A few weeks ago, I managed to try out OnLive – the new Cloud Gaming service which launched in the UK last month. I’ve known about this for a while, and have been looking forward to having a go with it, but I’ve had some serious scepticism about certain aspects of the service.
My first impressions weren’t amazing. Having created my account and installed OnLive onto my PC (running Windows 7), I found that I couldn’t get onto the service right away – the servers were full. Given that it was the first few days of the new service, it would be harsh to damn them for that, but it does highlight one underlying flaw of the cloud gaming model – the fact that is it possible for the service to be over capacity. Presumably, this will be mitigated as the early period dies down, and the company grows, but it is a possibility.
I got on within about half an hour, and loaded up a free trial of a few different games. I had some difficulty, being on a WiFi connection (though not a particularly slow one), which made getting things started quite tricky, but not impossible.
I tried out a few different games – notably Batman: Arkham Asylum – which I’ve played to death on the PS3 – and Borderlands – which I had never picked up before. Even with a fairly basic connection speed, the experience really worked. The games played well; the video quality was nothing to write home about, but I think it was still better than my fairly old machine would have handled Arkham Asylum – though I’m interested to see how well it up-scales on a better connection. Having the OnLive menu overlay, one of the great things about consoles, worked really well. The biggest ‘wow’ factor came from the instant start-up of a game – no waiting around on install times. Trying out a game was painless.
A day or so later, I picked up a Full Playpass of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Augmented Edition) for £1 – a start-out bargain. Again, it played really well – the odd bit of pixilation, but nothing severe, and it looked reasonable. I was quickly hooked.
But it’s after this that I came across the major limitations of the service. Firstly, since I was using the connection at someone else’s house – with capped data usage, I had to be very cautious about how long I used the service for. It really eats through your bandwidth. Secondly, as I keep mentioning (can you tell it’s bugging me?), since I have not internet at the moment, I can’t get back playing for another few weeks.
As I say – these are limitations rather than flaws, and something you just have to accept if you want to use this style of service – but they are frustrating. OnLive isn’t for those with capped data (and, to be fair, the kind of person who will use OnLive will probably be the kind who wants unlimited use anyway). Likewise, it’s my problem being offline, not theirs. But neither of these would be issues if I were playing a ‘real’ copy of the game, not to mention the usual murky sense of ownership of digital content.
These were some of my original misgivings about OnLive, and I’ve experienced them both pretty swiftly. Despite that, I still absolutely love the service. I can’t wait to get back on, and that’s a good sign. I’m going to write about this again in a few weeks, when normality is restored, and come at in from a different angle, when I should have had a pretty speedy new broadband connection put in.
