GeForce Now and My Anger

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I’ve had this post in me for awhile now but each time I sit down to try and write it nothing but an angry screed comes out. So today I am going to try going about this from a different angle. There is an issue that is occurring and each time I try and talk about it, I wind up catching shit about my “opinion”. I’ve fired off random tweets on three occasions and each time I’ve gotten someone telling me that my thoughts were more or less wrong because I was not viewing things from the standpoint of the business and only looking at things from the viewpoint of the consumer. The thing is… while I have lots of friends in the industry and can often times give them credit for their stances on issues… at the end of the day I am a consumer and at the end of the day right or wrong I want the thing that is going to be best for me and others like me.

However we are already veering dangerously towards the anger zone and I am going to take a step back and explain why Remote Gameplay matters to me. I have a weird use case namely because I game from two different locations in my house. The secret of my marital bliss has been to be flexible and being able to hang out somewhere other than sequestered up in my office with my gaming equipment. As a result I have a gaming laptop downstairs in the living room and my fancy gaming desktop upstairs in my office. Gaming laptops however are a frustrating proposition in that they just don’t stay viable for very long in the grand scheme of things. The hardware placed inside of them is lower end to deal with power draw and battery life issues and as a result you wind up needing to replace them roughly every two years to keep playing modern games.

That is not an expense that I enjoy and as a result over the last three years I have been exploring various options that would allow me to be on the sofa on my laptop but actually playing games upstairs off my gaming desktop. Remote Play and Game Streaming is nothing new and it has been available in one form or another since at least 2014. There are various issues around it related to input latency and graphical hiccups but some almost seven years later most of these issues have been ironed out. Steam In Home Streaming works well for anything that runs through the steam client and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Then there is my tool of choice called Parsec that supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Web Browser.

The vast majority of my gaming is done while sitting downstairs on the laptop and remotely playing games off my Desktop upstairs using Parsec running in LAN mode. That said I could just as easily connect into my machine from outside of my four walls and remotely play my games on a mobile device. If I so chose I could also go out and rent a box on Amazon or Paperspace and connect my Parsec client out to the cloud server that I am renting and install my games that way. I personally don’t need to go down this path since I have a good gaming machine that I control access to, but I know folks who are doing this and it is working fine for them. Just like the server room has moved to entirely virtual servers that may or may not exist on premises, this heralded the beginning of that being a game for your gaming machine as well.

Why GeForce Now is important is that it took this concept that has already existed for years… and refined it down to something that someone who is not technically savvy could do. It also took the madness of a multi-tiered cloud provider billing system and burned it down to a simple number… $4.95 a month. If you had an Nvidia graphics card in your gaming desktop and one of the many Nvidia devices like the shield… you have been able to stream your games for years now. However GeForce Now blew away all of the artificial barriers and just allowed you to have that same experience without owning the Gaming Desktop and instead renting one sitting somewhere in an Nvidia server farm… or more likely a nameless server farm that Nvidia is themselves renting space in.

Stadia, XCloud and Playstation Now are gaming platforms designed to alter your game buying preferences and channel your focus in a new direction. XCloud and Playstation Now are both following the Netflix model, where your subscription fee gives you access to several titles in their library of licenced titles. Stadia goes down a different path trying to replace both the method of playing the game and the purchase point for that game as well. You make your game purchases through Stadia and you play them within their walled garden on any device you choose to do so. GeForce Now however is something completely different and is not a gaming platform, but instead a hardware surrogate. You still have to purchase games like normally through Steam or Epic Games Store and instead of installing them on your own machine you connect out to your temporary server in the cloud and install the game there. From there you can play that game and maintain progress in that game on any device that supports GeForce Now.

So my frustrations rise when people keep calling GeForce Now a gaming platform and treating it like an equivalency to the other Game Streaming Platforms. While I agree wholeheartedly that a Developer should be able to dictate what store fronts their games are available from, and choose which locations that they want to offer them. I disagree completely that those same Developers should have a single bit of control over the hardware we gamers choose to play those games on. If I go to Best Buy, I can purchase a brand new laptop, take it home and install the Steam client on it and within a few minutes pending download speeds be playing a game on it. When I connect to a cloud server with GeForce Now I am doing the same thing. They have provided the Steam Client for me, but I still navigate to my game that I own in my Steam Library and choose to install it and then moments later play it.

The license for the game is between the end user, steam and the game developer and Nvidia does not factor into that process at all. Nvidia is providing me the gamer with a hardware surrogate. I am renting computing power in the cloud just like I would if I choose to go with Amazon Web Services, Paperspace or Azure. I could achieve the exact same result by doing these things as well and the developer would likely have no clue at all that I am doing it. The only reason why this has become an issue over the last few weeks is because Nvidia has managed to package this same service up with a neat bow and offer it up at a reasonable price point that is enough to get people to jump on the bandwagon and start trying to play games remotely. The truth is that I have been subscribed for a few weeks now and I am still not playing a lot of games through it… but that does not stop me from wanting to fight for the right of such services to exist.

I stream almost all of my games through my laptop from my desktop and I doubt that paradigm is going to change in my household. It allows me to exist with a cheaper laptop and pour any of my finances into my gaming desktop upstairs instead of trying to maintain two rather expensive form factors. With Parsec and an android enabled Chromebook, I can have the same gaming experience that I have on my desktop anywhere inside my house. That is extremely powerful, and what GeForce Now has promised to do is to extend that same flexibility to gamers who either don’t have the skill, patience or knowledge to go through the process of setting the same thing up for themselves. It is really compelling to think that a blah business laptop and $4.95 a month will allow you to purchase games through existing storefronts and play them with RTX enabled graphics.

So yes I get frustrated when Developers be it small indies like the dude behind The Long Dark or big companies like Activision Blizzard and Bethesda take an anti-consumer action and claw their games off of the GeForce Now service. This is the point where I get told that there are business decisions that we are not privy to and that there are complications. I know when you say “no offence but” you are just about to be an asshole… but while I understand the realities of doing business and why sometimes we can’t have nice things… it doesn’t stop me from thinking all of that noise is a lot of bullshit. GeForce Now is not a new platform to deliver games through, it is a hardware surrogate that allows you to play games through existing content delivery vehicles. If you were fine with allowing your players to have the game on Steam or Epic Game Store then you should be fine with them playing it on GeForce Now. In my opinion Developers shouldn’t get a say about it, just like they don’t get to choose the hardware that we purchase.

I hope I successfully rode the line between angry screed and think piece. I am worked up as I sit down and try and finish this because the thought of someone dictating what I do with the games I have valid licenses to always fires me up. I am generally one of the most pro-developer bloggers out there because I do see the ramifications of some of the decisions that are made echoed on the lives of my friends in the industry. This situation however is just a bridge too far for me, and I am unlikely to ever back down from my stance. I will always view the companies that are clawing their games away from GeForce Now in a bad light because I view them as now being on what will ultimately be the wrong side of history. Hardware surrogacy is a thing that is going to happen one way or another and the time of us not having physical hardware in our homes is rapidly approaching. I will always stand on the side of doing this on a manner that benefits the customers.

Adding to the Party

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I’ve been continuing down a particular path to madness, and yesterday instead of pushing the cleric I opted to get some other characters started. The idea being that maybe at some point soon I can link them all up and run around together. I’ve never played a Berzerker in Everquest 1 in spite of it seeming like a class right down my alley. I did for a bit play one in EQ2 and it was a fairly enjoyable heavily AOE focused melee class. I opted to go with a Vahshir, though in truth I probably should have gone for Dwarf with the idea of making it smallish for when I am running around with a pack of characters following behind me. I knew I absolutely had no interest in having my line of sight blocked by a Troll, Barbarian or Ogre.

Once again I did the same general treatment for leveling. I focused on killing Giant Skeletons from 1-10 while attempting to complete most of a set of the “noobie” armor. After that I transitioned to fungoids in Paladul caverns where I completed a full set of the “Wrath” armor which is the Kunark armor set for the class. When I transitioned to Castle Mistmoore however it also appears to be dropping Wrath, so maybe there was not a Berzerker set for the Velious factions that ever went into the game? From what I can tell the drops are something like this on average:

  • Field of Bone Giant Skeletons – Noobie Armor Set
  • Paladul Caverns Fungoids/Oasis of Marr Orcs and Crocs – Kunark Armor Set
  • Castle Mistmoore – Kael Drakkal Faction Armor Set
  • Dulak’s Harbor – Planes of Power Armor Set

I am hoping that once I push up into Dulak’s harbor that a new armor set appears for Berzerkers since there seems to not be one for the Velious chunk of the push. I have no clue why I obsess over collecting a full set before moving on, because the second I get the new set I am tossing out most of the pieces of the old set. I am keeping a handful of the items that have interesting clicky spells on them, even though I probably won’t even need them on a server that isn’t balanced around traditional play of the game.

For the next member of my team I went ahead and stubbed out a Gnome Rogue, thinking that is probably the most innocuous character to be following me around. Rogues do a lot of damage and I think the roombas can be controlled to always stay in the back arc of the target doing that sweet sweet backstab damage. I am mostly focusing on melee damage and at some point I might swap the cleric out for a Paladin, because I hear that for the most part high level Paladins do enough AOE healing to the group to more or less ignore the need of traditional healer role. The funny thing about this is that it feels like I am building a Final Fantasy V party.

Right now I am thinking the group comp is going to look a little something like this:

  • Iksar Shadowknight – Main Tank (active character)
  • Dwarf Cleric or Paladin – Main Healer/Splash Healer
  • Vahshir Berzerker – Melee Dps
  • Gnome Rogue – Melee Dps
  • Halfling Ranger – Melee Dps and buffs
  • High Elf Enchanter – Buffs and High End Pet Damage

The ranged dps classes feel like they would be just too fiddly when controlling them through scripts. Melee on the other hand tends to be “hug the butt” of the monster and spam melee attacks, which seems like a much more viable option. The enchanter supposedly does massive amounts of damage from their pets at high end and there is also haste buffs that are worth having. I probably want to run that up with some other character though because I imagine enchanter is going to be even more annoying to level than the cleric has been so far. The traditional call for tank would have been a Warrior, but quite frankly I enjoy playing a Shadowknight more than a Warrior in Everquest.

Root and Nuke Life

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It is election day for me as my state is part of Super Tuesday, and as a result this post is going to be fairly short and to the point. Last night I did a thing, and that thing was deciding to roll a healer on a new account so that I could at some day sort out how to do the MQ2 thing and have a tiny healing roomba following me. I took a real trip down memory lane and decided to skew the naming convention of “BELG” something and instead recreated my original main from Everquest. Exeteroth the Dwarven Cleric. During the early days of the internet my OG handle was Exeter, and I don’t have a glorious reason for it other than the fact that it would fit into a name slot on the NES version of Ultima.

In D&D I always liked playing Clerics because they seemed self sufficient. You could turn one into a decent melee character, they could wear decent armor, and they had access to spells that could heal themselves in a pinch. My jam was always rolling a Cleric of Tyr because that gave me access to Bastard Swords. So when I ventured forth into Everquest and saw that Clerics could wear plate armor and use two handed maces… I thought hey… I will be able to relive this battle-priest fantasy. Only to find out that the life of a cleric is living in a party and casting the same spell over and over from the moment you get it at 39. The alternative was to find an area where you could control your surroundings and root/nuke until something fell over and repeat this with breaks in between to regenerate your mana.

The EZ Server experience thankfully is way more reasonable than that as they seem to have scaled up combat on all of the epic weapons even the “support” ones. I am effectively just running around and meleeing things down and the noobie item is keeping me alive during the process. Last night I made it to level 10 and started in on Paladul Caverns, which is the alternate zone to Oasis of Marr in their leveling curve. This is a significantly better choice as all of the fungoids can drop the Kunark armor sets as opposed to the Orcs and Crocs of which there are WAY fewer spawns. Additionally by the time Luclin came around, Sony got way better at building hunting camps as opposed to a bunch of randomly roaming monsters.

One thing I an consistently impressed by is just how damned good we had it with it came to third party map support for Everquest. Even though I have map files in game, I still find myself referring back to EQ Atlas and the old grid paper and color pencil maps. I chose to include Butcherblock Mountains given that it is my old stomping ground as a Dwarf Cleric and it also is a fairly square map which would show up here when embedded in a reasonable manner. The map for Paladul Caverns where I was actually hunting last night is a long mess of a thing, which would just translate to a blog post weirdly. I remember having bunch of these printed out and in a binder so I could check them while I was furiously running across a dangerous zone.

The thing is… while I have nostalgia about being weak and small in a large and dangerous world… I don’t find that I actually want to return to it. I like knowing that I am more or less safe to walk away from the keyboard at any point and if I die there will be absolutely nothing lost other than a run back to wherever I happened to be hunting. I like being able to go off and do whatever the hell suits my fancy without needing to somehow convince five to six other people to want to do the same thing. I also don’t miss sitting around and doing nothing because we either didn’t have enough people on or nobody would take the initiative and decide what was going to happen that evening. While I loved Everquest for what it is… what I want now is a modern game set in this rich universe. I also love Everquest II, but it has a myriad of its own problems. Norrath however is too rich of a setting to let it wither away and not take advantage of the IP with fresh new games.

Orc Highway of Loot

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First off sorry for missing a post on Friday. If you don’t follow me on twitter you likely missed my announcement that one was not going to happen. Essentially I have been fighting some nasty flu-like crud and wound up staying home from work both Thursday and Friday. Were I not under the gun for several deliverable I might also stay home today because while I am feeling significantly better I am in no way 100% and it is the stupid stuff like the long walk into the building that I am dreading. This unnamed crud came with a general sense of weakness and an ability to make pretty much all food sound nasty and unappealing. I am hoping that I am back on the mend and can start to get on with life, but at least for a bit I will be moving a little slower and wearing out a little faster.

To go with this need for something slower paced I found it extremely hard to stay alive while playing Wolcen due to my sluggish reflexes and I wound up venturing back into the Everquest Emulator and landing on another server that one of my coworkers had talked about. “EZ Server” seemed like a neon sign calling out to me in a foggy night, and I proceeded to make an Iksar Shadowknight and had a glorious time wandering around the area surrounding Cabalis and leveling normally. It was only when I created a second character, a Halfling Ranger that I realized I was completely missing part of the experience. Instead of Riverdale I arrived in Surefall Glade that was set up completely as a newbie town with a greatly condensed set of vendors and npcs and the ability to port from there to anywhere else in the game.

So I proceeded to set forth about fixing this and ran from Cabalis to Warslicks Woods to The Overthere which apparently is a full pvp zone on the server and flagged me as soon as I entered. From there I took the Plane of Knowledge book and transitioned to North Qeynos and then Qeynos Hills eventually running all of the way to Surefall Glade. This was a run I was fairly unfamiliar with because I was a Freeport kid and had never started anything on the Qeynos side of the pond. Thankfully Allakhazam has a page of directions on how to get between a bunch of locations which came in handy. It was shortly after arriving at town that I decided to start goggling the server to find more information, and trying to determine why it had kept telling me that I really should be using the Underfoot or Rain of Fear 2 client and not Titanium.

During the googling I also found these charming and quirky server tutorials. Essentially EZ Server is exactly the opposite of Project 1999. While 99 wants a pure original game experience and takes actions to stop anyone from being able to run more than one character at a time… EZ Server goes to the other extreme and has added a bunch of new content that effectively requires you to be botting to be able to get through. I am not sure yet if I will be playing long enough to go down that rabbit hole but they support some software called MacroQuest 2 which effectively allows you to remotely control your “roombas” as the server guides refer to your bot accounts. For now I am just enjoying poking around in zones that I remember while being powerful enough to pretty much solo them. It was a trip roaming around Castle Mistmore and soloing my way through it.

They have also done some nonsense of editing zone drops and offer up a specific set of level range bounded quests to lead you to these specific zones. For example the Field of Bone Giant Skeletons for some reason drop a full set of newbie armor, that is way higher statted than anything else you could possibly hope to get at that range and a quest sends you there to kill ten of them. From there they loaded up the Orcs and Crocs in Oasis of Marr with the Kurns Castle era armor set…. and the orcs tend to drop 4 pieces at a time but you are still battling RNG to try and sort out a full set. The chain goes form there to Castle Mistmore where everything is dropping the Kael Drakkal faction armor sets and I managed to hang out there and collect most of a full set of Malevolent gear. Now I am in Dulak’s Harbor and the gear dropping appears to be from the Plane of Tranquility quests from the Planes of Power expansion and I am currently missing only a few slots for a full set of that.

Prior to me figuring out what I was missing from the experience, I spent an awful lot of time roaming around Kunark and a good deal of that killing Forest Giants in Warslicks Woods. There is just something enjoyable about killing Giants in Everquest… and I have been contemplating taking a trip over to Kael Drakkal and seeing if I can hunt there yet. Some of my fondest memories involve hanging out in that zone for hours hunting giants and collecting gear for the Thurgadin armor quests. As a cleric at the time… that meant a lot of me casting the same spell over and over but hanging out and chatting was enjoyable enough. I am trying to decide if I want to create my first “roomba” as a cleric to roam around with and heal me, or if I would rather have something like a druid. In Everquest II my power combo is my Iksar Shadowknight and my Wood Elf Warden, which has allowed me to solo a bunch of just slightly below my level content.

No trip down Kunark’s memory lane would be complete without a trip into Dalnir, to visit the angriest of sperm. I did fairly well in here until I got swarmed by frickin gnomes and died. The joy of playing on EZ Server is that death is effectively meaningless. You port back to your bind point, which is now in Surefall Glade in the Newbie town and don’t have to care about doing a corpse run. The newbie vendor in town sells things like Gate Potions for no cost allowing you to pretty much “hearth” at any time you like. This weekend I found the experience of roaming around and chasing armor sets to be extremely enjoyable, but I have a feeling that once I am no longer quite this sick the pace will feel way too slow for me and I will move on once again. It is making me want to patch up Everquest II and poke my head back in there again however.