Published on March 25th, 2022 | by Sunit Nandi

The New Ubisoft Technology That Promises to Bring Bigger Game Worlds

One of the standout features of gaming technology recently has been the introduction of bigger game maps and open worlds. Developer Ubisoft has recently revealed that they intend to use cloud technology to make their game worlds even bigger and able to support more players. How does this work and what could it mean for gamers?

The Full Details of Their Idea

The 2022 Game Developers Conference was held in San Francisco between March 21 and 25. During this important meeting of the worldwide community of developers, Ubisoft revealed details of Scalar. They say that by using cloud-based technology to host their games they could remove the current constraints that restrict the size and complexity of games, giving developers “unprecedented freedom and scale” for their new ventures.

This innovative approach is being led by the Ubisoft team in Stockholm. They believe that processing power and collaboration can both be improved in this way. Their idea is that Ubisoft Scalar would be a production tool or game engine that includes everything needed to get started, from animations and audio to assets and renders. Another benefit of the cloud-based approach would be that the developer would have freedom to update their games without any need for patches or for taking the games offline to carry out maintenance work on them.

In a technical sense, each element or microservice of the Ubisoft game engine, like physics and AI, would run in the cloud individually. This gives developers the potential to spread out the work and processing power across as many computers as needed. Indeed, they suggest that the computing power available in this way would be “virtually infinite”. It’s also important to note that this isn’t the same as cloud streaming, which still requires land-based hardware to carry out processing while the new solution would see all of the processing carried out in the cloud.

How Does This Differ from the Current Model?

Ubisoft Scalar could give bigger game worlds and allow a greater number of concurrent players to join in. It would use an on-demand approach so that the amount of computing power needed is based on what the developers and players are doing at any given time, helping to increase computer performance for everyone who opens the game.

While games like No Man’s Sky, Red Dead Redemption 2, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are listed among the best open-world games currently available, they use a different development method from that being proposed by Ubisoft. If we look at the example of No Man’s Sky, this 2016 title by Hello Games uses a procedural generation system to create an infinite number of unique planets with their own ecosystems and alien lifeforms on them.

This has proved to be a hugely popular way of creating vast games with infinite maps, but there are some drawbacks to the procedural generation system method. For a start, it’s more demanding on the hardware being used. There’s also the risk that the artificially-created worlds all feel similar and repetitive, or that they end up being too strange-looking or even boring. Scalar would give more control to the developers, meaning that the unpredictability level would be reduced and they could set up the game’s world to be exactly how they want it to be. It would also make it easier for them to outsource work to global freelancers.

Technology Advances in the Entertainment Industry

This is far from being the only advance in technology that we’ve seen in games lately. The likes of the Cable Robot Simulator, HoloLens, and gaming suits are mentioned here as adding to the gaming experience. If we focus on the gaming suits, we can see that they offer a way for the player to experience whatever happens to their character on the screen, giving a fully immersive experience that could be the next step after virtual reality.

New technology has also been introduced to other areas in the wider entertainment industry. In terms of online casino games, for example, live dealer titles represent one of the major advances. These games, such as Live Blackjack and Real Roulette, let players watch a live-stream of a human dealer carrying out their duties on their screen while placing bets remotely. We can also see a growing variety in the slots world, where titles such as Rainbow Respins, Assassin Moon Hyper Hold, and Bust the Mansion Link & Win reveal what some of the latest features are in their titles.

In music, the introduction of artificial intelligence composers and live hologram performances have raised the bar. Similarly, fresh new approaches to technology have also reached the headphones market, with the Kraken V3 HyperSense model that creates vibrations to match the audio in the game you’re playing. This means that the music, the dialogue, and the explosions happening on the screen are recreated as vibrations in your ear. Like the rest of the technology we’ve looked at here, it’s designed to add to the gaming experience and is easy to use.

Ubisoft Scalar should prove to be a success among gamers who want a bigger world, and developers who plan to create huge games. This is unlikely to be the only major development in gaming technology this year, so it’s a market worth keeping an eye on.

Tags: bigger, game worlds, Ubisoft, video game development

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.