PUBG and Fortnite are both wildly popular mobile games. I see people playing them on the bus all the time.
Having never played an FPS on my phone, I had to download Call of Duty to see how it worked, being a heavy kb+m FPS player in my youth.
Played a dozen or so rounds in a couple weeks. It worked surprisingly well with plenty of skill gap between the players.
A couple years ago I also tried a MOBA on my phone wondering how that could possibly work on such a small tap-input device
Turns out mobile screen + tap input game UX is well-explored and polished territory.
Now all I want to see is Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis on a phone and I'll agree that nothing is impossible.
https://www.digitalspy.com/videogames/a456278/europa-univers...
Somewhat bizarrely, a Nintendo DS port of EU2 was also in development at some point!:
For example a pirate game would have a detailed social sim of the crew, an "FTL level" sim of the ship in combat, a "Sid M. Pirates" level sim of ship to ship combat (that is all NPC off-screen when the player character isn't in command of a ship) and a sim of baroque-era Caribbean economy. A low level sailor would just manage relationships and balance focus between categories like following orders, initiative, camaraderie, bravado and risk avoidance (each influencing how he fares in the off-screen social and "FTL combat" simulations), peppered with the occasional decision set-piece, whereas a pirate-king might decide on resource allocation and strategic city upgrades (but still not micro-manage anything but relations). The tactical level would be a much more interactive (if the PC happens to be in command) series of decisions, but still do exclusively fast-forward-to-pause timing. ("free form turns", imho mobile games should be as passive as a book whenever you put down the phone)
The pattern could be applied to anything that has a somewhat limited set of characters for the social layer (the CK2 courtier population might still be a bit heavy for mobile...) and involves separable tactical and strategic layers. The original idea came from the question of how one could do a WW2 air combat sim on mobile that is deeper than Sid M. Ace Patrol but unlike IL-2 still without a dexterity factor. The player would balance focus between e.g. spotting, engine operation and navigation when on mission but not in combat and during engagement between aiming, evading, energy conservation, situational awareness and so on (plus a series of decision points that might be seconds or minutes apart depending on situation). The social layer might involve storytelling decisions like choosing to "accidentally" miss an emergency scramble after a night of heavy stress relief or flying under the influence.
With a bottomless fantasy budget, this kind of game would come with full 3D modeling for illustrating every sim layer, but only ever show a single frame at each interaction, representing the state of the simulation (which is actually closer to board-game abstraction than to 3D physics) in a semi-randomized way. Reasoning: animations quickly get old no matter how good they are and single frames can be doused in nice-looking postprocessing that would cause unsightly artifacts if animated. An endless pool of informative flavor illustrations, not the usual showing-off of GPU power and production effort.
You might be interested in Stellar Monarch (https://store.steampowered.com/app/446000/Stellar_Monarch/). I haven't played it (no linux version) so can't recommend it but it seems much more focused on role playing as emperor sitting in your throne room. I think a successful mobile CK2 would look more like this and less like the desktop map staring one.
1. Each tier is its own game, 2. The games are not independent
As a simple, two-game, example. Imagine a strategy game such as Shogun (turn-based strategy). When the players kn that game start conflicts that opens up a match for FPS-type players to join. The outcome of the battle will depend on the FPS-player performance while the match-up is skewed depending on the relative forces deployed by the generals.
Maybe cities are maintained by more Minecraft-esque players, while the eye in the sky can submit tasks down below for resources, certain buildings, etcetera.
What would be in it for the player extras on the tactical level? It's hard enough for level design and matchmaking to compose a match of random internet players when there are no further constraints, forcing the parameters of one players strategy session on top of that problem can only make it worse.
"RPG sim" would aim for the opposite, creating a uniform UX with consistent interaction pacing (even if on wildly different timescales) for all the off-screen sim layers.
Incidentally, neither of these are an FPS. Both using (or favouring, in the case of PUBG) third person, over-the-shoulder play.
However video game “genres” are kind of a mess. FPS is too broad of a label to be useful. Both CoD and Portal are “FPS” but feature wildly different pace, tone, and requirements on the player. Another example: there’s a type of “FPS” that is almost extinct because it’s only really playable on PC: the arena shooter or twitch shooter (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Quake 3). These are simply not playable on console/mobile because the speed and precision of inputs required to play them is beyond the inputs available.
All of this is to say that the type of “FPS” you might get on mobile won’t represent the full range of FPS experiences you can get on PC or console.
The options to play may be increasing, but there’s no way mobile will kill the keyboard players.
The second largest streamer in Germany (I think top 20 world wide or something) regularly streams the mobile game "Clash of Clans". I've seen streams with 20k viewers and more streaming things like "Black Desert Mobile" and "Call of Duty Mobile", too.
But... both technically and culturally it's not the same as a PC shooter. Similar to comparing HALO with a game like Counter Strike I guess - one summer I was bored and shot 2500-3000ish heads (Aim Botz) in one sitting but I can't imagine "practicing" PUBG mobile in a similar way.
They are separate, partitioned instances of the games though, tailored for the format.
Who plays the Bedrock Edition on PC, though?
It sort of makes sense, since anyone my age or older didn't _really_ have access to serious mobile games growing up.
I know the games have been tweaked for the format but not by much, at least in the instance of Minecraft.
The virtual controls infuriate me but they're tapping and swiping away building some complex creations. They do this in the middle of a family social, necks bent, staring down at the screen. The only time they look away is when the iPad runs out of juice.
I see a lot of this in other fields. People will use a sub-standard workflow and think it's fine until they experience something better and at that point they realise how bad their previous workflow was.
There is a reason why pros who play with controllers never play against pros on PC in shooters. And I can easily imagine the controller pros will be much faster than swipers.
So, for just building with blocks, I can see why parents just give the kids an ipad so they don't have all the running and screaming, but it probably won't be a competitive way of playing games. I only say probably because I just can't imagine me watching someone swiping on a screen.
A game on the other hand can create a sort of rewards treadmill where no one ever really 'finishes'. A book can't adjust rewards in real time to fuel addictive behavior.
Books don't really exploit gambling mechanics, which is what can drive some of the most pernicious addictions.
It's literally virtual building blocks (+ hack and slash combat and crafting and exploration etc). Would you have the same level of derision for kids who sink thousands of hours into playing with lego? Kids have a lot of spare time to kill.
From the way some people talk about video games on here sometimes I assume they think the android/ios market is representative of all of gaming (even then there's plenty of good "buy once" mobile games without microtransactions, the discoverability on the stores is just godawful - presumably to steer people towards more profitable crap rather than what's actually good).
This applies to basically every form of media prior to the internet—movies, TV shows, music albums, etc.
I personally prefer games that are one-and-done too, and this is partly why. I want to immerse myself in a virtual world for a little while and then move on with my life and/or find a brand new virtual world; I'm not looking for an endless rabbit hole.
> This essay will focus on two particularly striking mid-nineteenth-century examples of the complex relationships that unite the writer, readers, and editor of a serial. The first one is a French novel. Les Mystères de Paris, by Eugène Sue, which was serialized over a year and a half in 1842-43 in the Paris daily Le Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, which translates literally as the Journal of Political and Literary Debates; the second is Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which first appeared in the antisîavery weekly, the National Era, between 1851 and 1852.
> My first point is that in the case of both works, apart from the fact that they aimed at social reform and were tremendously popular and violently criticized, their respective readers played a role in giving final form to each novel, particularly in terms of length. I will then examine the locus of the discussion that is being carried on between the readers and the writer. In Stowe's case, since she was writing far from Washington, where the National Era was based, the conversation between the reader and the writer was carried on in the columns of the Era itself. In Sue's case, the correspondence between reader and writer was mostly conducted via private letters, for reasons I will go into later. Sue kept more than three hvmdred of the letters he received while writing Les Mystères; those letters have now been edited and published. As can be imagined, they provide a rare and invaluable insight into the interaction between reader and writer during the publication of a serial.
How do you fix the distance between me and Google?
It's possible that Stadia might be "good enough" for casual gaming (and granted, that's a very large market segment), but I don't think it will ever be good enough for anyone who is sensitive to latency.
Indeed, I found this recently out in a double-blind kind of way, when running at 165hz. I had to take out my GPU to fix the fan, so I wanted to try playing some demanding games on my integrated Intel GPU. I switched settings to the lowest (along with the game itself auto downgrading settings). After I put my GPU back, I put all the settings back, or so I thought. I was feeling some input lag and the mouse a little "floaty" but thought I just imagining it for a day or two. Afterwards I checked settings and lo behold, VSync was on.
I was surprised that I could tell the difference when running at 165hz and 165 fps.
That is to say, on my 60Hz monitor, I don't feel much difference between 60 FPS and anything above with vsync off. But if I go from from 70FPS (vsync off) to 60 FPS (vsync on), it's yarrgh unplayable, as far as first person shooters go.
Variable refresh rate is one way to fix this.
All major engines (Unity, Unreal and even Godot) provide 2 different mechanisms for callbacks in your scripts: A callback before each rendered frame and a callback before each physic step (Update() and FixedUpdate() in Unity).
Now, physics always run in a fixed time step. Usually 60 times per second. If you move your player, the game will always need to wait for the next physic callback to move the entity around. Same for spawning projectiles and or checking hitscan weapons with raycasts. You always need to wait.
In this case, when V-Sync is on an your screen updates at 60Hz per second everything is fine. But on a screen with 144Hz, there is inevitable input lag.
Can someone tell me, how on earth can this be improved by disabling V-Sync? It's basically not possible to reduce input lag in this scenario.
I know there are ways to hide the lag through Input Prediction and Entity Interpolation, but those are necessary band-aids for multiplayer games, where you accept lag which is already an order of a magnitude larger than local input lag. And for single-player games? If you introduce physics your oh-so-nice 1000 Frames per Seconds are basically useless. But please tell me, if I missed something.
Interp and extrapolation do not delay your input. Interp fills in lag time with predicted movement for other player characters to hide 50ms+ of lag from the player. Your client side input still exists and is updated client side in realtime. It may get corrected by lag after the fact. Your input is not delayed to match their lag.
E.g. Dota 2 and CSGO servers in Europe have <40ms ping for most people. Local lag should be up to some 16ms from a 60Hz display plus 1ms from a 1000Hz mouse/keyboard, half of that on average. If the hardware is bad, it could easily be some extra 30ms from the display and maybe 16ms from the mouse/keyboard -- think 125Hz poll rate and bad debounce implementation.
Many gamers think they can feel differences in such small ranges of milliseconds... and maybe some can. I bet its not very many though.
I would love to see results of a blind test.
Edit: Freesync/G-sync is an attempt to eliminate tearing AND latency. Unfortunately, this often requires a higher response time on many monitors. For example, on my simracing setup with a Samsung CHG90[1], you can't both enable freesync and the fastest response time on the monitor. I opt for the faster response time as it just feels faster and most of the time I don't notice the tearing.
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/monitors/gaming/49--chg...
Considering those last-mile edge devices often cost in the tens of thousands of dollars and use a lot of power, including a few hundred ARM cores isn't a huge cost increase for the benefit it provides.
You're not going to get a lot of gaming done on ARM cores, when the games Stadia is trying to sell are built for x86 and x64.
Games that run on ARM devices (Fortnight, Minecraft) can already run on Stadia's end user hardware (phones, low-end computers, even many android-based smart TVs), and don't require streaming infrastructure.
Stadia DOES solve those problems... over a particular range of conditions - and its a respectably wide range. It can't heal shitty internet though, but who said it can?
That's a gorgeous game that probably deserves a big screen experience. But the convenience of being able to play anytime, anywhere trumps the cumbersomeness of sitting before a TV, switching everything on, and using a controller.
People are playing games on their phones on trains and buses and cars all day every day. Mouse and Keyboard FPS games have given way to the control pads on phone touchscreens.
One benefit of being so old and traveled is that I can predict the future more reliably than 40 years ago. Look to dense urban centers for entertainment consumption efficiency and life hacks and you are looking at the future of the culture, even if another wave breaks that pattern a short time later.
I agree as well though, keyboard and mouse is the superrior interface for me.
It took like 20 minutes for the game to copy from the disc to internal storage (luckily her Xbox had some free space!), and then it spent another 10 or so downloading an update/patch.
Back when I remember playing Sega, Nintendo, etc. (even Xbox 360, which was the last console I owned), it was a matter of plugging in a cartridge/disc, turning on the system, and playing the game after a few boot screens.
In the end, I only got about 20 minutes of time to play the game since it was night and I had to be up early to help the kids. The experience didn't make me anxious to buy a modern gaming system.
Sorry to hear it was not an enjoyable evening.
With the higher resolutions many TVs support, there's only so much bandwidth and memory headroom to support textures that big, and DVD drives just don't have the seek speed to support. Heck, in the 360 generation we were carefully laying out files broken apart and spaced so the platter would be under the read head at just the right time to reduce that latency.
As for the updates... well, I'm intimately familiar with why patching the four concurrent titles is they way it is. I have hear our feedback was incorporated into a new update system. It's been personally frustrating, when Microsoft/Bungie pioneered the Play-While-Install concept all the way back in Halo 2 Vista. We'll see!
The feedback in this post is my own, and is not meant to reflect that of my employer 343 Industries.
Some games patch very poorly due to Steam's update mechanism. Path of Exile is notorious for this, to the point many download the standalone client instead. The issue is that it uses one big file for data and this interacts poorly with steam (a tiny patch will take half an hour to apply after downloading, even on SSD).
However, the install times are still annoying. I really wish more games had play-while-install features. That being said, Steam downloads so much faster than a PS4 installs. I have a gigabit home connection and can get pretty close to saturating it while downloading from Steam, while the PS4 is slow -- apparently due to some technical limitations of the PS4.
Regardless, never again. It's downright offensive.
It was also a matter of traveling to the store during opening hours, purchasing the game and traveling home. That is almost always less convenient than purchasing it in a UI and having it download.
What does annoy me is how steam and probably other platforms force you to install updates before you can start a game even if the game has no online features.
Tried to play Halo on his xbox one, something he played almost daily. Required an update which took maybe 10 minutes. Got in and realized we couldn't play local split screen online. Fine, he has a gaming pc, let's fire that up and play with his Rift.
Pc has an update, then steam needed some kind of update, and Oculus did, and then the damn game we wanted to play had it's own update. We just sat there laughing as all in all it took an hour from when we sat down to actually playing something.
If you're not playing regularly, the amount of updates that can happen are insane.
If she has a game in, I start it as well, same reason.
I like the idea that they are both getting security and/or bug fixes (I'm looking at you, Bethesda) but yeah damn, it's a pain to wait an hour to start playing anymore.
But really. Every 3 weeks when I get time to play I spend 40~ minutes updating the game on PS4 because the patch sizes are gigabytes and the harddisk is slow.
The situation is only /slightly/ improved on a dual boot setup but then it’s also complaining about windows updates too, so not much time is actually won there.
It's not a huge deal if automatic updates work as expected. I've have too many times where my Playstation fails to auto-update and I'm stuck waiting an hour+ for an update.
The problem is latency.
In a world where I am not even happy with the latency, or delay on most of the Code Editor, Keyboard, Screen, Display etc. And Gaming Display Monitor being 120Hz and trending towards 240hz+. We are not even anywhere close to solving latency issues in a local environment, let alone one that is separated by a fibre Optic.
And I not sure about "dreaded" the 20min update, on a decent Internet connection, most of the time is no longer in the network, but CPU decompressing the Data and installing it. But they way update are package are still optimise for minimal bandwidth, not minimal user time.
I dont think the problem with Gaming industry is Distribution or Delivery with Cloud Gaming. It is with the forever increase in Asset Prices. Middleware Engine helped Software Gaming Development cost to stabilise. But the Asset, especially Graphics will need ways to dramatically reduce its time and cost.
Actually, this is more or less solved. https://parsecgaming.com/ works really well over a local network. I use a raspberry pi as a thin client to stream games to my tv from a windows vm in my closet. I cant even tell a difference. Its not just for games either; its basically a gpu accelerated remote desktop.
They claim it works really well for remote servers (they even let you lease environments I think) too. For less intensive games, it probably works fine, but for more latency sensitive games, Im sure you can feel the lag.
I honestly don't understand how anyone can say this with a straight face. I've tried multiple solutions over a local gigabit network, literally just streaming from my gaming PC upstairs to the living room PC, using Steam streaming, Nvidia streaming, and while good, they are very clearly being streamed. Especially in high-detail or darker scenes the artifacts around low-contrast areas are horrendous - it feels like watching a movie rather than playing a game. And even when playing locally the latency is still too high to play racing games for example, I just couldn't get used to it.
One of my gaming friends who is a big fan of Stadia loves it because it means that even though they travel a lot, they will be able to play [enter big aaa pc game] from the comfort of their hotel room (they travel a lot).
Personally, I think I might be tempted to use stadia for another reason : I love FPSs but I have abandoned pc gaming in favor of consoles. I will try to use Stadia in order to play Doom eternal : this way I can play with a mouse and keyboard without having to invest the time, money, space and energy to build a gaming pc.
I used to have a cheaper laptop back in the olden days so I subscribed to a service called OnLive. It worked like Stadia where the cloud would host and render your game and you could play it online. I loved it! I wish it hadn't gotten bought out and canceled. Doesn't work for certain types of games, obviously, but it's great for most casual things.
Obviously not my thing but we can’t ignore the rest of the world.
Fortnite on mobile says otherwise
There are many games where these aspects aren’t core to the game but there are for sure many where they are.
I was pretty surprised by PUBG’s success in the mobile space - Then again I sunk an immense amount of time into Ring of Elysium when it came out on PC and that was in many ways mobile-esque in gameplay and visuals.
So there’s probably more crossover potential than I acknowledged in the earlier post. I think a lot of my opinion on the limits of cross-platform (multiplayer) gaming was formed back when Quake 3 got cross-play between PC and Dreamcast. It was an absolute bloodbath.
Doubt. In the same way that movies on PSP had this idea in mind but fell flat on it's face, games are strongly tied to the format and environment in which you consume them.
FPS gaming with a keyboard and mouse isn't coming with you on your phone for the morning commute, and no amount of technology is going to change that because the main barrier is you won't want to play that game on your morning commute with a bunch of people around you, noise, and being unable to immerse yourself (even for reasons as simple as needing to remember to get off at your stop).
That said, perhaps the converse doesn't hold true, and when you flop down in front of your screen in the evening you can get into a 6h marathon of bejeweled just the same as you were playing on the train into work that morning. Streaming isn't an enabler for this though, just cross-platform builds of your chosen game and cross-format suitability for input/output methods.
>Microsoft claims Game Pass subscribers increase their overall playtime by 40%
I'd really like to see retention stats alongside this to drawn an inference, because (anecdotally), I subscribed, played the shit out of the one game I subscribed for, then cancelled my sub before the next month. I definitely look like a player with increased playtime, because I deliberately did that to play a game that would have cost $$ for just $.