A long time ago it was pretty easy to buy and play a video game. You bought the disc or cart, put it in the console and pressed play. Not so much anymore. Case study: The not-so-great cloud-streaming-only versions of Kingdom Hearts Released for Switch earlier this year has recently received an update and now has an alert letting you know when it’s not a good time to play the single player games you’ve already purchased. Welcome in the future. It sucks.
Released yesterday, update 1.03 for all kingdom heart Games on Switch appear to be adding two main features. In Kingdom Hearts 3, players can now choose between two performance options: Prioritize Performance and Prioritize Graphics Quality. These settings can be selected before you start playing and allow the game to focus on either a more stable framerate or higher resolution graphics, an option that a number of games offer these days.
The patch’s other new feature, however, is mostly unique to the Switch’s controversial cloud streaming Kingdom Hearts games. Now, New messages on the game selection screen warn you of any “server overload” the titles might experience. If a game you want to play is currently dealing with busy servers, you can still try, but it probably won’t be a great experience.
While it’s nice to know if a game is working properly before you play, it’s also terrible that this needed to be added in the first place, and a solid example of why so many people aren’t sold through services like streaming games stages or Amazon Luna. That’s not to say it’s not a useful or powerful technology; I think what Xbox is doing with its cloud streaming and Game Pass is great and lets you Play fancy games like gears 5 on a phone. However, Microsoft also lets you install all of its games. So if the servers are slow or you don’t want to experience any lags, you can just play a native version of the game on your local computer. (This is also very important for wildlife conservation!)
Continue reading: An Extremely Stupid Performance of “Simple And Clean”
The problem is that unlike Microsoft’s Game Pass streaming, Square Enix only sells cloud-streamed versions of Kingdom Hearts Games on the Switch. There is currently no way to download and install them on your actual console. And consider These versions are not great even if you can play them, and also ask for a premium price, it seems to be a bad deal. And now, maybe Square Enix is just telling you not to even play the games you’ve already bought? That’s just a very 2022 thing, isn’t it?
I’m looking forward to Square Enix finds a way to stuff NFTs and blockchain technology into future cloud releases, only to make this whole experience that much worse. In the meantime, you should only buy Kingdom Hearts Play on PS4 or Xbox if you want to play at consistent quality at all times without worrying about servers being “overloaded”.
