Yes this is true, Iams conclusion is incorrect nothing is stopping there being different changing weather. eg non cloud based weather ->
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Weather+in++red+dead+Redemption+2
Yes having the ability to pull the actual weather at a place in real time is technically cool but for gameplay will prolly make the game worse. Its like my game I recently made it so you can choose where in the world you are so the sun position/daylight/night changes depending on what you put in. first I stuck in here barcelona so coords N 41 E 2, tried other numbers and it seem further from the equator both looked better (and gave you slightly longer daylight (depening on the time of year of course), S 47 looked the best) now if I added weather based on whats actually happening at the place it would be pretty boring, for the next 4 months theres gonna be nary a cloud in the sky, whilst it rains a handful of times a year. Like I often say reality is often boring.
Its like with RDR2 its fictional world looks like its made up of all over the USA according to the following page. (yet its only 29 miles square, if you took any part of the USA its not gonna vary as much as they used in their map)
https://www.shacknews.com/article/109148/where-does-red-dead-redemption-2-take-place
btw I thought the showcase of the cloud was crackdown 3?
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-zone-what-happened-to-the-power-of-the-cloud
but seriously if you want a better showcase of the power of the cloud than flight simulation just choose practically any multiplayer game and even more so ones with persistent worlds, eg for MS a better example is minecraft
Real time real world data makes a game better or worse depending on the game. For Flight Simulator it's obviously a
huge win because it's a simulator based on the real world. It's most passionate fans (the ones that spend hundreds or thousands of USD on it) are actual pilots who want something that mirrors the real world as closely as possible. Everything form the flight model, to atmospherics, to geography. How much is simulation accuracy valued? Real world commercial pilots have been using it for decades as a way to keep their piloting skills sharp when now actually flying their routes as well as to familiarize themselves with new routes should they be required to start flying a different route than what they are currently flying.
However, if your gameplay is tied to in game weather, like for example some rare monster in an RPG that you're farming to get its rare drop only spawns during the night with an overcast sky and a full moon ... well, real time real world weather data being used probably isn't a great idea.
So, the value of real world data being incorporated into a game in real time will obviously depend on the game and what the game is attempting to achieve. Personally, I'd love it if a driving simulator used real world data incorporated in real time to model traffic and weather in the game. Obviously a more arcade oriented driving game wouldn't want to do that, but for a driving simulator I'd love it.
One of the things that has always been a bit off-putting for me in driving simulators was the arbitrary weather (when the game even bothered to present weather effects). Rain is often there for the entire race or not there. It would snow for the entire race or it wouldn't. The few attempts to vary conditions during a race always feel artificial and too abrupt. I'd love it if weather variability mirrored the real world. But then, I love accurate simulations more than arcade like facsimiles of a simulation. YMMV.
One area, I'd love to see advancement in is more work towards global physics simulations. Things that aren't directly player interactable, which would make them less latency sensitive. For example, pushing a box is directly player interactable, while setting a bomb on a structure and then triggering it remotely (either timed or via remote control) isn't. Combined with a shared world, this could be absolutely incredible. Going back to the driving simulator example, imagine crashing into a building and having accurate physics based destruction (generally too expensive on local machines) which is shared with everyone in that game world instance. Where doing something like this for an individual gamer in a solo instance could be considered too expensive, if it is instead shared with 20 or 100 gamers in a game world instance? The cost is then amortized/shared with a large number of gamers. I know crackdown was supposed to show things like this, but it wasn't quite there.
Hell, it's pretty incredible that a 12 year old game (Battlefield Bad Company) has more environmental destruction than almost any AAA game released since (lots of Indie games have that level of destruction or more). Despite having SIGNIFICANTLY more hardware power, the last generation of consoles regressed in so many areas WRT gameplay compared to the PS3/X360 generation. Prime example of prettier pixels being far more important in AAA games than actual gameplay affecting tech. /sad.
Regards,
SB
