Just played a bit of Control through the browser, just up until you meet and chat with the first character, Emily Pope. I’m honestly not the type of person who’s super adept at noticing FPS and resolution and such so I’m not a good judge, but it was definitely playable!
Felt responsive, had no trouble dispatching foes with mostly headshots. It did look a bit muddy though, and I did feel a bit nauseated by the time I finished but I think I had the same issue on PS4 until I changed something in the settings (probably motion blur). It was cool being able to take screencaps and videos, but I wish you could use the dedicated button for that instead of having to go through the game bar, which I’m not used to. Loading in the game was pretty slow, probably because I’m used to an SSD now. Loading up the stream took a while as well, probably like 25 seconds. Not too bad for something that only needs to happen once but room for improvement.
I chose Control for a few reasons:
I’m already familiar with the game, having beaten it on PS4 a few years ago. I remember being impressed with how it looked even on my launch PS4!
It has gunplay, which I wanted to test out. I’m not much of a shooter fan, but I figure it’s a good metric for how responsive it is.
I had double dipped on the Ultimate Edition, and wanted to see how the base game looked and if the save would transfer (I don’t expect it to).
I’m not actively playing it. This is important because I think Quick Resume really messes with the save syncing (which makes sense). I had tried to stream Yakuza 3 Remastered after finishing it, and it threw up a few errors while syncing because I guess it was confused by the technically still running instance on my Series X.
All in all, this is a really cool concept that could change how I play games. There’s still work to be done, but I’m sure that it’ll be better when they upgrade the blades. Maybe building more data centers or whatever will help too, I’m not a scientist.
Yeah, was thinking about this a couple weeks back. I’m assuming that Xbox has planned on using a pretty large number (still not sure how many, but I’d guess if each can host around 4 gaming sessions at a time (or was that the older system?), conservative minimums in the high tens of thousands but likely more overall for initial ramp up, and probably with a 3ish year expected life since they’ll be running more frequently, meaning they’ll require replacement units too) of their SoCs for their data centers. Honestly guessing required #s is pretty hard since it relies on knowing or being able to estimate peak concurrent usage of xCloud with enough room for growth to not handicap it and also normal hardware failure rates etc. Every time they have a huge show like an E3 it probably means more people hearing about the service as well.
So even if output of chips matches Sony (who according to rumor last year did start chip production a couple months earlier) they still can’t sell as many retail units unless they also completely delay their growth and improvements in cloud goals. And while normally they could just buy up extra fab space and bump production numbers in a couple of months, the fact that they’re competing for it with everyone else makes that a bit hard. I’m sure they’ve got good people making lots of calculations and figuring out the best mix of usage.
I had mixed experiences. FH4 worked pretty good and when it stuttered because of connection problems you can always rewind. Startup was crap because syncing the save took minutes. I don’t know why this happens in a data center?
Greedfall worked surprisingly well with decent image quality. The only problem i have with this game is turning the character which is already a bit weird on console and the greater input lag on cloud streaming makes this really noticeable.
I can compensate the lag in my brain for most games but Greedfall has a really weird acceleration curve for turing around your char. it made me really uncomfortable, i have to look into camera sensitivity setting for this game.
Startup time I believe comes down to them not having literally every game installed on every server all at the same time and also looking up your save point. So they’re most likely doing a quick flash of the game to the system or something. Don’t take this as gospel, but I think that’s what’s happening.
It’s been a few months since I tried FH4 on my phone, but at the time I definitely noticed issues with lag affecting me in races. I’ve played stuff like Minecraft Dungeons, Rain on Your Parade, Donut County mostly recently, and aside from a couple stutters in a long session, it’s been pretty good.
Unless you are a Microsoft employee, your xcloud experience has been running on old Xbox One S blades. That is why you’re having long load times. Also with that setup, the video encoding for streaming is done outside the OneS hardware using separate hardware for encoding. The SeriesX and SeriesS have integrated hardware for video encoding which will remove some portions of latency.
I actually bought myself a Kishi last year as a birthday gift and still haven’t used it. Might sell it, as I think I’m more likely to use a regular controller and my Surface going forward. My biggest complaint using my phone wasn’t the latency or experience so much as just my screen was too small. Guess I’m getting old…
Sounds like you need a bigger phone, old man! Joking aside, I’ve had a Kishi on my wishlist for a while, but I haven’t had much opportunity to be out of the house. I figure at this point, I’ll wait for the new blades to really look into it and maybe a better device will be out or it’ll at least drop in price.
I will say that I’m looking at phones a bit differently now, paying more attention to size, 5G compatibility, and refresh rate when those weren’t factors that moved the needle much before.
