Xbox Live lead program manager John Bruno revealed, during a GDC Next presentation (via IGameResponsibly), that Microsoft have attempted to prevent the Xbox Live Compute serves rebooting in the middle of a game, but the company has not managed to solve the issue entirely just yet.
“Once in a while, rather frequently actually, the host OS will require an update, meaning the physical machine is going to get rebooted whether your code is running or not,” he explained. “That’s a problematic thing for a game, and oftentimes it’s in the middle of a multiplayer session. We’ve worked very hard to overcome that, but that’s not to say it’s going to be a reality in every case.”
Titanfall, the highly anticipated sci-fi first-person shooter from Respawn Entertainment, heavily relies on cloud servers. This could lead to an incredible amount of issues, with a high count of play sessions being disrupted due to these frequent updates. Bruno was asked how these updates would actually affect the game; he couldn’t give an exact answer.
“I can’t answer that. I don’t know what the guys over at Titanfall have built into their game. It’s up to the game developer. If they want to rely more on our XBLC service, we’re happy to support that. We do provide a platform for them to persist data, but that’s up to the developer to utilize that.”
Microsoft might run weekly updates for these cloud services but nothing has been confirmed as of yet. Nonetheless the system will make its debut on November 22.