Steam is already the best game launcher, but the past few months have reinforced the idea that Valve isn't resting on its success. For those who already have a collection of local multiplayer games, it's a way to get more out of the games they own. Depending on how well it works in the long run, it could improve sales of local multiplayer games by broadening their audience. Until the recent library redesign, the news about Steam has typically involved equivocating statements about what it will and won't sell (the line seems to be drawn at 'whatever people get really mad about').īut this new feature is playful and generous. The world bounced off Artifact so hard there's a new crater somewhere in Washington. It's announced some VR games, but we haven't seen them. The past couple years of Valve history haven't been the most exciting. It's also heartening to see Steam iterating on these experimental features. It's too bad hot seat local multiplayer has gone out of fashion over the past couple decades.Īcknowledging that Remote Play won't always work perfectly, as nothing reliant on network conditions can, I'm excited by the opportunity to crack open games I haven't played in ages with people who I've moved away from in the process of relocating a couple of times. Part of the reason I picked TowerFall for testing is that it requires precise timing, but turn-based games will obviously be ideal for the feature. Image quality and latency won't be a big deal for all games. The only advice I can give is to have the person with the fastest internet connection host the game you're trying to play, and to ask the stars for advice as to when their upload speed will be at its peak.Ībove: Enter the Gungeon with non-ideal network conditions. This time when I hosted TowerFall, however, he said it looked fine on his end, and though he noticed some input delay, we went toe-to-toe for a match. Network conditions are fickle. It was technically playable, but I'd never want to play that game at that quality. Now and then it would hitch for a good second. In a fast, busy game like that, you need to see the enemies crisply and I couldn't. The real problem was how artifacted it looked at times. With him hosting Enter the Gungeon, I noticed a bit of input lag, but was able to adapt. (Note that the host's stream passes through a Steam server before making its way to the other players, so the location of that server adds a variable.) We had trouble getting it to work initially, but both games were playable despite our distance. Later, I tested Enter the Gungeon and TowerFall Ascension with a friend who lives in the Midwest. In TowerFall especially, once we were past character selection, it genuinely felt like I was playing a built-in online multiplayer mode.Ībove: TowerFall Ascension on my screen, with Wes hosting. All I had to do was accept Wes' invite, and a few seconds later I was looking at the game, able to interact with the menu as player two. In those first two games, though, everything worked perfectly. I might've been able to get it to detect my controller by fiddling with Steam Big Picture settings, but I sense that some games are just going to be stubborn. When Wes tried to host a game of Rayman Origins, however, I had to use the keyboard. In both TowerFall Ascension and Spelunky, my Xbox One controller was detected instantly. Of course there had to be some latency, but I couldn't sense it. It looked great on my end, and I was surprised to find that I didn't feel like I was at a disadvantage as we fired arrows at one another. We then switched places, with Wes hosting on his 100 Mbps fiber connection, running the game at 1440p. I ran it on an ultrawide, 2560×1080 monitor, which meant the black bars at the sides of my screen were being streamed to his 1440p, 16:9 display. I hosted TowerFall Ascension for Wes on a notoriously inconsistent Comcast connection with 8-to-10 Mbps upload speed. Our testing confirmed the obvious: the quality of your experience will vary with the quality of the host's internet connection.
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