You’ve got to move fast if you want to stay ahead. In January, Ubisoft chose to partner with Gamestream to overhaul its game streaming technology. Now, Ubisoft has announced Ubisoft Scalar, a cloud computing project that will allow for the creation of larger game worlds, with Ubisoft Stockholm leading the project development.
Ubisoft: Games giants that keep getting bigger
Ubisoft, the French game development giants responsible for franchises like Assassins Creed, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs are no strangers to big game worlds. Anyone who plays Ubisoft’s recent Assassin’s Creed or Watch Dogs will be aware of just how expansive they are, with users easily sinking 100 plus hours into each adventure. However, Ubisoft Scalar promises to bring the company’s future open-world game maps to a new level.
“We’re setting game makers free from the restrictions of single machine computing,” Ubisoft states in their Scalar trailer, “transforming these engine systems into distributed services and allowing them to harness vast amounts of processing power in the cloud.”
Ubisoft Scalar: Upsizing the game
As games evolve, game engines become more complex and thus more challenging to update. Ubisoft Scalar intends to use cloud computing to create game engines in which developers can test and iterate on various parts of the system independently. This new technology will allow Ubisoft to create bigger open worlds, but it also has the potential to create better in-game social experiences.
According to the Ubisoft Scalar trailer, game developers have always faced limitations due to computing power. However, Ubisoft Scalar will allow developers to utilize nearly unlimited computing power allowing for game worlds on a scale never seen before. Whether this technology will make an impact on the metaverse, however, is currently unknown.
“That limitation has always been there for as long as we’ve made games. Over time game developers have become really good at hiding and bypassing these limitations, so the player doesn’t see them; that’s our expertise,” says Ubisoft Scalar Product Director Per-Olof Romell. “What Ubisoft Scalar allows us to do is to simply get rid of those constraints. Once we remove them, what do we actually want to create?”
