Square Enix, the masterminds behind the Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Tomb Raider series are out to innovate Cloud gaming. As the Tokyo Game Show date rapidly approaches, Square Enix is looking to reveal all the juicy details about their “technological breakthrough in cloud gaming,” Project Flare.
Last year, Square Enix explained that Flare is unlike OnLive or PlayStation Now. Instead of focusing on streaming games, Flare is concentrating on the cloud. “It replaces the console with a supercomputer.” “Everything in current streaming games is running in its own individual instance. Flare creates one instance and shares those resources. Supercomputer-like experiences are possible, through a unique, patented, architecture that enables cost-efficient scalability and processing power through which images are streamed as video.”
During this years E3, demos of project Flare focused on physics as well as geographical scale, producing a landscape 17 times larger than Skyrim.
Jacob Nocak, the director of business development at SE said, “Games now use smoke and mirrors to provide the illusion of a living world. With Project Flare, we can provide an actual living world.” It is important to note that Square Enix is not keeping Project Flare for itself. They want to license the technology to third parties. Square Enix believes that making a new technology accessible to other studios will push them to create new types of game play. (And we’re all cool with that!)
As for actual games utilizing this new technology, there will be more details revealed later this year. As for now we can only wait until more details on Project Flare are revealed on September 19th, 2014.
So there you have it, Project Flare is a giant house party and everyone is invited. Personally, from what I’ve seen and read, Project Flare is incredibly unique from a conceptual point of view and to share something like that can only lead to further innovation.
