GeForce Now And Then

When I said in yesterday's post "I have yet to try GeForce Now but I see no reason why that shouldn't also work perfectly.", I knew I was taking a big risk. I ought to have done my due diligence and at least checked Nvidia's cloud gaming service would run on my new laptop.

Well, now I have - and it does. It does not, however, "work perfectly". I've tried two games so far and if GeForce Now was baseball I'd be batting 0.500. Actually, it would have been a strike and a home run. (Help! I'm on an analogy and I don't know how to get off!)

Shorn of the the sporting metaphors, I got one game to run without any issues whatsoever but the other one wouldn't run at all. The good news is that the game that did work is one of my favorites. The bad news is that the one that didn't was the one I wanted to try.

First, though, a little bit about GeForce Now itself. It's been a while since I last used it. A couple of years ago, I was playing New World in the cloud because playing it locally was threatening to set my PC on fire but then two things happened: 

1. I bought a really good graphics card that could run New World comfortably.
   
2. I pretty much lost interest in playing New World, comfortably or otherwise.

That was in the summer of '23. Back then the free version of GeForce Now limited you to an hour per session and put you in a queue each time the hour ran out. You could play any game that GeForce had on their servers and that you owned. Of course, you had to prove you did, in fact, own the game, which meant syncing it with wherever you'd bought it.

In the autumn of '21, when I first engaged with GeForce Now, I had a heck of a job getting it to link up with my Steam account which, as I remember it, was the only option then available for proving ownership, apart, presumably, from buying it direct. Or maybe it was the only one I was interested in at the time. I really can't remember.

Now, there are several ways to tell GeForce Now you own a game. You can link to your Steam account but also to Ubisoft, Epic, XBox and Battlenet.

That's quite a selection. I have all of them, although I only really use Steam. I might branch out now I know I can play on Nvidia's servers, though.

For this experiment, I stuck with Steam, having completely forgotten the problems it gave me last time. Luckily for me, either I did all the set-up then or the information required has been trimed because it took just a few clicks and some confirmatory emails and it was all done.

I didn't have a particular title in mind so I took a look through the list. It was good to see Fortnite featured in numerous flavors because only a few days ago I uninstalled it to make some space. Now if I ever want to log in to watch a metaverse event I won't need to download the damn thing again.

There were several obvious possibilities, not least New World, but it was one of the "free" titles that caught my eye. Only a couple of days ago I read a piece by Tyler FM Edwards at MOP, where he described The First Descendant as a game "with very little genuinely challenging content". That sounded right up my street so I thought I'd start there.

Even though it was free, I still had to add it to my Steam Library before GeForce Now was happy. That lit up the Play button and I pressed it.

Other than the enhanced range of partners, about the only noticeable difference to the process is that now you get adverts while you sit in the queue. And if you skip them it sends you back to the start of the line. 

That sounds much worse than it is for a couple of reasons:

1. Watching ads beats staring at counter, which is all you used to get.
2. You can both mute the ads and tab out and do something else while they run without losing your place in the queue, so you don't need to see or hear them at all. 

There were only fourteen people ahead of me anyway, the perks of playing mid-week during work and school hours. There was barely time for an ad to run before I got in. 

Or rather didn't get in...

It would be nice now to go into a few First Impressions paragraphs, where I either confirm or refute Tyler's opinion. Unfortunately, the game repeatedly hung at login, offering me nothing but a black screen and the blue, spinning ouroboros that's replaced the good old hourglass. 

In the end I had to exit GeForce Now by right-clicking the icon in the toolbar, there being no option to quit on the screen itself. A form popped up asking me to rate my experience from one star to five. I gave it one but only because I couldn't give it zero.

Not a great start. I might have stopped there had I not also noticed, as I was checking the roster of available games, that one of them was Wuthering Waves.

This piqued my curiosity. I currently play WW directly through publisher Kuro Games' portal . I wasn't aware it was available on any other platform so I wasn't sure how it would work in the cloud. 

I guessed that if I tried to play the game on GeforceNow, I'd be starting over as a new player. I didn't want to do that but I did want to see how it worked and also if the spinning PoV issue would recur so I clicked the button to say I owned it just to see what would happen.

To my considerable surprise I was offered a couple of options, one of which was the Epic Store, where I'd completely forgotten the game was also available. Much more exciting for me, there was also a link to the Kuro Games version. I couldn't believe it would take me to my existing account but that's just what it did.

In fact, it took me straight to the exact same login process I've been using ever since I started playing. It let me log in using Google, select my existing character and server and pick up playing from where I left off - except now I was somehow doing it on GeforceNow's servers in The Netherlands.

Honestly, it felt like magic. There I was, sitting all warm and cosy in an armchair in front of the gas fire, playing my familiar character just as though I was at my desktop, only in a great deal more comfort. 

Gameplay felt as smooth as it ever does. I had maybe ten seconds of lag in an hour but I often get more than that on a direct connection.

I worked my way through another full chapter of The Black Shores (Great story. Makes no sense but the feels are off the charts...) before I had to stop for lunch. There was no sign of the mysterious spinning problem. That's clearly down to Splashtop but now I don't need to think about how to fix it.

I mark my laptop trials of both Luna and GeForce Now resounding successes. There are all kinds of advantages to playing this way, not just the top-line benefit of turning a middling business laptop into a high-powered gaming machine but also in the savings in disk space and time sent keeping the games up to date. Let someone else handle all those huge downloads for once!

I might even push some of my gaming to the cloud when I'm back on the desktop. I'm struggling for disk space there and it might make sense to play new games remotely where possible, rather than try to free up space to download them.

Either way, the technology has clearly improved and it looks like remote gaming is here to stay. Now, if I can just get The First Descendant to join the party...