Game Streaming

[Morreion]

Loading... Gaming Upstream (Ten Ton Hammer)

...I’m talking about streaming patch content for MMOGs while you play. While a simple concept, I find it interesting that it’s taken a pretty long time for the top names the industry to finally catch on to the notion that players get rather annoyed when attempting to log in to their MMOG of choice only to discover that they get to sit and watch a progress bar fill up at a painfully slow rate before being able to actually play. However, if there’s one concept that I’d love to see universally adopted by the industry moving forward, this would be the one.

Streaming client or patch data while playing still has the potential to be a negative for some players, at least if it causes the game to become sluggish while the patcher chugs away in the background. From the sounds of it this seems to be the case with the current testing phase for EQ2 Extended, and back in the early days of Guild Wars this also lead to some rather annoying rubber banding issues that have thankfully been all but completely erased since then.

Still, this is a welcome turn of events for my gaming dollar, and one I thoroughly encourage other developers to adopt moving forward.

I play the WAR Endless Trial on their streaming client, and it works well. Every once in a while there's a brief hitch as the game loads but it has minimal effect on my gameplay. The big advantage of this system- much smaller downloads for games (1.6 gigs in WAR vs. 10X+ that size for the game DL), and no big patch downloads when you want to play.

I think we'll see more of this model, particularly with the rise of the F2P game.

[dotty]

This is something I hadn't even realized was happening until recently. I wondered why I was able to just log into WAR... Great trend!

I admit to enjoying SL's way of patching. Each sim area is loaded on a different computer. To upgrade or make major changes, just walk to the neighboring parcel while they patch and restart the previous one. Completely different backbone setup to a normal MMO, but almost no downtime for customers.

[Regolyth]

I don't like streaming content while I play. It slows my connection down. I live in an apartment and I'm on cable, so my connection is bogged down enough as it is by all of the people around me. I don't need a patcher slowing me down further, especially when I'm trying to kill someone. Lag does not make fights go well in my favor.

[dotty]

Eh, I'm normally not trying to kill someone in the first few days I play an MMO. My toughest adversary is typically a mangy wolf, giant rat, etc