![]() ![]() If you simply can't find a local friend to join you for some couch co-op or you want to try out the hot new game that your friend in another state just picked up, there are worse solutions. We also ran into an odd problem sharing gameplay on new action-puzzle game Pix the Cat, which threw up an error saying sharing was "blocked in your region." That's a bit odd, considering the fact that Sony has said in the past that the service should work with "all released PS4 games."ĭespite the slight bandwidth and setup headaches, Share Play is a nice, unexpected addition to the bevy of features already offered to PlayStation Plus subscribers on the PS4. There's no limit to how many times you can restart a session, though, so this is a pretty minor inconvenience, especially considering that the guest system doesn't even have to own the game in question. If you were hoping to hop from game to game while your friend stepped away from the controller or binge for hours on your friend's remote system, too bad every game had to be selected by the host. One other drawback worth mentioning is the one-hour time limit for each Share Play session, which requires you to restart the sharing session after 60 minutes. Even in this ideal setup, though, the guest still had to make unnatural adjustments for the lag. With a hard-line connection setup, the guest player was able to hold his own in Sportsfriends battles and participate in a multiplayer Spelunky run without too much trouble. To be fair, that delay got much more manageable when the guest machine switched from a wireless connection to one hard-wired to the router. In a game like Towerfall: Ascenscion, though, the hosting player was at a huge advantage in multiplayer, as the guest struggled to time precise moves like wall jumps against the slight input delay. On a game like The Evil Within, which has a sort of loose, languorous control scheme already, playing remotely wasn't really that different from playing locally. How important this delay ends up being for the guest depends largely on the kind of game you're playing. The sensation is similar to what many players find when streaming games from PlayStation Now's huge server farms, which is actually a point in Share Play's favor. While the host gets a perfect, locally run experience, there was a small but noticeable delay between the guest's button presses and the on-screen reaction in our tests, ranging from roughly one-fifth to one-third of a second. The main limitation, as it always seems to be with these kind of streaming game solutions, is lag. Once things are set up, the experience is pretty intuitive-the host system acts as if the guest had simply connected a controller from miles away, while the guest's system displays video and audio streamed from the host's machine. Chat functionality is also limited when the Share Play host is navigating menus, meaning Skype might be a better solution for consistent communication. What's more, when the host is navigating through system menus, the guest is stuck staring at a blue screen telling them to wait for the host to start a game. ![]() The system menus do their best to walk both sides through this process, but it still requires a lot of coordination and juggling between various screens. After all that, the host has to virtually "hand a controller" to the guest through another Party screen menu, and the guest has to accept the controller. The "guest" then has to connect to that Share Play session. Then one player has to start the Share Play session though the Party menu. First, both players have to join a chat party. Setting up a Share Play session is a bit of an onerous process. After tinkering with the new feature for the better part of an afternoon, we found Share Play on the PS4 to be far from unusable, but also far from the seamless experience of actually playing with a friend in the same room. With the launch of the PS4's firmware version 2.00 this week, the Share Play promise has become a reality for millions of PS4 owners with PlayStation Plus. ![]() That means the ability to take part in competitive or cooperative multiplayer, even in games not designed for online play, or just the freedom to "borrow" a friend's system and screen to briefly try out a single-player title. The promise: a "virtual couch" that lets remote players join your games as if they were sitting right there with you. When Sony announced the new "Share Play" feature for PlayStation 4 owners two months ago, it was one of the most unexpected and interesting potential uses for its cloud-based gaming infrastructure that we'd heard of. Further Reading What Sony’s Gaikai purchase means to PlayStation’s cloud gaming future ![]()
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