Despite still technically being in Beta, Microsoft has made huge strides in their Cloud Gaming service, and recently I picked up 2 months of Gamepass Ultimate to try it out on my smart TV and on my Linux PC.
I actually only bought one month but I guess since I haven't been a subscriber for too long they decided to give me a free month if I kept recurring payments on, it's a matter of time until I decide if I'll actually go for a third month and beyond though.
The interface only looks marginally better than what I remember from 2022, but it's a good interface, there isn't much to complain here. It recommends you games that you might want to play and it's easy to find what you're looking for.
A new feature is streaming your own games. I unfortunately don't own any of the games on offer, so I can't test this, but I assume it works well.
Hopefully this gets expanded more and more as I see Microsoft's future with Cloud being a fruitful one.
The game selection is pretty good, and now with another great feature for certain games: Mouse and keyboard support. This makes games like Fortnite, Call of Duty and Age of Mythology way more playable. It's really neat.
Talking about Call of Duty, I was originally having an issue where I couldn't connect to servers as it would say that the ping from the streaming device was too high, this apparently got fixed or maybe I got lucky (?), but now everything is fine and the game is working well.
I unfortunately had some issues with input lag using a controller, but as soon as I switched the game to mouse and keyboard, it worked really well and I managed to get a few kills.
Image Quality
As you can see from this Fortnite screenshot, the game looks extra blurry. I tried switching out my user agent but that didn't fix it, so I looked for solutions.
Something I found was this extension/app called better xCloud.
Unfortunately it did not fix Fortnite's blurry image entirely but it did look a little better, it also allowed me to set game languages to Portuguese, which will be really helpful for my little brother who's still studying English.
Despite Better xCloud not helping on Fortnite, it did help on other games, which leads me to believe that Fortnite's bitrate is capped since it is a free game on the service and that makes sense.
Crash Bandicoot Trilogy here looked beautiful at 1080p and ran really well overall, with barely no input lag.
It was a great experience.
Queues
Back in 2022, it didn't matter what time or day you were playing, you were bound to face queues, now it seems Microsoft has added a few more servers because things are just a tiny little bit better.
I'm playing today on a Thursday morning, and I did not face any queues to get into any games.
Playing it on a Saturday afternoon had me facing 6-8 minute queues for any games and Sunday night was 25 minutes.
However it is important to note that the time in the queue isn't always accurate.
For instance, I played FC 24 twice on Sunday night and the first time it actually did take 25 minutes, but the second time it told me it was going to take 25 minutes, but in reality it only took a few seconds which was great.
Overall, the experience has been improved greatly but Microsoft still has a ways to go till this service is perfect, but as of yet? I totally recommend it. It's great. Specially for budget gamers who don't have a good PC or a console, this can be a really nice substitute.
I hope to see more and more improvements with the coming months and years. And more and more games to be added. It's a shame some original Xbox titles aren't present, such as EA's Black which is accessible on consoles but not here, but oh well, what can you do? It's still a good service all around.
Thanks for reading, mates!
I was excited about the cloud gaming scene when it first popped off a few years ago but since then many have tried and failed because in the end, there are always issues. Even if you fix all the issues with connectivity, there will always be lag and ping or just input delays. For just a few games it can still work but only for a few single-player titles, I suppose. I should give it a go and see where are we in this scene. (I will try it again and see how far we have come)
I sort of agree.
There will always be latency, but it can get better with better and more servers.
Unfortunately Microsoft hasn't expanded their servers in Brazil just yet, there's only one called "Brazil - South" which is likely close to me since I live in the South.
Latency has been alright over the past few days, with even Fortnite and Call of Duty being playable, but probably because of the lack of servers they still have instances of lag sometimes.
It's a matter of time till things get better. I'll of course always prefer playing things natively but I'm very surprised.
X box games are great to play.