Cloud Monday - Dragon Quest Heroes - Part 2 - A Much Better 45 Minutes, But Not Perfect

Today's Cloud Monday is part 2 of playing the PS4 game Dragon Quest Heroes on the PlayStation Plus Streaming Service.

throughout most of part 1, https://youtu.be/F6vjq33ZTf8, the streaming experience from PlayStation Plus Premium wasn't great. thankfully in this series i do each game twice so we can get a better sense of what to expect. This game is a great example of that because today's video shows how much better it can be streaming the game. to help, i will now include the PS4 Internet Speed Test at the end of the video, taken immediately after the game, so we can see how good or bad my wired connection is.

The title does say, however, that it wasn't a perfect experience and it wasn't. the main thing that happened when playing it the second time was stream tearing. a few times, briefly, grey tears would appear on the screen where there was no data to be displayed. as they were brief and covered a much smaller area of the screen than in part 1, they didn't impact playing the game. Yes, they were a distraction and mostly fairly obvious.

So after two videos, playing Dragon Quest Heroes isn't the smoothest experience. but, the games design, art direction, and game style do help to mitigate the issues in such a way that the game is playable. even when things were bad in part 1, i was mostly able to play it like normal. that's not to say these things are distracting when they happen, they are. but in making the best of what we have, it's certainly more playable that what happened with Assassin's Creed Origins.

Cloud Monday - Dragon Quest Heroes - Part 1 - 45 Minutes Blighted By Streaming Issues

Today's Cloud Monday is part 1 of playing the PS4 game Dragon Quest Heroes on the PlayStation Plus Streaming Service.

I wanted to try out a "musou" style game as part of Cloud Monday as i thought it would be an interesting challenge for a streaming service. often these games have many enemies on the screen at once with many FX and particles, basically many things that can make it difficult even for YouTube.

However, what i got in the 45 minutes and even a bit before i started recording was far worse than i expected. it has been many weeks since i had a PlayStation Plus Premium Cloud Streaming experience as bad as this, it was Assassin’s Creed: Origins last year, part 1 https://youtu.be/X5e1b-JPh70 and part 2 https://youtu.be/ZCjvWJLaZ-Q. there wasn't one specific issue, this video has all the issues. Stream tearing, macroblocking, resolution dips, to the point that a couple of times i got the warning message.

But, even tho there were streaming issues, playing the game wasn't too bad. the game's art style is simple, clear, and colorful which meant even when things got bad it was still mostly possible to work out what was happening. plus, the control scheme for this game means you can smash the buttons and often attack something. the streaming issues were a negative.

But, in this series we always play each game twice so come back for part two and we'll see if it's just as bad the second time. it'll be on a different day at a different time. for Assassin’s Creed: Origins, it didn't help. but for the other games i've played, it usually does help.