Originally posted by mrw0lf

I no longer feel I'm getting old, I think I just AM old. I really don't see the appeal of  the 'cloud' era we will innevitably see in the fairly near future. I can't even give reasons really, I just don't like the idea, god I really am just old :(

I am not that old and I prefer the high end graphics on my machine as well. Cloud computing is easy, but there will always be a market for high end graphics I hope. 

I too played OnLive Beta and think it may have a spot in the future of gaming.  However, for myself it still has a long way to go.  You just can't stream HD quality games right now.  OnLive knows this is a limitation.  I even had a discussion about this with them over email.  If you have a current gen video game card and a widescreen monitor then you'll have to play in windowed mode and still not have all the graphics turned up to the highest settings.  If you have an old PC then sure, it will be great for you.  Enthusiast gamers wouldn't want to settle for a  graphics downgrade.

It will be interesting to see what Bioware has coming along.

Anyone who thinks OnLive is a good thing is pretty damn ignorant.  The only good thing I see about it is that it eliminates hacking in online games.  It also

The bad:

No game piracy.  You might be wondering why this is bad.  It's because the consumer is a moron and will buy every piece of garbage released, piracy at least keeps them from spending too much money on retarded things.  If a demo is not released for a game we have no way of knowing whether its good or not.  I often pirate games to determine if they're worth buying.

You no longer own your games, you pay a subscription fee to access them.  What do you do if they start making changes that screw you over?  All this does is give an industry that's predominantly obsessed with making money more control over you and your money.  Look at Lord of the Rings Online going free to play.  Many players dislike this, but because noone else is able to offer LOTRO, they have to deal with it or no longer play it.

You think Ubisoft DRM is bad now?  Just wait until people can prevent you from playing singleplayer games by ddosing you or your ISP.  Internet outages will prevent you from playing offline games as well with OnLive.  Who knows what other problems will plague this service.

Price.  OnLive might promise lower fees for access to games, but remember how Digital Distribution as supposed to lower game prices because it eliminated the need for a box and other physical distribution related problems?  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is still 60 dollars on steam and other digital distribution websites.  Remember how ingame advertisements were supposed to reduce the price of the game?  Never saw it happen.

Control.  How often do you see indy games on xbox, ps3, and wii?  Not often.  All this does is raise the barrier for entry for new developers.  I expect massive fees associated with getting your games on the service.

Lag.  Unless you're sitting next to the data centers for these services, you're going to have a (depending on how far you are from it) significant delay between the time you click/move your mouse/press a key and the time it takes for you to actually see the effects of this.  Not to mention traditional methods of prediction won't even work, not even UE3's clientside hit detection, or Source Engine's serverside lag compensation system, because you can't have the client think ahead since you're using video only. 

Most importantly, this option for gaming may not even be available for people who don't live in or near big cities or any of the data centers that OnLive (or whatever other service attempts to do this) uses.

It's ridiculous and depressing to see that anyone would support that something as complex as a computer be turned into something as simplistic as a TV where a closed system controls what you have access to.  My worry is that such a thing will become standard and the rest of the computer functionality will become neutered, or that gaming will be moved completely to such an awful of service.

Basically I'm saying this could only work if the people running it had integrity and weren't pieces of shit who only cared about making a quick buck, and if we had some kind of super internet that had no ping time to anywhere in the same country.

Ok... This is why Cloud Computing is causing such a buzz with developers. In the past as well as the present to make games for PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox, PS3 and others code had to be written to be native on each system for the games to be truly multi-platform. This severely limited markets as you could only stretch your dev team so far so they would have to sacrifice some platforms to concentrate on a main few... namely PC, Xbox and PS3. With Cloud Computing you can have multi-platform games with only one incarnation of the code! This one master code will be able to be played on everything including PCs, Macs, Linux boxes, TVs, cellphones, Pad computers and any other device that has the ability to play video and has a broadband internet conection. This is not only going to save developers a boat load of time but also will allow them to reach markets they never dreamed of writing high end games for up until now.

This isn't just some way to nickle and dime people like some here would like you to believe as this could actually lower the costs of development and in turn make games cheaper to play. Cloud Computing will revolutionize the way we play games in the not to distant future. OnLive is just the first step toward great things to come in Cloud Computing. If you haven't tried it yet I highly recomend you do. Granted it's not perfect but what new technology is? This will only greatly improve with time. I for one look to this new future with great anticipation as it will mean no more updating your computer or buying a new console every couple of years to keep up with the new games. Hell you won't need a gaming rig at all. This is the future and it's coming so you'd better get used to it.

Bren

Originally posted by Scottc

Anyone who thinks OnLive is a good thing is pretty damn ignorant.  The only good thing I see about it is that it eliminates hacking in online games.  It also

The bad:

No game piracy.  You might be wondering why this is bad.  It's because the consumer is a moron and will buy every piece of garbage released, piracy at least keeps them from spending too much money on retarded things.  If a demo is not released for a game we have no way of knowing whether its good or not.  I often pirate games to determine if they're worth buying.

OnLive lets you demo any game for 30 minutes for free. This is the actual game and not some cheap demo level. You can try any game before you buy.

You no longer own your games, you pay a subscription fee to access them.  What do you do if they start making changes that screw you over?  All this does is give an industry that's predominantly obsessed with making money more control over you and your money.  Look at Lord of the Rings Online going free to play.  Many players dislike this, but because noone else is able to offer LOTRO, they have to deal with it or no longer play it.

This would be up to developers so it would be no different than it is now. The Cloud Computing service just delivers the games... they don't produce them. Just like now if you don't like something some developer is doing just don't play their games.

You think Ubisoft DRM is bad now?  Just wait until people can prevent you from playing singleplayer games by ddosing you or your ISP.  Internet outages will prevent you from playing offline games as well with OnLive.  Who knows what other problems will plague this service.

This may be a problem or it may not. It's really too early to tell what the next five to ten years will bring with the way the internet services have been advancing. I'll bet ten years ago 90% of this forum or more was still using Dial-up and now almost everyone is on high speed broadband. Who nows what the next ten years will bring.

Price.  OnLive might promise lower fees for access to games, but remember how Digital Distribution as supposed to lower game prices because it eliminated the need for a box and other physical distribution related problems?  Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is still 60 dollars on steam and other digital distribution websites.  Remember how ingame advertisements were supposed to reduce the price of the game?  Never saw it happen.

This may be a problem and it may not. Broadband costs have dropped exponetially in the last ten years. Writing only one copy of code for any given game will save developers a lot of time and money. Also through cloud computing they will be selling a lot more copies of each game as people with devices that never could play these games before will be buying them too. The combination of things could possibly mean cheaper games for all.

Control.  How often do you see indy games on xbox, ps3, and wii?  Not often.  All this does is raise the barrier for entry for new developers.  I expect massive fees associated with getting your games on the service.

This is a bunch of bull pure and simple. If anything it will be easier for indy developers to publish their games as this service will give them a centralized place were they can market and sell. I'm sure their will be fees involved but I think they will be far from massive.

Lag.  Unless you're sitting next to the data centers for these services, you're going to have a (depending on how far you are from it) significant delay between the time you click/move your mouse/press a key and the time it takes for you to actually see the effects of this.  Not to mention traditional methods of prediction won't even work, not even UE3's clientside hit detection, or Source Engine's serverside lag compensation system, because you can't have the client think ahead since you're using video only. 

Have you even tried the OnLive service? I live out in the sticks in Maine... About as far away from the OnLive servers as you can get without leaving the country. The lag is so minute that it's not even noticable.

Most importantly, this option for gaming may not even be available for people who don't live in or near big cities or any of the data centers that OnLive (or whatever other service attempts to do this) uses.

Read the last comment again.

It's ridiculous and depressing to see that anyone would support that something as complex as a computer be turned into something as simplistic as a TV where a closed system controls what you have access to.  My worry is that such a thing will become standard and the rest of the computer functionality will become neutered, or that gaming will be moved completely to such an awful of service.

Oh so you like shelling out a boat load of money every couple of years to upgrade? I know I don't. Computers will always have there place in the world and I don't see them going anywhere because of this service. You just won't need a high end gaming rig to play games anymore.

Basically I'm saying this could only work if the people running it had integrity and weren't pieces of shit who only cared about making a quick buck, and if we had some kind of super internet that had no ping time to anywhere in the same country.

LOL... I don't know what to say to this.... How would it be any different than dealing with the money grubbing bloated suits that run the gaming industry now?

It's very obvious that you know very little about OnLive or Cloud Computing. I suggest you go try it out and come on back when you have a little more knowledge of what you speak.

Bren

This is pretty interesting, not the first part (the concurrantly developing Bioware MMORPG) but the second part (consoles being, potentially, a relic). This is great news for gamers though, provided it actually happens and ubiquitously. Console systems like the Xbox 360, Wii and Playstation 3 are actually called 'computer game systems' (e.g. Playstation 3 computer game system). It is unclear whether or not this would apply to games designed to be played on portable consoles like the PSP and Nintendo DS, but perhaps they will find their own niche (more on this in a moment).

This would spell the doom of consoles and, perhaps, console gaming but this isn't in the least bit bad news save for one exception. The cost of technology is no longer what it was in the mid- to late-90's, a time when the cost of computer gaming on a quality rig was just ridiculous and became moreso as the price of technology wasn't allowed to catch up to the output of technology. The environment is different now and you can play games like Crysis and Dawn of War 2 on moderately priced gaming rigs. The Toshiba Qosmio x505-880 that I use for gaming while I'm at work, for example, only cost $1,799 and runs incredibly well. Moreover, people are becomming more knowledgable about technology and are able to take advantage of the less expensive cost of building their own desktop rig -or buying one. Thus, this can only be a good thing...if it happens.

That one exception is the niche I mentioned in the first paragraph. Portable consoles like the PSP and NIntendo DS are still rather popular and companies, such as Atlus, are porting older console titles (e.g. Persona on the PSP) and creating new ones (e.g. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey). This is an example of a company that is continuing to produce games for current console technology with games like Demon's Souls for the PS3, while at the same time utilising 'older' technology or technological constraints to put out quality titles. Thus, when it comes down to it, games that are less technologically advanced and could have been on consoles will now see action on more technologically advanced portable consoles.

Again, this is if it actually happens but if it does, damnit it's a good thing...but only if OSes aren't an issue!

Originally posted by Brenelael

. I for one look to this new future with great anticipation as it will mean no more updating your computer or buying a new console every couple of years to keep up with the new games. Hell you won't need a gaming rig at all. This is the future and it's coming so you'd better get used to it.

 

Bren

Communists have been looking in anticipation for their utopian socio-economic dream for years too.  I'd say let the free market shake out where these kinds of services are going to land, but we don't even have that anymore to a large extent.  Instead, I expect services like Onlive to be rammed down our throats whether we like it or not.  Fortunately, there are enough very real problems and trade-offs with cloud computing services that it will be a long time if ever that it dominates the gaming landscape.  There will continue to be options.

Originally posted by Asmiroth20

    I agree with what Hideo and Greg said about the how the console is going to be a thing of the past soon, I see everything coming together to point to PC.  Think about it, what have the consoles started doing?  Ability to access the internet, less titles being exclusive to any given console and the ability to use mouse/keyboard for input.  Game designers should be picking up on this.  I would think they would be shelling out extra money to make different formats and compatibilities, making a single platform would make things incredibly more streamlined.  It's also getting easier to get a decent gaming PC, as costs for quad-cores and i7s have been dropping and will cost even less by this time next year. 

    As for the small-scale MMO they're working on, I can see how they would want to experiment a little even while they have one of the big boys of the MMO world being worked heavily on.  Only time will tell what comes of it, guess we can wait and see how it all pans out.

You completely misinterpretated their points. They are not suggesting that consoles will become a thing of the past because of PC gaming. There is no reason to expect people moving to PC gamin. Consoles can do more and more things a PC can do and PC gaming is currently in a terrible state. Sales of console games continue to outsell PC games.

What they are probably suggesting is a lack of console hardware, In a similar way OnLive works.

Originally posted by kaiser3282

Anyone else kind of starting to get the feeling that EA is basically turning Bioware into an entirely different company. What i mean by that is, basically milking the success and good name associated with Bioware by basically staffing it full of people who were not part of Bioware before EA, and giving these teams the Bioware brand name and giving them projects that the original Bioware wouldnt have done themselves.

I guess it's part of business considering EA took them over and started calling the shots, but it just kind of seems like Bioware is slowly becoming simply a department of EA, rather than the real Bioware with financial support from EA. If thats the case, the quality of some of these future games is probably going to start going downhill from past Bioware games.

cant see how. Coding is coding, and there arent many ways for programmers to make something, specially considering they have style guides that your code has to comply with, and that every line has to go thru multiple checking/testing.

The point is that you can hire as many mercenary programmers as you want to speed up developing, the only thing that really matters is the brainpower behind the project, and I seriously doubt that EA is touching that. 

the biggest downside with Cloud computing is you HAVE to be connected to play, and not just connected, but Broadband connected. 

With MMORPGs, of course that's not an issue, they require connectiion to the net. 

But with single player games, believe it or not, there are times I like to play them when I'm not connected to the net. 

I don't care how many computers you have in your cloud if my client can't handle the graphics and the network doesn't have the bandwidth the application stalls. Worse, one slow element in your cloud can slow down all the other elements for time critical operations. Some operations are single threaded by nature and there is no substitute for raw processor speed in those cases. Cloud computing is also inherently less secure and more suject to data corruption. . Ever notice two core processors aren't as fast as a single processor at double their base speed? You can't chain fifty Atari 2600s together and make an Xbox. Cloud computing is not suitable for MMORPGs of today's complexity.

The main reason I look forward to cloud is because the game market is too much fragmented with these exclusive tittles. I invested my money on a good pc. I am a lot more comfortable on this platform. I have a list of games that I want to play though but I have to buy a ps3, 360 and even a psp. That sucks for me. 

Originally posted by zymurgeist

I don't care how many computers you have in your cloud if my client can't handle the graphics and the network doesn't have the bandwidth the application stalls. Worse, one slow element in your cloud can slow down all the other elements for time critical operations. Some operations are single threaded by nature and there is no substitute for raw processor speed in those cases. Cloud computing is also inherently less secure and more suject to data corruption. . Ever notice two core processors aren't as fast as a single processor at double their base speed? You can't chain fifty Atari 2600s together and make an Xbox. Cloud computing is not suitable for MMORPGs of today's complexity.

I am sorry but I have to disagree with you. It's not about the processing of the data or anything like that for the moment. It all comes down to the developer porting or making there game for the service. So far they have shown without a doubt that its possible. There are 30+ high end games already ported to the system that work without any problems, hitchs, ect.

Currently the only issue that really is any type of a issue is networth bandwidth. But thats something they are continuely addressing. They already have 10+ datacenter's in the US that server games out. They continue to add more both within the US and across the globe.  Of course no matter how many datacenters they add to serve games out, it can't makeup for some soddy ISP's that don't deliever the min quality of service.

As far as single processors being fast then duel, quad, ect. core procs. Well of course anytime you have something that can crunch through information 2x, 4x, 6x as fast its going to be faster. You can't compare a 4ghz processor to a duel core 2ghz processor with a single threaded app. But with that said more and more apps are being made to make use of multi procs and cores.  Heck alot of MMO's make use of multi threading. World of Warcraft fully makes use of Duel, Quad core machines.

Neather one us know how there backend porting / rendering system works.  For all we know there platform setup could put 10+ xeon proc's in place of a single gpu card. All we do know is that they said the system scales to meet the demand of the game being played.  And from what I have seen, I have never experienced any type of hitch or loading issue in any of the games.  If anything they load much faster on the cloud then I have ever seen on a PC without a SSD or Ramdisk  to house the game on.

Originally posted by Gameloading

Originally posted by Asmiroth20

    I agree with what Hideo and Greg said about the how the console is going to be a thing of the past soon, I see everything coming together to point to PC.  Think about it, what have the consoles started doing?  Ability to access the internet, less titles being exclusive to any given console and the ability to use mouse/keyboard for input.  Game designers should be picking up on this.  I would think they would be shelling out extra money to make different formats and compatibilities, making a single platform would make things incredibly more streamlined.  It's also getting easier to get a decent gaming PC, as costs for quad-cores and i7s have been dropping and will cost even less by this time next year. 

    As for the small-scale MMO they're working on, I can see how they would want to experiment a little even while they have one of the big boys of the MMO world being worked heavily on.  Only time will tell what comes of it, guess we can wait and see how it all pans out.

You completely misinterpretated their points. They are not suggesting that consoles will become a thing of the past because of PC gaming. There is no reason to expect people moving to PC gamin. Consoles can do more and more things a PC can do and PC gaming is currently in a terrible state. Sales of console games continue to outsell PC games.

What they are probably suggesting is a lack of console hardware, In a similar way OnLive works.

 Yes, not only Asmiroth 20, but a lot of people here misinterpreted their points.

-Bioware argument has NOTHING to do with Console vs PC gaming. To tell the truth "High End" PC gaming is almost dead today, casual and acessible PC gaming, MMO PC gaming and PC as a plataform for Console ports are the reality now.

-Now, lets see (Direct from Eurogamer) :

Mass Effect creator BioWare is working on a "small scale MMO".

BioWare is also exploring Flash, browser and iPhone games, although these may never see the light of day.

"On a big basis, what's working in business?" BioWare co-founder Dr. Greg Zeschuk asked during his keynote presentation at the Develop Conference this morning.

"Every year it's a little bit down. You can't blame the economy anymore. Really, it's about online. We're obviously working on Star Wars: The Old Republic, a big MMO. But we're working on smaller MMO type game games across the group - things all over the space.

"We explored lots of different kinds of games. We did some Facebook stuff. We did an iPhone game for Mass Effect. It wasn’t the best one – people point that out to us. We learned the hard way. The learning there was you have to iterate. The team went back and made some more games that we never released that were way better. Large scale MMOs. Small scale MMOs. We're going to continue to do triple-A console, but we're also going to be exploring pretty aggressively."

BioWare is known for its blockbuster games including Mass Effect and Dragon Age. It's upcoming online game Star Wars: The Old Republic is set to be one of the biggest MMOs ever created.

But BioWare is preparing to broaden its output.

"The future isn't necessarily on console," Zeschuk said. "That's the past. It's going to be a strong thing going forward, but the future is in all of these new businesses that are starting up.

"There will be some stuff you'll see down the road, within the next year, that shows what we're doing in that regard."

After his presentation, Eurogamer asked Zeschuk to describe the kind of game the "small scale MMO" may turn out to be.

"It can be almost anything," he said. "I used to play this game called O Game, by Gameforge. The galaxy is spinning away on some server and you're just poking at it in HTML and moving space ships around. That's an MMO. So it could be almost anything.

"We want to expand because, you look at what kids are playing on. Kids are playing on iPhones and iPads. The 3DS looks pretty amazing. All these platform options, we want to be touching on all those. We did one DS game. We actually had another DS game in development at one point but decided to hold off on that and look at iPhone instead.

Zeschuk's comments need not concern BioWare's veteran fans, however. Zeschuk said BioWare "is still going to do the giant stuff".

Expect more from Zeschuk, and the Develop Conference, throughout the week.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/bioware-working-on-small-scale-mmo

Originally posted by mrw0lf

I no longer feel I'm getting old, I think I just AM old. I really don't see the appeal of  the 'cloud' era we will innevitably see in the fairly near future. I can't even give reasons really, I just don't like the idea, god I really am just old :(

 The only thing i see when cloud computing is mentioned is the ability to nickle and dime the hell out of me for wanting to play games.  I see cloud gaming as a first step toward something i really do not want to see happen and that is cloud computing in general for everything.  I dont like the idea of my personal information, family pictures, financial information all the things that i use my pc for not being stored on a computer that i retain control of.  Unless there are massive leaps foward in information security  i do not and will not trust cloud computing.  I guess to me its the idea that i do not retain physical control fo the things i purchase and that bothers me.

Originally posted by Umbral

To tell the truth "High End" PC gaming is almost dead today, casual and acessible PC gaming, MMO PC gaming and PC as a plataform for Console ports are the reality now.

What do you consider "High End" gaming?  FF XIV is the second highest voted game on this site.  The graphic requirements aren't something a 5 y/o PC can handle without upgrades.  I've played OnLive.  The concept is great.  I was amazed I could stream the data with almost no lag.  However, I take a huge graphics hit using OnLive.  Right now the highest reolution they support is 1280x720.  Their suggestion is to play in windowed mode and sit farther away from the screen so it doesn't look as blurry.  Even my work provided laptop runs in 1920x1200.  I don't want to sit halfway across the room to play on a PC monitor.  Given time they will upgrade their systems to support higher resolutions, but as of right now anyone that has a decent widescreen monitor and graphics card bought in the last couple years would take a big hit.

Back on topic, I'm not sure I'm happy with this whole social mmo revolution.  Everyone wanting to hop on the Facebook bandwagon.  Those games don't offer enough depth for me. 

Originally posted by Cernan

 

...What do you consider "High End" gaming?  FF XIV is the second highest voted game on this site.  The graphic requirements aren't something a 5 y/o PC can handle without upgrades. 

-FFXIV will be also available for the PS3, sure you can play it on higher resolutions on PC, just like Mass Effect, Fallout3 and Bioshock, but those games are not produced for today's high end machines, they are produced primaly for Consoles.

-My argument was against the unrealistic points made by Asmiroth 20, the only 2 games released for real High End PC gaming in the last years were Arma 2 and Crysis. Arma 2 Is not a graphic reference anywhere and Crysis 2 will be on Consoles...Most gaming community and gaming media in the last months were amazed by God of War 3 and Uncharted 2 graphics, again, Console games and not productions oriented for high end PC gaming.

-Graphically sophisticated games like God of War 3, Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2 are huge hits on Consoles, on PC games like WoW, The Sims, Diablo and Civilization are huge hits.

-It doen't matter if quad-cores are cheaper now, PC gaming will not end with Consoles, to tell the truth, what we see now are Consoles eating all the PC market. Would you belive that Battlefield and Call of Duty series would be much more popular on Consoles than on PC a few years back? Well, it is the reality now.

...Back on topic, I'm not sure I'm happy with this whole social mmo revolution.  Everyone wanting to hop on the Facebook bandwagon.  Those games don't offer enough depth for me. 

-Well, I have a similar opinion, and checking the full interview, it seems Bioware is much more interested on this kind of social "easy to sell" casual and small scale game than anything related to OnLive.