The OnLive Experience
I sat in my kitchen at 11:59 p.m. on Monday, looking at my watch and waiting patiently for the clock to roll over to midnight. I quickly dove into Deus Ex: Human Revolution as soon as the game became available through OnLive. It felt instant — I didn’t have to drive over to a GameStop store or sit through a several-hour download to play it. Better yet, I was playing it on a MacBook Pro, which is notoriously light on games.
As a whole, the experience was solid. When OnLive first came out I played Borderlands — another first-person shooter — on the service. The controls felt a little sluggish when I played around with OnLive last year, but it has since improved and it now feels one-to-one. It’s comparable to a PC or Xbox 360 gaming experience.
I played the game on a decent Internet connection at home, with something north of 8 megabits per second download speed, but not too much higher. I played it over a wireless connection, too, which put even more strain on the service (it recommends that you play the game on a solid ethernet connection). It was basically the equivalent of running a high-resolution YouTube video for about 4 hours straight per play session, and it ran fine. The service was unplayable at our office, where our connection is shared between a dozen or so people and I can barely get a download speed above 3 megabits per second.
I only ever felt the wrath of the always-on cloud gremlin once during my hours of play time, when my wireless router inadvertently cut out and I frantically had to fix it within the 5-minute time limit OnLive gives you before it permanently disconnects you from its servers. It was frustrating, but realistically it was poor planning on my part. I lost around 45 minutes of play time, but it wasn’t enough to deter me from continuing on in the game — I just took a different path to the mission objective, which the game once again rewarded me for doing.
The spectator feature was also pretty enjoyable. I had a few dozen people drop in on my play session while I took on the first boss and cheer me on as I used some more absurd tactics to take the boss down. I was playing it on the hardest difficulty, which I suppose made my floundering and disastrous attempts to kill the boss more fun to watch. But eventually I joined the game’s voice chat and heard them talking about how to kill the boss.
One minor annoyance: that the game stops registering a key-press for a short period of time when you get a notification. That means if you are holding a key to stay in cover, you will drop out of cover for a second whenever a spectator joins, leaves, cheers you on or leaves a friend request. It was enough to get me caught once or twice while trying to be sneaky, and during intense firefights when more people seemed to join it got me killed as I lost control of my character for two or three seconds.
The video would infrequently become a little garbled when my wireless connection experienced small hiccups. It’s less like a YouTube video, where the video would simply stop and load before it continues playing, and feels more like a satellite television or cable channel that’s experiencing interference. It happened once or twice during a firefight and a cut scene, which hampered the experience slightly.