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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Ashes and cloud gaming
Nerror
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
So, cloud gaming is a thing, and aside from competitive shooter games perhaps, it offers a decent playing experience. Good enough for an MMORPG in most cases.
The upside is that you can play Ashes on the go, even on your dinky laptop, or at your work computer (employers hate this one trick!). All you need is a strong internet connection.
The downsides are obviously that you usually have to pay extra for that service, and that the cloud gaming platforms might not support Ashes on them, or that support can be removed with little to no warning. For example, Geforce Now requires you to link your Steam/Epic/Ubisoft or other gaming platform accounts, and you can only play the games you own there. Since Ashes won't be on Steam, for example, it's unlikely we'll get the option to even play it on Geforce Now.
Shadow, a different service, gives you a full windows instance to mess with, so technically it should work there. It's also more expensive and I hear it's kinda crap atm.
From Intrepid's point of view, they might not want this either. I am not sure how anti-cheating software would work on a cloud gaming service, but I assume it would have to function normally or the game won't launch? I dunno.
I read that last year Blizzard pulled support for WoW on those cloud gaming services, so I am guessing something happened that they didn't like. Multi-boxing perhaps? Because cloud gaming does seem like it makes that a lot easier and cheaper, all things considered.
Any of you with more experience with this know of more pros and cons?
The upside is that you can play Ashes on the go, even on your dinky laptop, or at your work computer (employers hate this one trick!). All you need is a strong internet connection.
The downsides are obviously that you usually have to pay extra for that service, and that the cloud gaming platforms might not support Ashes on them, or that support can be removed with little to no warning. For example, Geforce Now requires you to link your Steam/Epic/Ubisoft or other gaming platform accounts, and you can only play the games you own there. Since Ashes won't be on Steam, for example, it's unlikely we'll get the option to even play it on Geforce Now.
Shadow, a different service, gives you a full windows instance to mess with, so technically it should work there. It's also more expensive and I hear it's kinda crap atm.
From Intrepid's point of view, they might not want this either. I am not sure how anti-cheating software would work on a cloud gaming service, but I assume it would have to function normally or the game won't launch? I dunno.
I read that last year Blizzard pulled support for WoW on those cloud gaming services, so I am guessing something happened that they didn't like. Multi-boxing perhaps? Because cloud gaming does seem like it makes that a lot easier and cheaper, all things considered.
Any of you with more experience with this know of more pros and cons?
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Comments
That said, if it works the way it sounds, it would make datamining impossible which could be a huge upside for MMOs. It would also be harder to hack.
Still, i think the lag is a huge downside and what is making it currently unfeasible.
They seem to have handled the input lag pretty well actually, as long as you're on a good cabled connection. Obviously, your ping to the server has a lot to say in this, but if you check this geforce now review, it seems pretty playable, even in shooters:
And yes good point about how it's even harder to hack. So in that sense it's a win for Intrepid.
The main use of this is if you aren't able to own or access a decent gaming PC. It's clearly not a complete replacement.
If that is the case then i'm not sure why blizzard pulled their support. Only other reasons I could see is the extra cost and maybe this being a niche market. I could see this being a small group of people who don't have a decent computer but still have a decent enough internet connection.
As you pointed out, it's something that could probably be abused by bots so it might be the case that it's an expensive service, for a niche group of people, and mostly being utilized by bots.
Let's say I play 8 hours a day on average. In A1 my computer pulled around 350W extra from the wall while ingame, compared to idle, but let's just say 333W for ease of calculation. I pay $0.35 per kWh, which isn't expensive where I live. That's a total of 240 hours times $0.35 divided by 3 = $28 a month in extra electricity cost.
Geforce Now RTX 3080 is around $18 a month for me. That still leaves $10 for any changes in price or reduced playtime.
So yeah... Intrepid, please consider this
Bots should be the least of their problems since it would actually be harder to bot when you don't have access to the server the game is running on to install your botting software.
Input lag and latency is pretty solid these days, and even if they were a problem that's something the user would suffer themselves, it wouldn't give them any advantages.
While this is a good point, keep in mind you are still using your computer - just not as heavily.
My first thought when reading this thread was to be against it, but every argument I could think of as to why, I was able to readily counter myself. As such, I'd be all for it if Intrepid were able to make it work.
If nothing else, it has the potential to bring in some people that just dont have a gaming PC and so would never consider playing a AAA game.
As an aside, this could be an interesting idea for a future MMO - making this the only way to play it. Rather than having the server hardware just run the server software and the client run the client software, just have it all run on the server and stream gameplay.
I thought of everything I know about this, ASIDE from 'poor connection', and couldn't actually find a reason why this would be bad.
Now, this isn't to say there wouldn't be a massive amount of players out there who would feel just a little 'off' or 'confused' doing this in a fast game, but the MMO genre does not generally contain the level of flow required to make it impossible.
The Playstation 4's 'Share Play' function is similar, and I use this function to provide certain practice tools to others even for fighters where this actually matters a lot. It is noticeable there if you've learned to play it from 'native hardware', but I find that my mind can adjust fairly easily to the required 'frame skip'/'frame drop' situation, and MMOs aren't P2P by definition, so you're still waiting for any system.
Most oddly, I perceive that the issue here might be 'scale' and 'UI rendering'. This type of gaming works best when everyone involved is likely to see the same screen, or there is a hard-to-explain concept of 'objective synchronous reality' that does not comprise too large a number of variables. Basically 'all players need to have mostly the same information, often presented in the same way', for any multiplayer form of this, otherwise you're doing the same thing, just 'closer to the server'.
Which is absolutely a benefit, just set up a server farm and rock out. The only 'issue' is that the architecture for it can't actually be particularly optimized for an MMO without a relatively large investment.
I haven't put a lot of thought or research into it, and @GrilledCheeseMojito would probably be able to give a much clearer idea of what might go wrong with it, if anything, but I could definitely see an architecture where this would work, it just feels like it would be moreso something that doesn't necessarily work well 'alongside' the base version.
We might have to wait for 'An Entirely Streamed MMO'. Unfortunately Google probably didn't partner with any MMO developers for Stadia to give this a real chance back then, and they would have been the ones with the real 'money to throw at optimizing it'.
True. I don't know how much extra the client uses, but my guess is not a lot more than streaming a 4K video for example?
As for 'An Entirely Streamed MMO', I think that's a cool concept. It would certainly reduce some hacks a lot. Some of the more advanced botting would still happen, because that can be based entirely on visual recognition of what is going on on the screen.
Another thing I thought of with the current cloud gaming services is that the developers can't see the individual IP addresses of the players. Not without the service deliberately forwarding that at least. Maybe that's part of why Blizzard stopped supporting all their games on those services last year.
For 'An Entirely Streamed MMO' I would assume this to be taken care of though.