heavily online based and supposedly uses the cloud’s capacity for extra processing oomph. Forza 5 also uses a system called Drivatar that populates player’s single player games with other user’s racing styles.
Of course the vast majority of users will still access the game’s online features but now that users have the option of not doing will said titles be able to accommodate that without significant recoding?
