Anyone here ever try OnLive?

I have been reading up on the service from Wikipedia and other places. The Talk page on the Wikipedia article is full of venom and despair. And despite being sold for a tiny fraction of the debt they owed already, the service is still running and still for sale. I have a Gaming PC, but will soon next year have my Ouya console. And OnLive promised to work with the console.

So has anyone played anything on the service? I am aware latency will be high. Even potentially unplayably high on certain games. But how high is the biggest question. I can get ~50ms ping times to the nearest servers they have. (That is more of a guess, since I know the cities they have servers in, but it should be close enough.)

Here are the links to read if you do not already know everything about these services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive
http://www.onlive.com/

And here is the Ouya console I bought from the Kickstarter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya
http://www.ouya.tv/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console

 

Never tried it, but from what I've heard it's like Steam but you can use it on your television aswell. Or something.

 

It has some features similar to Steam, but it is a monthly fee for all the games they have rather than a single fee for each of them you choose to buy.

It will have dedicated PCs running Windows and the latest patched games for the users. It will encode video from the games themselves in real time and send it over the Internet to the user. The user then sends back input like as if they were playing locally.

They have software to play it on may devices already. The Ouya console will have it soon if not immediately at launch.

In one way, it will be much cheaper than buying games only to learn they are awful. But the biggest limitation is the latency. Some people speculate it will be simply impossible to play most quick action games because at best it will likely have 200-300ms of latency between input on the player side and response on the server side.

You could aim for a perfect head-shot in a FPS and hit nothing but air. But I expect many of these concerns can be all but negated by auto-aim and a bit of work from OnLive and the game makers. Still, I expect FPS games will be next to worthless with this service. But $10-15 a month to try new games before dumping a boatload of cash on what could be garbage may be well worthwhile.

And often in a FPS I disable any auto-aim because there are times I anticipate where my target will move and lead my shots. This is invaluable for area of effect weaponry like RPGs and such. Auto-aim makes these worthless in most games that have it. I do not aim for the character that is my target. I aim for the ground or a nearby object that they will be close enough to. That works well in games like Borderlands and such. If auto-aim tried to correct my shots in those cases, 50% of my shots would sail right past the target as they dodged, whereas with auto-aim disabled they may not take maximum damage, but they would certainly be hit.

 

Hah 200-300 latency, you call that lag? pfft.

[Australian latency is 200-300 minimum if connecting to a US server... which many of us have no choice but to].

 

Can you actually play a modern FPS game with that much latency?

Another thing I neglected to mention is that as far as I can tell, OnLive maxes out at 1280 x 720 resolution. For it to look good, I would have to buy a cheap 720P LCD monitor. (I absolutely hate running anything other than native resolution on my monitor. 1920 x 1080 would be a bitch to encode on the fly and transmit. But I would gladly lower some graphical settings to compensate if I must.)

 

I don't understand the appeal for non-casual PC gamers. You don't have the files, you don't have access to deep settings (e.g. those within .ini and config files), if something is wrong on their end you can't fix it and so on. If there's one thing we need to stop doing, it's relinquishing control of games (one of the things I dislike about Steam, truth be told).

On top of that, internet infrastructure is incredibly poor in most areas of the world. Whilst you might live in an area that can use OnLive, it could be a case of the next town over couldn't. In the UK, our infrastructure is fairly poor and as such a system like OnLive isn't feasible for most customers. Maybe those on fibre optic or in improved areas, sure, but I think it would be an unreliable system for most.

I also think it's disgusting they charge £30(+) to "own" a game. It's glorified renting with absolutely no guarantee. At least with Steam you have the vague promise that your games will be available if/when the service goes under, and even then you have the game files so workarounds may be possible in some regards.

 

My ISP has been getting worse as time goes on for years now. (Charter Cable Internet.)

But there is nothing else available here other than Clear Wimax. (It uses the old Television radio frequencies that the FCC sold to the highest bidder and promptly stuffed the profit in their pockets.)

I would love to have another option. But still Internet access is more reliable than most other things these days. Outages are frequent, but very short in duration. (Minutes on average.)

So this may still be a good option rather than buying games on Faith I do not have for most game makers.

There is much debate about the cause of the Internet failures of the last few years, but I think it all boils down to ISPs not wanting to bother to upgrade to support IPv6 and thus having to reset everything every few hours to reset the IP addresses used since there simply are not enough IPv4 addresses.

Charter claims to support IPv6, but the truth is that they do not in any way support it. They support a variant of it for their own OEM DOCSIS 3 Cable Modems, but even that does not work half the time. I use a DOCSIS 2 modem, and am uninclined to upgrade to DOCSIS 3 until they actually bother to support the standard as it really is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS
(Read the talk page to learn that if the ISP cared to, DOCSIS 1.1 and 2 could support IPv6 too. Cable Modems carry Ethernet Frames, not IP packets.)

Wow. I went off the deep end here. I will shut my pie hole now.

 

Looking at their catalogue and racking my memory, no. It's supposed to allow you to play PC games without the need for the perceived expense of a gaming-capable PC (a perception that's outdated and complete bullshit at the moment, especially when you compare to the iPhone and iPad).

A lot of the 'console exclusive' games tend to be exclusive to one console/brand anyway, which means they'd most likely not appear on a platform-blind(ish) service like OnLive.

 

My impression is that their goal ultimate goal is the reverse of that. It's to allow you to play PC games on low end embedded devices without having to buy an expensive console. That's why they are pushing their support for things like smart TVs, blu-ray players, and tablets.

 

I'd heard of On-Live before, but it never seemed like something I'd want to use. It's one of those things that makes a lot of promises, but I'm very skeptical (no surprise). I suppose turn-based games might work well with it. But for anything else?/? I can't see it being anything more than a gimmick.

 

I look at it more like a trial run of every game they have for a flat rate per month. You do not have to have a perfect play experience to determine if a game is worth buying. And a terrible game would be evident in minutes. For $10-15 a month to try 300 games, I think that would be well worth it.

Also there are advantages most of us do not need, like the fact that all you need is some petty system capable of receiving and decoding the video and transmitting your input. You can do this anywhere with a netbook and still play a good looking modern game.

Your power usage would not be linked to massive video data being churned away to render things locally. You could leave your GPU at a lower clock speed and greatly reduced power usage and still play as if it was maxed.

 

But, really, if you're capable of doing that, why would you need OnLive in the first place? £84 a year to access the "PlayPack" (which isn't all of their games), then whatever else it costs more to buy games at stupidly high prices. You're looking at a pretty expensive service, all things told.

Those who shop via the Steam, GamersGate, Origin, etc. sales would probably get quite a few good games for that £84.

 

Well the playbook is not all, but rather most of the games. And more are added over time. (210 in the US and Canada. 207 in most other areas.

But I am not advocating OnLive as a good option. I am only saying it is a nice theory, and asking if anyone has actually tried it.

In all likelihood I will never try it. But I like to plan in advance anyway. And if my PC ever dies, I can use my Ouya with this service to play until I can afford to rebuild my PC. That is my real motivation besides a trial run of newer games that I will likely not buy anyway. (I do not trust demos or trials. But a full version I can play remotely is close enough for my purposes.)

 

According to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, it's not bad but when you factor everything in, it's really no better than playing a console on your home TV, and the streaming can blur if you move the camera too much or there's too much visual feedback (e.g. explosions). That is, of course, assuming that you can get onto the service (they tried before OnLive went bankrupt, and I saw mentions of only a limited number of 'slots' are available, though I doubt it's much of an issue now).

And a rough calculation suggests 299 games in the UK, many of which are low-quality small studio titles (Alpha Prime), Sega's scarily expensive re-releases and so on, but there's a good mix of classic titles, indie games and more recent releases. And a lot of the latest or more popular releases are, well, not in the playpack. AssCreed, Darksiders 2, L.A. Noire, etc.? You have to rent/buy them.

 

I find that startlingly hilarious.

 

And yet not at all uncommon. It reminded me of the story about a movie that is near and dear to my heart, "The Big Chill". Kevin Costner, at the time, was an unknown actor, and he got a part in that film. And yet no one ever saw him in it because he played a corpse, and they decided to cut him out of the movie during editing. I know that this kind of thing has happened to many people /edit BTW, he's actually one of the most important characters in the movie, because it's all about his funeral. But you never actually see him.

Heck, it happened to my brother and his family my brother's wife's cousin works on the television show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition". Early in the summer or late spring, they went up to visit him (I think they were filming in Maine or something like that). And appparently (because I never watched the show) they always have this scene at the end where a truck blocks the view of this house that they've practically rebuilt for a family, and there's an audience that is behind the truck that is supposed to cheer when the truck moves, and reveals the house for the first time (obviously they'd need a blind audience to keep it a secret, but it's one of those really stupid things that they do on reality shows). My brother and his family were in the crowd.

Anyway, my brother made me record the show and I did, but my mom watched it first and told me that she didn't see anyone she recognized on the show (honestly, I didn't want to watch that entire show just to see my brother at the end, I would have settled for just watching the few seconds they'd be on, but they weren't there. I have no idea why. But they weren't.

Well at least they got to hang out on a television set -- I bet that was exciting for them.