Zenless Zone Zero “Cloud Gamimg”: Key to next Game Generation!

With the update of Zenless Zone Zero, ZZZ "Cloud Gaming" has also been launched. In the field of "Cloud Gaming", miHoYo's technology is quite mature, and the experience for mobile players is quite good. However, behind these advantages, there are also inevitable technical difficulties, which begs the question: is "Cloud Gaming" really the key to the next-generation breakthrough in mobile gaming, and where will miHoYo's next-generation flagship be heading?

The next generation of gaming, is it really only possible to use cloud technology? This is actually a question I've been thinking about lately. The reason is that Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero's "Cloud Gaming" experience is just too good.

Hugh Tsai, co-founder, former legal representative, CEO and chairman of miHoYo, once talked about how AIGC technology has revolutionized game development. Some people may associate AI drawing, AI copywriting, and the like with automated AI content generation to reduce development costs, but that's just one of the development directions.

As a gamer, this question, in fact, can start from the game classification. As we all know, most games on the market today are RPGs (Role Playing Game). And RPGs are also categorized into more different forms because of the genre:

ARPGs that tend to be action-adventure

JRPGs that tend to favor storyline gameplay

CRPGs that tend to old-school adventure gameplay

None of these concepts existed in the beginning, and it was only later in the evolution of the community that corresponding concepts emerged based on the community itself and game feedback. For example, CRPG (Computer Role-playing Game) is a concept that has only been around for the last couple of years, but in fact the original CRPG is actually the originator of all electronic RPGs, the "Dungeons & Dragons" board game released in 1974. The concept of CRPGs has evolved into the type of games we have today, or we can call them DND-like games.

But one thing you'll realize if you want to really experience DND is that there are no DND games on the market in the strictest sense of the word. Why is that? Actually, the reason is a bit funny - because human beings can't do it with the technology they have now. All the DND games on the market now, including "Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous", "Baldur's Gate" and so on, which can be said to have reached a fairly high level, are essentially just "youthful versions" of DND games, which are not comparable to tabletop games with mature DMs and rulebooks. The current technology does not allow for the possibility of realizing such a huge amount of content in a game.

So with the help of AI technology, can a true DND game be made? The answer is still no. There is a famous law "Andy and Bill's Law", that is, "Andy gives, Bill takes away". The hidden meaning of this saying is that the improvement of computer hardware itself will be eaten up by the consumption of software. In the gaming field, this problem still exists today. But as the semiconductor industry slowed down and mankind began to hit the upper limits of silicon-based chips, the problem became more acute. People gradually realized that what limits software and game development is not only simple graphics performance, but also a large number of technological improvements including other aspects.

For example, the simplest, the size of the PS2 era of the game size in general in 10G or even smaller, to the PS3 era has appeared in the 30G or more "giant games", PS4 era even appeared in the 100G or more "monster". With the level of PS4PRO, it takes more than 30 minutes to read the disk to complete the installation. In the PS5 era, 100G+ games have become the norm. Even 200G, 300G games are not a strange thing.

So one of the more cynical things is that as technology has progressed, gamers have instead become more stressed about device storage. Even if you install a 2TB SSD in your PC, you may be left with half storage space after installing a few big games. So might the next generation of gaming ditch cellular mobile? Unlikely, because the cell phone is today's largest common display window, if the abandonment of the mobile terminal is approximately the same as abandoning the mobile Internet. But it's obvious to the naked eye that cell phones are even worse than computers and consoles.

With the arrival of the power wall on silicon-based chips, even if you pile on the power and heat dissipation how you can, the power consumption of a mobile chip is still meaty hard to go over 10W or even below 5W for normal use is the best If you want a mobile that consumes more than 15W of power, it's probably going to look like this:

With that, the chip's process is also running wildly towards the limit. Even the most advanced TSMC only dares to mention in the PPT that it can make the process density twice as high as now in 10 years. This is not at all the same concept as the wild ride of technology in the 00,10s. And, can a twofold increase lead to a twofold increase in performance? Can twice the performance bring twice the experience? Judging from the past so many years, no. This also directly leads to the technology manufacturers in the related technology development more and more extreme and unthinkable.

The vast majority of vendors nowadays need to constantly call on monster computing power like supercomputers and Wanka clusters to even keep development on track when it comes to new technologies. This is perhaps the real meaning of Hugh Tsai's words. With existing technology and the technology visible in the future, traditional game development has gone as far as it can go. As new technologies come online, game development will rapidly become polarized. That is, the breakthrough products developed by talented and elite teams led by new technologies and the individual creations of a large number of small enthusiasts, which can also be combined and is exactly what miHoYo is executing right now.

The former concept is the high demand that miHoYo is obsessed with for their new flagship. Judging from the new news revealed over the past two years, they've already removed more than one project internally and have been experimenting with new technologies. The latter concept is the UGC gameplay mentioned by miHoYo in the 5.3 Teaser live stream. One of the things that miHoYo is likely to do is to integrate a lot of creators' content, gameplay and mini-games into their next-generation games, i.e., to give the players their own platforms to show off their skills in the game.

And bridging these two together is cloud technology. When these two are combined together, it will surely bring huge volume of the game itself. For example, hundreds of gigabytes of game volume, or even the game built-in large models and strong interactive requirements, after all, the game UGC sharing must require a huge amount of interaction, which also makes the "Cloud" has become an inevitable choice. After all, it's hard to run a groundbreaking game with over 100G, built-in AI models, and platforming capabilities on a gadget that doesn't have a maximum of 10W in your hand. And even if miHoYo might be able to make that possible with post-optimization, how much of a gaming experience can gamers expect?

Keep in mind that under cloud technology, any display device is just a screen. Theoretically using that 720p screen of the NS can also run gaming masterpieces smoothly. It's just a matter of whether the manufacturer is willing to create an adaptation for the device. And only by expanding the boundaries of content production to this limit can we make a billion people's virtual world in the real sense.