Insomniac's Sunset Overdrive playable "without an online connection" on Xbox One

The open-world shooter Sunset Overdrive from Insomniac Games is using Microsoft’s Cloud service for their ambitious computations and streaming updates, but what about those without the Internet?

Not to worry as CEO Ted Price assures us it’s entirely playable offline. He acknowledges that the term ‘cloud’ is ”one of those broad terms” that depends on genre, audience and hardware.

The studio will be using the cloud service through Xbox One as a means to collect and analyse player data, and to then feed back contact updates to Sunset Overdrive.

”Some of the hardcore data collection, correlation, and translation that we expect to do is difficult and takes a lot of horsepower, and that is one aspect of the cloud that is attractive to us,” Ted Price told Game Informer.

”Our intent is that you will be able to play the single-player without an online connection,” he went on. “The game will be updated with content we expect that all players will want. You won’t be able to access that without an online connect.”

Price describes his studio’s new open-world IP as an ”awesomepocalypse” - mainly because it’s not dreary. ”You, as the player, have formerly worked in a dead-end job. You are not looking at a city that has been destroyed and is dark and gloomy. You’re looking at a playground,” he said.

”We are going to be relying on heavy backend services to churn through the data we get from players to understand what they’re telling us and what they’re doing in the game,” Price continued, speaking of the cloud.

”The potential of the cloud for console developers is pretty large. Over the next five or six years, it’s one of those technologies that will change in meaning as we see more games come out and take innovative approach to the more and more offline processing that’s available.”

“It is proven that cloud services can improve products and services in other areas, so it’s cool that games are starting to take advantage of it. Looking at the world’s approach to this now-massive amount of hardware we have that can be taken advantage of, these are things are going to change faster and faster. Not just for games, but for every industry. It’s ultimately good for all of us who consume entertainment,” added Price.

Sunset Overdrive releases exclusively on Xbox One. Check out Game Informer’s full article.