Tag: Ubisoft

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Parsec – Add Ubiquitous Star Wars Reference Here

I’m a little late to the Parsec party it seems. I just heard about this service recently and I tried it out this weekend and I’m impressed with what I saw. By all accounts, it seems like they have done the impossible and brought latency down to an almost imperceptible number for both users and game creators. Parsec might be the key to making cloud gaming mainstream.

One night while on a hacker forum, Parsec’s founder learned about a new way of bringing down latency by using only the GPU. They set out to try it themselves. In the beginning, the latency was still not good enough for twitch shooters and fighting games but as they continued to work on it and were able to get the latency down to under 10/ms. Of course, once we start adding in networks, home routers, and so many other kinds of things that number doesn’t stay that low but it seems that Parsec is the real deal and they have made something that works right now. Video game developers started taking notice of Parsec because of what they have been able to produce.

In early August it was announced that Ubisoft would be partnering with Parsec for a long term deal. Parsec was able to ingratiate themselves with Ubisoft after they helped power their demos for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Watch Dogs: Legion for over 1,000 media professionals. The demos must have gone well because Ubisoft seems to be teaming up with Parsec for the long haul. It doesn’t hurt that, as a platform holder with a new gaming service Uplay+, Ubisoft wants to throw their hat into the ever-growing pool of cloud based companies.

Cloud gaming is here to stay. It seems like every company is stepping into the ring to show off a bit of what they have in store. Google’s Stadia didn’t start well but cloud gaming isn’t something that we need right now, it’s something we’ll need in a few years and companies need to be getting it right for when that happens.

Amazon Luna is poised to launch soon and I’m sure that they are watching this very closely since Parsec is using Amazon Web Services to host their technology. Microsoft has X-Cloud and PlayStation has their PlayStation Now (Gaikai) service. Each of those companies may be wondering if Parsec can make the same magic happen using Microsoft Azure. Both of those services are using Azure for their cloud based services.

Parsec has split their business two ways that may be very beneficial. First, they are going after the content producers like Ubisoft to show off how those companies can’t live without Parsec. Game makers can add Parsec’s SDK to their games. Second, they are also going after the users, people playing at home with their friends, right now with their app. Video game players can use that app to play in a lag-free environment with friends or even with matched players.

The app gives players a way to play co-op games with very low latency. One person starts a game as a host and then someone joins that game. I tried the service out and here is what I have to report.

I tried running Burnout Paradise from my friend’s computer. I live in Japan and he lives in Omaha, Nebraska. The video had a lot of artifacting, the audio levels were going in and out at a specific interval of every second or so, and the gameplay was perceptively lagged. I ended up quitting pretty quickly after having gotten it booted up because it wasn’t a great experience.

The next game that I tried was King of Fighters. This time I started it up and let my friend share with me. We were both able to get things running and he said that the game did not look bad on his end. The lag was a lot better for that game.

I will say that I have a 2GB connection and he has a 500mb connection. There was also an ocean of distance between us and have the distance across the United States. But, after factoring all of that nonsense in I still think that Parsec has done something amazing for streaming. I will do some more testing this week and I’ll either update this article or write another one with my thoughts on the service.

The name Parsec is being spoken with near-godlike reverence when it comes to playing games online. That means whenever one of these companies ends up swooping up Parsec, that company is going to be purchasing some very good word-of-mouth from users but also names like Ubisoft, Samsung, and HP who have also used their technology. I’m excited to see how fast cloud gaming can become and it looks like Parsec might be one of the companies who brings us to the finish line.

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Hope and Prudence in the New Call of Cthulhu Game

I am a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos that was created by writer H.P. Lovecraft. I am especially interested in it’s history in the realm of video games. I have been playing through Alone in the Dark recently and like the eldritch themes that are present in that game. I have always wanted to play the Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, a game that came out for the “original” Xbox and PC. I have never gotten around to it but I have heard good things about the game. There are countless other games that have taken themes from Lovecraft’s works, most recently the Amnesia games have been extremely popular with the worshippers of Cthulhu.

During E3 this year, Cyanide Studio announced that it would be making a new Cthulhu game called Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game. There was only a small teaser but contained in those few moments were some lush visuals that look like they could drum up some pretty horrific feelings of terror in the player.

I found that the main title screen for the trailer is reminiscent of the Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare cover art. Both characters walking through a gate to the unknown. The Alone in the Dark 1 cover art has the character much more centered but it is difficult to see the gate in that picture.

screen grab from teaser

Alone In The Dark - The New Nightmare (PAL) - Front

The trailer looks fantastic. The setting is a creepy island called Darkwater Island. (I’m not sure that a more ominous name for a place has ever existed in the history of mankind.) The trailer has a couple glimpses at the evil creatures that reside on the island, the creatures look pretty horrific.

The camera pans around different areas inside a house or mansion, there seems to be a definite Amnesia or Soma vibe to the game – the former being another title in the Cthulhu video game mythos.

I didn’t know anything about Cyanide Studio so I checked out some of their past titles. The studio was founded by seven former Ubisoft employees. The studio has been in business since 2000, so it seems like there is some pedigree there but most of the games that the studio has developed don’t really appeal to me until now. As I scrolled through their game catalog it seems like they have mainly worked on sports simulation games – a healthy number being cycling games. They do have Styx: Master of Shadows in their catalog, which was a Games with Gold game on the Xbox One platform, and I did hear some pretty good things about that game but, once again, I haven’t played it so I can’t really comment on it.

The trailer for Call of Cthulhu looks really good but I am concerned with the studio’s catalog as a whole not being a good representation of what is needed for a good Cthulhu game. Of course, being just a teaser, we can’t take too much out of the short video as a representation of the final product. Fans of Cthulhu games will just have to hope that this game turns out as good as it looks.

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What Does Watch Dogs Mean to Ubisoft?

Great White Hope

Watch Dogs gameplay trailerWith a little over a month until Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs launches for everything under the sun except the Wii U, Ubisoft has been out pimping their game on anybody who plays games. Megan Farokhmanesh had a write-up today concerning the multiplayer features of the soon to be released game.

Farokhmanesh confirmed the 8 person multiplayer, which can be turned on or off, which will allow the player to infiltrate another players world and using “encryption based PVP.” The player will impact the notoriety or fame of other player through hacking; your notoriety will go up with successful hacks and go down if you are hacked. (Could this just be a glorified Rush mode?) The Polygon video above has renewed my interest in the game.

Great White Hope From the gameplay footage that I have seen and through the information in the Farokhmanesh article and the Brian Crecente article that appeared earlier this month, I think that Ubisofts ” The Great Watch Dog Hope” looks like a mix of Naughty Dog action (Uncharted and The Last of Us came to mind when I watched the action in the video.) and, hopefully, Syndicate style cyberpunk hacking. Although, Ubisoft doesn’t want their game to end up like EA’s Syndicate sales-wise.

I am much more excited to play Watch Dogs now after seeing the Polygon video and reading the two Polygon articles, so I guess that part of their marketing worked; for me, at least. The biggest question I have though is: What does this game mean to Ubisoft?

I know that Ubisoft is a big company and it is built to take a flop. But, can it take a flop like this? In this down economy no developer can risk losing money. Will this be Ubisoft’s uDraw? 

A girl playing uDraw
uDraw kicks ass! Thanks Mom!

If Ubisoft is going out to places like Polygon right now, before the game comes out, are they really trying to be honest with the media? You can excuse me if I am skeptical that a publisher isn’t shoveling shit into my mouth and calling it chocolate. With the financial commitment that Ubisoft has put into Watch Dogs they would not shelve it at this stage of the game, but they just might get out there and try to convince the media and the public that they spent their extra time making their game into the new “be-all-end-all” of gaming.

Denis Dyack memeI bought Too Human. I bought into all of that bullshit that Denis Dyack fed to me because I wanted to believe Too Human was good. That was my fault and I have learned from my bad decisions. But, you will excuse me if I am less than convinced that Watch Dogs is going to be anything more than a GTA style action game that had serious problems with development up until a few months ago.