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Xcloud preview impressions

Anthony Hopkins

Anthony Hopkins

Banned
Feb 10, 2018
17,534
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About Xcloud
Stream Xbox games from the cloud
Get a first look at game streaming with Xbox in Project xCloud (Preview). Play over 50 Xbox favourites on your Android phone or tablet, streaming directly from the cloud over Wi-Fi or your mobile network. As we continue to roll out this test, we invite you to help shape the future of game streaming.

Xcloud uses Xbox one S hardware (which will eventually be upgraded and replaced by scarlett hardware) in azure data centres to stream games via the Internet to your android device, pc, iOS and other devices will be compatible later.


So I just got an invite today, and just tried it out.

My thoughts

  • The app is smooth, works well
  • You sign into your xbox account and all your saves come with you
  • I played gears 5 and halo 5 so far, gears 5 felt similar to how killzone shadow fall felt on psnow, it felt good there is more latency then local play (especially compared to 60fps local play) but it is very playable and feels good
  • Halo 5 feels quite a bit better, I presume because of 60fps
  • My connection is WiFi 350mbps down and 30up
Streaming works (has been since psnow) and with its inclusion in Gamepass it is now affordable and great value, I think streaming has a bright future.

Update:
Just tried with a 4 bar 4g signal and while I was able to beat a room in halo 5, there's was like some extra momentum while moving the analog to look and aim, a little bit of macro blocking like 5% of the Playtime but nothing to intrusive, but while it is possible to play with 4g, it's not a good experience.
 
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OldDirtyGamer

OldDirtyGamer

Member
Apr 14, 2019
2,476
Every game I tried, played and looked great. But , on my phone, it seems like a lot of games just aren't that great on a 6 inch screen. Ill enjoy it much more on PC, or on a tablet.
 
Vasto

Vasto

Member
May 26, 2019
342
Got my invite today. Steaming from my Xbox there was hardly any delay at all. Streaming from the cloud had a little delay but hopefully this will be improved before the official release. Overall I am very impressed with it. It is one of those things you just have to try for your self to really see the potential. Now I have to get one of those phone clips.
 
QuinchoOsito

QuinchoOsito

Member
Oct 10, 2018
545
Got my invite today too. I don't have a great internet connection but serviceable. I tried Halo 5 and Madden 20 streaming from the cloud. The audio and visual quality were both great, but the audio was like 2 seconds late compared to the video for both games. Just my connection I guess? Besides that the input responsiveness and everything was pretty damn good.
 
statham

statham

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
2,449
FloRida
Everything I played looked and played great, Killer instinct had a couple of hiccups the first game, but not the second.

My issue is my phone(S9, 5.8in) is too small to find enemies in the distance for shooters, I would say a 7inch tablet or bigger. KI was no problem on the small screen.

didnot try console streaming, Comcast 250 down 15 up or something close to that.
 
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Anthony Hopkins

Anthony Hopkins

Banned
Feb 10, 2018
17,534
Vasto said:
Got my invite today. Steaming from my Xbox there was hardly any delay at all. Streaming from the cloud had a little delay but hopefully this will be improved before the official release. Overall I am very impressed with it. It is one of those things you just have to try for your self to really see the potential. Now I have to get one of those phone clips.
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How do u select between cloud and console streaming?
 
Remeran

Remeran

Member
Nov 27, 2018
3,896
I've played several games and gears 5 feels the worse to me. I can't seem to aim properly due to latency. Every other games feels awesome though. Devil may cry 5 and soul caliber 6 both felt great with no really issues
 
Yerffej

Yerffej

Prophet of Regret
Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,572
I'll really only use this to sample games I might want on Game Pass. Neat addition tho.
 
Kent

Kent

Member
Jun 4, 2018
1,098
I poked at this a little bit. For a frame of reference, my internet speeds aren't exactly the fastest thing out there, about 40 megs down, 5 up.

Loaded up Killer Instinct first. Video stream quality seems actually really good - there were periodic weird visual artifacts that would happen, but it overall had a surprisingly high-fidelity and smooth look to it. The input lag is, of course, atrocious - if you've played KI a good bit on your own console, you'll be well aware of how snappy and responsive that game is. Truth be told I was expecting it to be far worse, but for something like a fighting game, this level of input lag is entirely unacceptable.

The visual artifacts I did see were... interesting. Like certain chunks of the screen would have to get re-synched and drawn from top to bottom - or certain game elements wouldn't appear for a second or so and would get scanned in vertically. I figured maybe it was due to the fast movements, even though I was just poking around in practice for a bit, so I switched over instead to World of Final Fantasy Maxima, since it's slower-paced, so it might be more suitable for actual gameplay.

This is where video issues started coming in more consistently - that vertical re-draw would happen quite regularly, so the stream quality was actually quite poor for this one. I couldn't help but notice it happened quite a bit during cutscenes where the camera would suddenly cut to a very different view, but that could've been a coincidence, as it also occurred periodically when just walking around town. There was still input lag for any actions taken, so the responsiveness was really just not very good at all still, but it for whatever reason had significantly worse video issues.

These were the only ones I had tried today, but they more or less reaffirmed my suspicions of its current viability.
 

MadeULook

Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
2,170
Washington State
Played it on both my phone and Chromebook and nearly everything I've tried has looked and played great. Devil May Cry 5 worked surprisingly well and haven't had problems shooting enemies in Borderlands 2. This will be great for quick pick up and play sessions.

My Chromebook had some stuttering going on but that's likely the Chromebook's end since it runs pretty good my phone.
 
elenarie

elenarie

Game Developer
Verified
Jun 10, 2018
9,823
statham said:
Everything I played looked and played great, Killer instinct had a couple of hiccups the first game, but not the second.

My issue is my phone(S9, 5.8in) is too small to find enemies in the distance for shooters, I would say a 7inch tablet or bigger. KI was no problem on the small screen.

didnot try console streaming, Comcast 250 down 15 up or something close to that.
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Something like a turn based crpg or tactics game would be perfect on a phone.
 
DrDeckard

DrDeckard

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
8,109
UK
Ok I just did a mission in ace combat 7 on my note 10 plus....mind blown. This works....really flipping well.. and to think it's just included with my gamepass ultimate.

Crazy tech.
 
Fadewise

Fadewise

Member
Nov 5, 2017
3,210
I've had access to this for about two weeks and have been greatly impressed with it. Today's Stadia reviews were the final nail in the coffin for me and I cancelled my preorder this afternoon, and am planning on picking up some XBL Gold credit on Black Friday and then using the $1 upgrade offer to get in on GamePass Ultimate. It's technically sound, and more importantly to me, the business model fits much more into my use case of supplementing existing local hardware and leveraging your game library with phone or otherwise away-from-home play, versus Stadia's ambitions of completely replacing the console.

Will also note, console streaming works way better than Steam Remote Play does for me, whether on the same network or over the internet. I'm still hopeful that Valve comes up with a killer app to leverage my enormous Steam library in a way that competes with xCloud, but right now MS has the UX and performance advantage.
 
bsigg

bsigg

Member
Oct 25, 2017
22,559
Terbinator said:
Not so sure. The text is hard to read on Halo on my phone (OP 5T) so I'd dread to spend dedicated time on reading a frog or focusing on numbers in a tactics game.
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Things like text on newer games should be handled by the JSON scripting with the new cloud aware SDK. So if the game recognizes you're streaming whether console or xCloud it will make adjustments to better suit the smaller form factor. It's something that they talked about at GDC so I would expect we'll see it implemented soonish.
 
Defect

Defect

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,706
I've been in the preview since it started and it works surprisingly well. Very minimal input lag in most of the games I played.
 
RingRang

RingRang

Alt account banned
Banned
Oct 2, 2019
2,442
statham said:
This is why its still in beta, and not launching like stadia, they want to nail this.
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How exactly does one "nail" streaming games over the internet in 2019? We've seen a very clear indication of what the brilliant people at google were able to achieve. Do you think Microsoft is going to do much better than that?
 
Rodney McKay

Rodney McKay

Member
Oct 26, 2017
12,213
Deader2818 said:
Was using this on my phone (S10+) using cell data and it looks good but really noticble input lag.
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That was my experience in my S10e from the cloud, I've mainly only tried Halo 5 but the input lag was too much to be enjoyable.

I do wish I could try it in my iPad Pro, I find I usually get better in-home streaming on that than in my phone, plus it has a MUCH bigger screen which I'd prefer to use.
 
cgpartlow

cgpartlow

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,005
Seattle, WA
I have not tried to the new games they just added but it has been working really well for me. I use the Xbox Remote Streaming almost daily to stream my xbox to my work over my lunch break. I played Jedi Fallen Order over lunch with a 12mbs upload and it ran almost perfectly. I had a huge combat encounter with a boss and several storm troopers and was able to pull off combos and parries with no problem.
 
Knight613

Knight613

Member
Oct 25, 2017
20,789
San Francisco
I've definitely felt some lag playing Gears 5. Killer Instinct played great though.

Playing on my T-Mobile 4G LTE connection did provide the occassional stutter/hiccup. Playing on Wi-Fi was fairly smooth though. Playing on a Galaxy S10.

All in all it's fine. About what I expected after using other streaming services.
 
statham

statham

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
2,449
FloRida
RingRang said:
How exactly does one "nail" streaming games over the internet in 2019? We've seen a very clear indication of what the brilliant people at google were able to achieve. Do you think Microsoft is going to do much better than that?
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Yes, this is a wide test with 50 games. Like MS doesnt have brillant minds focus on gaming.
 
RingRang

RingRang

Alt account banned
Banned
Oct 2, 2019
2,442
statham said:
Yes, this is a wide test with 50 games. Like MS doesnt have brillant minds focus on gaming.
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There are most definitely brilliant people at Microsoft working on streaming, but the point I was trying to make is that what we've seen today from Stadia is what we should expect from game streaming in 2019. It's going to be a very mixed bag, and there is no way around physics and internet connections being imperfect.
 
coma

coma

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,576
I was able to do combo breakers and win a multiplayer match in KI. I was surprised with how well it worked. I still don't see myself ever actually using it though. Maybe on a PC as an easy/fast way to demo a new game.
 
bsigg

bsigg

Member
Oct 25, 2017
22,559
Ascenion said:
Man iOS need to be here like yesterday. I bought an iPhone specifically to not be left out of things like this.
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I'm sure it'll be there for the full roll out. They're focusing on Android since Android has the largest market share of mobile OS devices in the world.

That said, they have never said the word iPhone once in any piece of material from interviews to tech dives for xCloud which I always found curious and makes me think there may a bigger reveal sometime next year in regards to xCloud on iOS.
 
RoKKeR

RoKKeR

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,393
bsigg said:
I'm sure it'll be there for the full roll out. They're focusing on Android since Android has the largest market share of mobile OS devices in the world.

That said, they have never said the word iPhone once in any piece of material from interviews to tech dives for xCloud which I always found curious and makes me think there may a bigger reveal sometime next year in regards to xCloud on iOS.
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This is absolutely not true. They had a preview build up and running for press to see at XO19: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-showcases-xbox-project-xcloud-ios-prototype-x019

I'm also only on iOS so am also waiting! Considered trying to snag a cheap android device in the meantime but I'll try to just wait it out. Hopefully it comes next spring or something.
 
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