EA Invites Testers to Try "Project Atlas" Cloud Gaming Program

Electronic Arts has taken the next step towards cloud gaming by asking for its community to come test its "Project Atlas" gaming service. Announced last year as a program which is part of the company's "broader vision for bringing together game engine technology and services that can realize the full potential of the cloud," the first test will consist of four games tested on the PC platform. EA hasn't given a date for when the test will take place yet, but it has revealed the games that'll be played and is asking users to sign up for the company's playtesting program to be considered.

Whether cloud gaming will happen or not isn't even a question, according to EA's latest post on Medium from chief technology officer Ken Moss. Instead, the company says it's a matter of when the technology will arrive. With that in mind, the plan is to have players test out "a wide breadth of games and genres" so see how the game streaming technology handles a variety of titles.

"Over the last decade, latency and jitter have made cloud gaming a non-starter for any serious gamer," EA said. "But now that the global cloud infrastructure is finally reaching ubiquity, EA is working on leveraging AWS and the public cloud so that we can deploy as close to the players as possible, even in the face of unstable networks and changes in bandwidth. This player test will help us to better understand how our games perform across real-life scenarios."

The four games that'll be tested during the external trial are FIFA 19, Titanfall 2, Need for Speed Rivals, and Unravel. While these tests will try out the HD games through Project Atlas for the first time publicly, EA looked ahead to the future of the technology should everything work smoothly. Delivering "full-scale HD games" to a variety of systems including smart TVs and computers means that users would be able to stream their games anywhere from home entertainment systems to hotel TVs when you're traveling. Starting a game on one device and continuing on a different one was another possibility.

Cross-play will also be a feature tested during the preview as Project Atlas users are able to interact with those on EA's PC-based Origin service. EA calls this "a very tangible connection" between what's possible now and what will be in the future.

Those who are interested in testing out Project Atlas are being asked to sign up for EA's Community Playtesting group to be considered for the tests.