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Yesterday afternoon was the unofficial kickoff of E3 Season, and it started with one of the more bizarre product offerings. For some time we have known that Google was making a large push into gaming with its Stadia product that serves to offer console gaming without a console. Now if this sounds familiar… it is because we have seen this same basic idea numerous times. Just off the top of my head I remember OnLive, Gaikai, Playstation Now and Geforce Now to name a few but I am certain I left off a half dozen of these product offerings. Where they have all fallen short however is in control latency and the amount of bandwidth required to create a playable experience. Google however thinks it understands exactly how much bandwidth is required to be able to use their product and has produced a handy chart to show what level of gaming will be available and what level of bandwidth. The challenge unfortunately is a little bit more nuanced given that the total bandwidth picture is influenced by the hardware sitting between your device and your internet service provider. I’ve gone to a lot of effort to try and make sure I have more than enough bandwidth to do whatever it is that I want to do online… and I feel like I would probably fall short of what would be required to make 4K gaming on this device stable. I have what I feel like is better than average internet for the United States. Additionally I have as much as I possibly can connected directly to a Gigabit switch attached hanging off of my AC 5400 router with two separate 5 ghz wireless bands theoretically capable of 2167 Mbps. I’ve segregated a business network and a gaming network all in an attempt to cut down on chatter. In addition to this I have 2 other AC 5400 repeaters helping to form a mesh network around the house. I use Parsec on a nightly basis and with a wired connection 4K streaming from my machine upstairs does not really work well enough to be something I would want to do on a regular basis. Similarly with all of this, none of the 4K video streaming options really feel viable and I always end up downgrading them to 1080p. Basically what I am saying is out of personal experience… their estimates are nonsense and will not produce the sort of results that they think they will.

What Google Stadia is really selling is a vision that I have long sought out myself. The ability to play the same games from any device in the house at any time I would like. In essence this is why I use Parsec, because it allows me to extend my more expensive and capable gaming desktop experience to my less than capable and aging gaming laptop. Even then however the experience works equally well when playing over my Chromebook via the native Android Parsec app, so I can see at least in theory that the vision of Stadia is possible based on my own experiences. I just question if we are at a point bandwidth wise where this level of fidelity is really ready for prime time consumption. Especially once you consider another potential monkey wrench… I am not really the target audience for this device.

That is ultimately the piece we are going to have to factor into our decisions about Stadia is the fact that most of us reading this blog are not what I feel like is actually the market for a device like this. For me personally… I own a 4k capable gaming desktop, an aging but still viable gaming laptop, effectively every console from this current generation and every console from the last generation. I’ve spent the money on hardware and accouterments required to be able to play games at a reasonable level of fidelity and with it comes a large library of games that I already own. Stadia more or less is going to require us to buy into a completely different library of games and potentially deliver a noticeable worse experience than being connected real time to hardware. Sure there will be the bleeding edge early adopters among us that dabble with this… but ultimately I expect we will all return to our comfortable world of hardware based gaming within the week.

I feel the true market for this device is the cord cutter that has already tuned their network and devices to fit a steady diet of media streaming from various platforms. The target individual maybe was a serious gamer in their youth but as life got busy they realized there just wasn’t enough time in the day to play these rather expensive consoles that used to just gather dust in their apartment. Every now and then a game comes along that through the Zeitgeist, friends and a dose of FOMO they really wish they could play… but that proposition seems less elegant when you consider playing a single game might have at a minimum a $360 outlay of cash associated with it. If this person could simply buy the game and be able to play it with a second hand direct input controller over their business class laptop… then I think you have the perfect use case for this network. Stadia is a system built for the occasional gamer and is going to be made or broken on expanding the range of gaming behind those of us who are already sworn acolytes.

I think the real tragedy of yesterdays presentation is the fact that they spent exactly zero air time talking about Stadia Base and instead made a hard push for Stadia Pro. The founders edition is $130 and includes 3 months of the $9.99 per month subscription as well as 3 months for a friend. However if you look at these charts what you are essentially getting for your “pro” money is 4k gaming and I have already stated that I think this is a pipe dream unless you happen to have Gigabit internet. What is way more impressive is the fact that they give you 1080p 60 fps stereo gaming without a reoccurring subscription and the ability to dip your toes into all of the free to play content that is going to be on the platform like Elder Scrolls Online and the recently announced as free Destiny 2 New Light. This is going to be the real backbone of the player base… folks that purchased a single game or want to try out one of the free to play offerings. Maybe these are folks that are already mobile gamers but crave something more immersive, or maybe they just want to occasionally relive the nostalgia of their youth that their jobs keep them from on a regular basis. In those scenarios I think this platform makes a lot of sense. I do however think that “Netflix for Games” is probably a really bad way to look at this service, and I feel like the as of yet officially announced XCloud is going to be more of that since the Xbox Game Pass already does an amazing job of serving up a ton of games for the subscription fee. Ultimately at the end of the day… what makes Stadia so confusing is that the messaging seems to be targeting so called “core gamers” when in truth that was likely never their intended audience. Once you keep that in mind… the product makes considerably more sense and may just bring a brand new audience to gaming.

This morning I am attempting to make a quick blog post, but after yesterday I didn’t want to skip today. My Mom is doing considerably better and seems to more or less be out of the woods. The plan to effectively “melt” the clot with super high strength anti-clotting agent seems to have worked and they believe it is largely gone. There was a marked difference between yesterday and today in both her coloration and her demeanor. You could tell she was feeling better because she was way more chatty and also complaining about little things… which weirdly is a good sign. She was largely knocked out and fairly ashen grey when I first got there Tuesday morning. At this point they have removed whatever the equivalent of a PICC line that she had delivering the clot busting agent directly to the location of the clot. They also removed all of the stuff that was going into her neck in general so currently she just has the IV which will ultimately remain until she is released from the hospital… which in theory should happen at some point today. Thanks for all of the thoughts, wishes and prayers for the last couple of days, and I am also super thankful to the folks in the ambulance for making the determination of what was going on and getting her to a cardiac unit quickly. For being a tiny spec in rural america, my home town has a pretty phenomenal volunteer ambulance service.

I don’t have an awful lot on the gaming front, but when I got home last night I played a bit more Destiny 2 and also spent some time catching up on the last few days worth of news. One of the more interesting rumors coming out of the pre-E3 leaks is that supposedly Bungie will be announcing today during a ViDoc or something similar that they are going cross play. This is legitimately a major wish of mine come true if it actually happens. Additionally there is talk about a Switch port of the game, and while Ashgar disagrees that this can happen it will be interesting to see. For all we know a more powerful version of the Switch is going to be announced at some point soon and that Destiny might be a launch title or something like that. Regardless I am super interested in seeing how well the cross play works.

In related news I have been poking around Dauntless now that it is officially part of the Epic Games store. if you look at the above image close enough you will see that I have a little PC icon beside my name, the second player has a little Playstation icon beside theirs and the last two have Xbox icons. I noticed absolutely nothing different about that fight until I got to the final screen and saw that we were all on different platforms. So this gives me lots of hope about the whole Destiny 2 cross play thing. I hope this also means that in the near future ALL titles will do this going forward. For now I need to run so making an extra short post. Thanks again for all the thoughts. Hopefully life can get back to normal.

In what is seeming to be the continued tradition of writing disclaimers at the top of my blog posts. I am still fine even though everything around me seems to be going batshit crazy. I officially cannot travel to see my parents right now as the highway between me and them is blocked with flood water. In my suburb the water has receded, but the city of Tulsa proper is struggling. I am getting pulled into some support of the flood prep effort, which is why I did not blog at all Friday. I got up for work at 4 am and was in the office at 5:30… which left me no time at all for my traditional blogging. Yesterday was of course a holiday here in the United States, and I contemplated writing a post… but could not bring myself to actually do so. Instead I more or less spent the weekend recuperating from the madness that has been our life over the last several weeks. Saturday night we had another string of Tornadoes, and there is a high chance that tonight will be a repeat of that process again. My wife just happened to be up and around at 1 am when the warnings started happening, so my slumber was briefly interrupted as we lay there in bed trying to determine if we need to worry about it. It managed to touch down in a few places but nowhere near us so we rolled over and went back to sleep… still leaving the television on just in case.

As far as gaming goes I have been all over the place. Some years ago I backed the Crowfall kickstarter, in part because it seemed like it was gaining a bunch of steam within the greater internet zeitgeist. I figured either I would really like the game or else it would at least give me a cheaper copy to try it as is often the case with kickstarter pricing. However over the period of time since Alpha went live the game itself has seemed more of a tech demo than an actual game Periodically I would poke my head in and think to myself “yup that is an unfinished mess” and move on with my life. This time however I am starting to see the early signs of a functional game, and as a result I spent more time playing it this weekend than I have to date.

Crowfall itself is this bizarre amalgam of Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online and Everquest Landmark all sorta rolled into a single game that neither explains itself nor really gives much in the way of breadcrumbs as to how you should be approaching it. As a result I personally found myself perplexed by the game each time I had logged into it in the past, and this time I resorted to actually watching a tips and tricks video to somewhat ease the transition into the mindset required to be playing it. Effectively there are three modes to play the game and each have their own specifics. Eternal Kingdoms is effectively sandbox mode where you have total control over the world and can fiddle around and build til your heart iscontent. God’s Reach is effectively newbie mode, which is a largely PVE experience that allows you to get a taste for how the game will feel. Campaign is the PVP conquest mode which resets every so often and pushes the players back to square one. At this point I have only dinked around with the first two modes, and my allergy to PVP will largely keep me out of the third mode for some time.

Where the comparison to Eve Online comes in is the fact that the game has decided to have offline skill progression. This means that probably the very first thing you should do in the game is decide to make a primary and a secondary path which will allow you to begin accumulating skills in a sort of alternate advancement system that is independent of your characters. I have no clue how fast this acquisition is, but it always feels like I have a ton of points anytime I have logged out of the game for awhile. Right now I am working my way through the Crafting and Combat basics… with a focus on crafting to in theory be able to build better stuff for myself.

The above image represents the tree within “Crafting Basics” and I am nowhere near maxing it out, which I assume is required to move on to the next sub tree in the master list posted two images above. All of the pips seems to largely focus on efficiency and success of the patterns, and over in the combat tree they largely focus on increasing your stats and less on granting abilities which are done at a per character level. Right now I have spent most of my time on a Guineacean Knight aka Sword and Board and a Stoneborn Champion aka the big axe wielding warrior. The one credit I have to give them is that the character models they have created are glorious. The character animations however leave a little something to be desired.

The gameplay largely involves a mix of combat and crafting and you sort out how to make yourself the tools necessary to navigate the world and its combat system. It all starts out by gathering wood which then allows you to make the most basic of crafting implements. From there you can work your way through tiers of materials and at least cobble together some basic armor, and once you find the next tier of uncommon materials and a crafting bench some decent armor. I’ve not encountered anything I would call a unique drop, and effectively everything seems to come from crafting. This is going to be a key point in a few moments.

Up until this point everything was a fairly pleasant experience, but the game was just about to hit me with a sucker punch. As I expanded out from the starter areas I started encountering more difficult monsters. At which point I stumbled across this trio of skeletons… and took my very first death. In Crowfall when you die apparently everything that you were carrying in your inventory and that was not equipped on your person stays at the point of your death in a grave marker form. In order to get back your stuff, you have to get back to wherever you died… and tediously loot your items one by one with no bulk loot option. If you read the forums this is designed to purposefully lead to some tension surrounding if you can successfully loot your corpse before trouble arrives.

I spent a good hour and a half trying to clear the camp of 3 skeletons… that if I was super careful I could split a single mob of that pack. I could not however managed to take down two of them at a time… which meant that I would ultimately die again… strand another tombstone and have to repeat the process. I finally Leeroy Jenkins’d my way into looting enough stuff off my corpse to be able to get started again, but I have to say the entire experience put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. That said… once I got back some basic crafting tools there really was nothing on my body that I could not get back given enough time harvesting which I guess is the one golden takeaway from the experience. Death is a loss of time and opportunity, but doesn’t really do anything to permanently impact your progression.

There are a lot of titles that are nostalgic about various aspects of games gone by. Crowfall is very much a game that is nostalgic about the realm versus realm game play of Dark Age of Camelot and having to do corpse runs. That is not at all something I am nostalgic about other than being able to tell the gamer version of “in my day” stories about how rough we had it. Death is a bad enough set back… I just don’t feel like we need additional penalties tacked onto it, especially when it effects the items that I had spent the previous two hours of game play fastidiously assembling. Ultimately I find what Crowfall is doing interesting… but I also figure at this point it is pretty certain that the game that exists is not really in my wheelhouse. All of that said… I am glad the game is progressing and has turned into something more than a tech demo. I will continue to watch it evolve into whatever it is planning on becoming. It isn’t really my jam but I figure it is someones out there. If you have deep nostalgia over the way Dark Age of Camelot used to be, then you might want to check it out. Otherwise you can just keep watching me as I poke my head back in periodically.