March 2020 – AJCrowley's Frustratotron

Software:
OBS, Restream Chat

Hardware:
Elgato Stream Deck (the 15 button one)
Elgato HD60 HDMI capture card
Blue Yeti Microphone
Logitech C922 Pro Stream Full HD Webcam
The occasional CatCam is currently a slightly older Logitech C110 webcam, but i’m lookig to upgrade that with a cheap HDMI cam (just for higher resolution kitteh)

OBS is the basic AK47 workhorse of streaming software. There are others around, but OBS seems to fit into the “simple enough to get going” and “advanced enough for me to tinker with things when i need to” slot. it also integrates perfectly with the Elgato Stream Deck, whose management software allows you to tie buttons on the Stream Deck directly to OBS functionality.

OK, so the buttons are a -little- bit of a con, in that really it’s a single screen with buttons over the top. However, while at first glance you might think you just get 15 functions to play with, each button can be a folder of a set of buttons, so it’s more or less infinite the limits of functions you can set up. Each button can represent a scene in OBS you want to switch to, so the middle row from left to right for my general streaming is “Intro – Coming Soon”, “main PC screen game capture”, “HDMI capture”, “Pic in PIc”, and the hand is “Outro”.

So for any given stream i can start with the Intro, switch to my main game broadcast (main game or HDMI) and then once I’ve finished, swap to the Outro for a few minutes before I end the transmission. the top two buttons to the left of the middle are toggling broadcast (the button changes colour when I’m broadcasting) and “record” so I can record as well as or instead of, broadcasting. the coffee cup is a “taking a break” scene.

All in all, instead of faffing with CTRL or ALT hotkeys, you just bash away at this nicely mounted little backlit control panel. I’m not sure it’s priced particularly well, the 15 button unit retails for round about £130. There’s also a newer 32 button edition for over £200! for someone who wants to stream seriously, it’s worth a punt, and very, very useful to have, but it could be priced just a little more competitively.

If you’re streaming on a PC, but you want to capture either the output from another PC, or from a Console like the XBox or a Playstation then an HDMI capture device is essential. I’d say the HD60Pro is one of the simpler and solid products you can pick up for doing this. other USB HDMI devices exist, but they suffer from lag, so you want what’s on the screen and going out to sync with what you’re saying. the PCI HD60 results in almost 0 lag, and is a simple pass through device, so while i’m gaming on the XBox, i can see the PC screen with OBS, chat windows etc, and play on a seperate screen. OBS also picks it up as a standard Video device, just like a webcam, and it takes moments to add to an OBS scene. again, for serious streamers who will be using other devices, it’s a must have.

I have a Nintendo Switch, and XBox and a Playstation, all of which I could stream from if I wanted, so this gives me options depending on what I fancy doing. Given the hassle of viewing chat on a second device, and the fact that OBS, while a damn good piece of software sometimes has issues being told what window you want to capture, I’ve found myself leaning more towards streaming off the XBox, which doesn’t hurt when the Game Pass gives me a library of random games which can take advantage of.

As an aside, it’s looking more like most professional streamers use a PC to game on, and then a seperate PC to stream from, picking up the output of their gaming rig through one of these beasts, and the composing it all on a seperate machine. For performance and usability reasons this is a pretty good argument, although it’s a little costlier for smaller streamers (like me for example).

The more I stream though, the more I agree with this proposition; keeping the Streaming software, chat etc. out of the way and reducing any reduction in performance of your gaming hardware is a good argument.

There’s a bit of me that wonders if you really need to get a professional microphone, but what I do know is that the mic on your headset is not worth a damn. It’s good for in-game communications, but sucks when you’re looking at broadcast quality voice. everyone has a seperate “proper” microphone. The Blue Yeti is large, but extremely powerful, and does look quite good, even though as far as i’m concerned should never be seen on stream. There seems to be a “thing” for many streamers to show their Microphone in front of them, which I think looks kinda stupid, and is completely unnecessary. The Yeti picks up my voice perfectly from over a foot and a half away, and in the picture you can see I’ve got it mounted on a cheap Neewer arm I bought off Amazon.

If you do want to mount any of the Blue microphones on a tripod thread, be aware you’ll need a thread adaptor. If memory serves, I think a 1/4″ on the inner out to a 5/8″ thread, but you’d need to check the screw you’ve got and the microphone model you’re using.

Note: if you go away from your rig in-stream and don’t have a seperate scene for that (with the sound off) think hard about the gain level you set on the Yeti. It can pick up sounds from a room or two away, which can be extremely embarassing.

Here you can see another ariculated arm in use to hold my Logitech C922. Annoyingly there don’t seem to be many Webcams with Tripod mounts on them, but the C922 is a solid HDMI webcam which does, as well as the normal over-the-top-of-the-screen clip. The arm in use here is more solid and less suceptible to vibration or knocking than the articulated arm I use for my mic. as it’s high and out of the way, I don’t need to move the WebCam, but the flexible arm for the Mic means I can swing it out of the way when I feel it getting in the way. Again, there are plenty of cheaper options out there, but Logitech seems to be reliable and long lasting, I’ve had no issues with this one so far.

It does have an integrated microphone so you could probably stream with this alone if you really wanted, without the need for a seperate mic. There’s included software, including Chromakey/background replacement, but I’ve never been as bothered about that. Regarding Chromakey, OBS has a perfectly good option built in, which works reasonably well, although my current OBS scenes don’t really rely on that style of visuals.

Last but not least, there’s the Logitech C110 which is now being used for CatCam (when a cat is present anyway). I’m hoping to replace with a cheap eBay Microsoft Lifecam as it has a tripod thread for the arm you can see in the picture. the clip i’ve using is clumsy and unstable.

You might think that with all these arms, it can get a little cluttered, but that’s only while streaming. The advantage of the arms and mounts is that you can reposition, move around, and when you’ve finished, move completely out of the way. Having a microphone constantly on the desk can look good (maybe), but storage and so on is less complicated when all you need to do is simply swing it out of the way.

Retail wise, this lot if you pick it up all at once could cost a lot, but most of these I grabbed from eBay, and the Stream Deck was heavily discounted during a black friday sale. I think even now I’d stil balk at the 130 quid price tag. For a complete beginner, the C922 webcam could double as microphone at a pinch, so it’s a good solid core of your hardware. All sorts of keyboards are out there to set macro keys to, which could take care of the Stream Deck functionality, and if you want some DIY maker kudos, lots of kits for programmable mini keyboards are out there and look good too!

That’s my hardware, just as far as Streaming kit goes. In a future article I’ll take a look at OBS, and some of the overall basic setup you can do, and at least what I’m managing to do with it.

Thanks for reading, leave comments and so on if you like!

So, recently while streaming, I’ve come across games which I would have been extremely aggreived to have spent real money on.

I’m an XBox Game Pass user, which means for a suscription fee, I get access to a variety of games, often for a limited period of time, to play as much as I want. a side benefit of the Game Pass recently is the “Games with Gold” perk, which gives you “free” games, to own as long as you are a member.

All in all, i find the Game Pass (and by extension, Game Pass Ultimate, meaning I get the games on the PC and the XBox combined) extremely good value. As a Streamer, I can pick some game at random, which I may or may not have bought if it weren’t for the Game Pass, and play through it, giving criticism or praise as I go.

A while back, I reviewed a game called “The Sinking City”, which was a Lovecraftian open-ish world game that came out on the Epic Game Store. I had been looking forward to it, being a fan of Lovecraft and Cthulhu style games. In the end, i was sadly disappointed by the glitchy and incomplete open world, with arbitrary boundaries, and very clunky transitions. All in all, I gave up with it after a few hours as just a bad job.

So this is all a very clunky way of saying that when Call of Cthulhu: The Official Videogame came through on the Games with Gold, I was looking forward to it.

And then I actually played it. The game is arranged into a dozen or so chapters, or one could really call them “Scenes”. bits of story which you loosely interact with, but ultimately have to complete to a certain degree to move on in the story. There are no branches to the story that I could see to any amount, although there are a number of decisions which can affect the ultimate ending of the story. along the way you gain Experience Points (XP) by finding books (medical and occult) or by completing tasks/feats along the way. These can be used to tweak some of your skills, a nod to the Pen and Paper RPG of Call of Cthulhu. As the game went by, I came up against some tests and dialogue options which were compromised because of the way I’d spent these points, so ultimately they did affect the ending, but really they didn’t affect getting through the game, if that makes sense.

What I’m getting at, is an “illusion” of effecting the game with the decisions you make, and the way you spend points. One of the reasons I was disappointed in CoC was that there were inconsistencies in some of the dialogue and story after decisions and dialogue I’d gone through. Sometimes contradictory statements which just jarred the whole thing and made it feel less satisfying.

So, Linear game, check. Bad Quality Assurance, check. (also subtitles which didn’t match the v/o. not a deal killer, but small details like that which just highlight bad quality control of a game). Sometimes glitchy graphics and audio, check.

So, Open World or Linear, it doesn’t matter much, you can still end up with crap games. What’s telling is that neither game was produced by a small software house, or a new one. Frogwares (Sinking City), Focus Interactive (CoC) are both experienced houses, but both ended up producing clunkers.

now let’s look at some other games.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins and AC:Odyssey are two of the Assassin’s Creed series’ last (at time of writing) releases by UbiSoft, one of the behemoths of the industry. Both open world games, both non-linear in approach, with high levels of Quality, in Storyline, Production, Graphics, environment and so on. With these games, you can’t heap enough praise on them, with only an occasional “samey” feel to the way you go about clearing areas and locations of baddies. Between either of these games there is a staggering scale to the worlds, with contrasts in terrain, look and feel, but with busy environments with belieavable NPCs populating them. Contrast that with The Sinking City’s randomly appearing and disappearing NPCs which react in no way whatsoever, randomly walk into walls, bouncing off them vacantly and so on. Cut and paste rooms and locations which have no soul or realism to them.

A Plague Tale: Innocence dropped recently onto the XBox Game Pass. While I will wax relentlessly on the Assassin’s Creed open worlds, picking games from the Game Pass results in a more random result, and that includes more linear chapter style games. Now, while I complain about the linearity of CoC:TOV, linearity in itself is not a deal killing sin. It is if it pretends to something else. In the case of A Plague Tale, there is no pretense around the linearity or the direction you are going at any point in time. In a few chapters there are more open areas which allow you either stealth your way through, or you can go a more direct and violent route. What sets Plague Tale apart from CoC is the level of attention to detail. Dialogue, Music, Scripting, and above all the Quality of the game is so many degrees higher. Production QA is quite clearly much better, the tailoring of the soundtrack to events in the game shines so much brighter.

What, then, is so incongruent between these two examples, is that they’re both published by Focus Interactive. I can’t comment on how staff were employed on either project, but Asobo House, producing Plague Tale are on the face of it a smaller operation. at the time of writing this, they’re neither “Premium” priced games on Amazon, both retailing for around £22.

So, what’s the point you’re getting at, AJ?

You got me, I’m not sure. I find it interesting that what we’re expected to be paying against the amount of gameplay we get is rather large, and the level of quality from games appears to be equally wide. With UbiSoft, Origin, Microsoft, and Sony all offering subscriptions now for playing “all you can eat” from limited company libraries, the opportunity to get some good games without shelling out full retail price is now quite a valuable one. The fact that it levels out the field between lower quality filler, and high end epics could be bad for the consumer when looking at the lists presented to them. However, just as the increased number of players in the Video Streaming arena results in paywalls that mean some consumers only willing to subscribe to one or two services leaves them unable to enjoy such-and-such a series (– cough — Mandalorian — cough — ) so too might gamers end up restricting themselves to one software house over another. There’s some convergence going on in the way games are being delivered, only being more complicated by the newer Game Streaming services (such as the aforementioned Sony offering, PlayStation Now).

It disappoints me that the smaller houses really aren’t aspiring to the level of Production Quality that you get in the larger franchises such as Assassin’s Creed. these games raise the bar, and ultimately, the amount gamers are willing to pay for releases they know share that level of polish. Clearly smaller houses such as Asobo can clear that bar, so why do releases like The Sinking City and CoC get put out as they are?

It’s a brave new world. For me, although I will continue to invest in the individual Assassin’s Creed games, the XBox Game Pass does seem to be good for me, with the range of random games that’s left me streaming a goddamn Fishing game and actually enjoying it.

peace out, AJ.

Month: March 2020

My Streaming Setup, just for reference

Game Standards in a world of high end games and high end publishers