What online multiplayer games play well over wifi/higher latency?
I'm thinking turn-based games may work okay in this respect, but which of those might you recommend besides Civ? Also what other types of games work better over wifi/higher latency than you might expect?
I know ideally you'd simply wire up your system to not have to fuss with either, but it's not always an option in some circumstances.
Some real time strategy games might also work. I suspect Age of Empires 2 won’t be too problematic if the high latency only makes your orders take a bit longer to happen. Warcraft 3 (the original release) might also be worth checking, you can find private lobbies to use in place of Battle.Net. I suspect most Total War games might do fine, too, as even the real time battles don’t require a million clicks per second.
Old MMORPGs can also remain playable with up to ~600ms of latency, so you could give a try to WoW on private servers running older expansions, FF14 (free up to level 60, I think) or Guild Wars 2, for instance.
Powerline networking is often limited by the fact that a lot of houses/apartments have multiple circuits and circuit brakes are the nemesis of powerline networking.
packet loss inherently creates latency. packets must be re-sent (at the baseline cost of the additional ping latency to the other side) and your client is running with an out-dated world state. In addition, packet loss usually comes in bursts so you’re losing all packets for an amount of time.
Tabletop Simulator gives everyone bad ping. Most lobbies I’ve been in have everyone with triple-digit ping despite it all being filled with Americans, and maybe one Portuguese guy with 400 ms ping.
Even in the same household, ping seems to stay around 20 ms
I wouldn’t think that most WiFi setups in and of themselves would lead to much, if any, added latency. Wiring up your systems is always ideal in terms of reliability, but plenty of people (I’d bet most) game online via WiFi. I’d suspect that if you’re dealing with latency issues it’d be from playing on distant servers or some other bottleneck in your network.
One couple I regularly game with are on Starlink and I believe both their computers are on WiFi and lag is (generally) fine for them when playing action-survival games like 7 Days to Die, Ark, and Valheim. Their only issues are generally from when Starlink has a momentary hiccup.
Servers may be some of the issue, but the problem then is that a number of games, at least outside of MMOs, don't seem to give much of a choice on that. Presumably they're trying to connect to servers that should give a good experience, but... 🤷♀️
Regardless, the intent here isn't so much to troubleshoot networking issues, as it is to find games that may handle less reliable/rougher network situations decently, as much as is really possible anyway.
Ah, yeah, playing on official or public servers is definitely gonna be a mixed bag in terms of location. I’ll admit I didn’t really consider that as I’m lucky enough to have a good group of friends with similar gaming interests, and we’re all within about 100 KM of each other. I just ended up building a server and self-hosting out of my home.
So for an MMO OSRS is amazing with this. I can usually connect across the world and notice no lag. In fact I don’t know if I’ve ever had lag with it, whatever they’re doing it’s great.
Some older online games have pretty good latency tolerance because they were built in an era before broadband was widely available.
Vanilla World of Warcraft, for example, has a ‘spell batching’ mechanic that helps to equalise things somewhat. You’ll need to play on a private server though because Blizz changed spell batching in Classic.
This is a great point (as well as others that have mentioned similar). I wonder if some of the old arena shooters from around then (or their open source offshoots) may handle just as well today, considering that.
I'll have to look into those that are still active and see! Thanks!
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