I think this deserves it's own post. Someone (Anonymous) told me that the OnLive service can be accessed and played from EU countries as well, so I gave it a try and downloaded and installed the tiny OnLive plug-in. To my surprise, I actually got it working on a pretty old PC (just a Pentium 4 at 3GHz). I was flabbergasted. I'm about 6000 miles away from the OnLive servers and it's still running! The quality of the video stream was more than decent and smoother than when I try to decode 720p Youtube videos which my system just cannot handle.
My first impression: I love it, now I'm absolutely positive that this is the very near future for video games. It's a joy to watch others play and to start playing the same game within seconds! I've tried some Borderlands, Splinter Cell Conviction and FEAR2. There is some lag, because I'm about 6000 miles away from the OnLive server (I got a warning during log-in that my connection has huge latency), but I could nevertheless still enjoy the game. About half a second (or less) passes between hitting the shoot key and seeing the gun actually shoot, and when moving your character . I must say though that I got used to the delay after a while, and I anticipated my moves by half a second. My brain notices the delay during the first minutes of play, but I forgot about it after a while and just enjoyed the game. I think that if I can enjoy an OnLive game from 6000 miles away, then US players, who live much closer to the OnLive servers, have got to have an awesome experience. The lag could also be due to my own ancient PC (which is not even dual core) or to the local network infrastructure here in Belgium even though I have a pretty big bandwidth connection. I can't wait until they deploy their EU servers. Image quality is very variable, I guess it's partly because of my PC, which cannot decode the video stream fast enough. FEAR 2 looked very sharp though. The image looks best when you're not moving the camera and just stare at the scene. The recently announced MicroConsole seems to offer very good image quality from what I've read.
I think that cloud gaming will give an enormous boost to the graphics side of games and that photorealistic games will be here much sooner thanks to cloud rendering and it's inherent rendering efficiency (especially when using ray tracing, see the interview with Jules Urbach). My biggest gripe with consoles like Xbox and Playstation is that they stall graphics development for the duration of the console cycle (around 5 years), especially the latest round of consoles. With the exception of Crysis, PC games don't make full use of the latest GPUs which are much more powerful than the consoles. I just ran 3DMark05 some days ago, and it's striking me that this 5-year old benchmark still looks superior than any console game on the market. I truely hope that cloud gaming will get rid of the fixed console hardware and free up game developers (and graphics engineers in particular) to go nuts, because I'm sick of seeing another Unreal Engine 3 powered game.
I also think that OnLive will not be the only player and that there will be fierce competition between several cloud gaming services, each with their own exclusive games. I can imagine a future with multiple cloud gaming providers such as OnLive, OTOY, Gaikai, PlayStation Little Big Cloud, Activision Cloud of Duty, EA Battlefield Cloud of Honor, UbiCloud, MS Red Ringing Cloud of Death (offering Halo: RROD exclusively), Valve Strrream... To succeed they would have to be accessible for free (just like OnLive is now), without monthly subscription fees.
All in all, it's an awesome experience and it's going to open up gaming for the masses and will give a new meaning to the word "video" game. The incredible ease of use (easier than downloading a song from the iTunes Store) will attract vast audiences and for this reason I think it's going to be much bigger than Wii and will completely shake up the next-gen console landscape (Wii2, PS4 and Xbox 2.5/720/RROD2/...). MS, Sony and Nintendo better think twice before releasing a brand new console.
Be it OnLive, OTOY, Gaikai or any other service, I, for one, welcome our new cloud gaming overlords!
My first impression: I love it, now I'm absolutely positive that this is the very near future for video games. It's a joy to watch others play and to start playing the same game within seconds! I've tried some Borderlands, Splinter Cell Conviction and FEAR2. There is some lag, because I'm about 6000 miles away from the OnLive server (I got a warning during log-in that my connection has huge latency), but I could nevertheless still enjoy the game. About half a second (or less) passes between hitting the shoot key and seeing the gun actually shoot, and when moving your character . I must say though that I got used to the delay after a while, and I anticipated my moves by half a second. My brain notices the delay during the first minutes of play, but I forgot about it after a while and just enjoyed the game. I think that if I can enjoy an OnLive game from 6000 miles away, then US players, who live much closer to the OnLive servers, have got to have an awesome experience. The lag could also be due to my own ancient PC (which is not even dual core) or to the local network infrastructure here in Belgium even though I have a pretty big bandwidth connection. I can't wait until they deploy their EU servers. Image quality is very variable, I guess it's partly because of my PC, which cannot decode the video stream fast enough. FEAR 2 looked very sharp though. The image looks best when you're not moving the camera and just stare at the scene. The recently announced MicroConsole seems to offer very good image quality from what I've read.
I think that cloud gaming will give an enormous boost to the graphics side of games and that photorealistic games will be here much sooner thanks to cloud rendering and it's inherent rendering efficiency (especially when using ray tracing, see the interview with Jules Urbach). My biggest gripe with consoles like Xbox and Playstation is that they stall graphics development for the duration of the console cycle (around 5 years), especially the latest round of consoles. With the exception of Crysis, PC games don't make full use of the latest GPUs which are much more powerful than the consoles. I just ran 3DMark05 some days ago, and it's striking me that this 5-year old benchmark still looks superior than any console game on the market. I truely hope that cloud gaming will get rid of the fixed console hardware and free up game developers (and graphics engineers in particular) to go nuts, because I'm sick of seeing another Unreal Engine 3 powered game.
I also think that OnLive will not be the only player and that there will be fierce competition between several cloud gaming services, each with their own exclusive games. I can imagine a future with multiple cloud gaming providers such as OnLive, OTOY, Gaikai, PlayStation Little Big Cloud, Activision Cloud of Duty, EA Battlefield Cloud of Honor, UbiCloud, MS Red Ringing Cloud of Death (offering Halo: RROD exclusively), Valve Strrream... To succeed they would have to be accessible for free (just like OnLive is now), without monthly subscription fees.
All in all, it's an awesome experience and it's going to open up gaming for the masses and will give a new meaning to the word "video" game. The incredible ease of use (easier than downloading a song from the iTunes Store) will attract vast audiences and for this reason I think it's going to be much bigger than Wii and will completely shake up the next-gen console landscape (Wii2, PS4 and Xbox 2.5/720/RROD2/...). MS, Sony and Nintendo better think twice before releasing a brand new console.
Be it OnLive, OTOY, Gaikai or any other service, I, for one, welcome our new cloud gaming overlords!
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