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The proposal and the basic concept of Google Stadia has always been quite appealing if you ask me. The idea of being able to play games on more or less any hardware without a download, installation, patch or even any hardware feed is a great idea, but it's obvious that some questions remain as a product .
A burning question is how will players be willing to pay for this service. In my mind, I'm pretty happy with the idea of a Netflix-style subscription service that will reach a hundred or so rotating games, but I'm less happy with the idea of paying for new games just not now own them in the traditional sense. But maybe I'm old-fashioned. Google can in any case refine and adjust this part of its business. The perception of Stadia's performance will be difficult to recover if it is not solid at launch. And let me tell you that it seems stronger.
The stadiums are gradually being in the hands of the media and the public at events such as Gamescom and PAX, and the images presented are impressive. I've been playing for almost an hour now and the short version indicates that the games shown here are almost identical to those running on native hardware. That feels honestly crazy.
Full Disclosure Now: The way I played these demos was the very definition of a controlled environment. I do not really know how close the data centers are to these games (although I'm told 100 miles away) and that means of course that performance will certainly differ in a way or a way. other in the real world. For the sake of fairness, I also want to point out that the Internet trade show is generally zero – it's a two-way street.
Anyway, this is one of the drawbacks of Stadia's vision in general: if you buy a PS4 or Xbox One, you'll know what performance you'll get. Each of these machines is basically the same. What Stadia can do will vary depending on the speed of your connection and your location, even in single player mode. It is important to recognize it.
It's also important to recognize how easy these demos were. The games on offer were the E3 2019 version of Doom Eternal and an almost updated patch version of Mortal Kombat 11, two games that do not forgive latency. As a fighting game nerd, MK is my first point of contact, and I can immediately start making combos with Jacqui Briggs in the same way as in a local version of the game.
In fact, for Mortal Kombat, the main difference for me is the placement of the entries; the Stadia controller has both analog controllers at the bottom, with the D-Pad in front of the buttons, like the PS4. I prefer the layout of the Xbox and Nintendo where one of the sticks is in front of the buttons, which threw me. The Stadia controller is a nice ergonomic kit with beautiful color schemes more aesthetic than promotional images.
More important for a game like Mortal Kombat is that it is fully compatible with other input devices. This demo was running from a low power Chromebook that had no hope of running the game in native mode. Stadia has just come out of a Google Chrome browser window, which seems a little magical. If I had an XInput arcade stick on hand, I could place it in the USB input of the Chromebook and use it in MK for an appropriate arcade action. It's good.
The latency is there, but it's minimal. Likewise, there are artifacts revealing here and there, the type of screen scrambling we all associate when a video is buffered. It is also minimal, and is not really the kind of thing that seemed particularly problematic in 1080p. I am not yet convinced that I want to play Stadia games in 4K if, at 1080 seconds, there are already some visible artifacts, but it is the good compromise: it 's portable and it basically goes in the air (even if this demo was hard – ethernet-cabled) – you must be willing to compromise and accept a little success somewhere.
Doom was pretty much the same story, though it may show where Stadia's small gaps will be less noticeable. The elimination of latency is clearly the priority and, in a game as dynamic as this one, it's perfect. The fast pace of the game means that you do not really have time to notice that the visual effects are slightly affected by the optimization in the background. In MK, combat intros are the ones where he would be most easily recorded.
In this line of work, you see a lot of smoke and mirrors, a lot of bullshit. I sat down and even played some of those awesome demos of the Natal project before the technology was dumped and made public under the name of the disappointing Kinect. I saw this infamous demo of Killzone PS3, the incredibly dynamic demo of Bioshock Infinite and the nonsense of Crackdown 3. All these elements seemed real to varying degrees at the time, and then the overwhelming weight of implementation in the real world broke them. But these Stadia demos look as real as they look, and the technology certainly seems to work as advertised. It's incredibly impressive.
So: it works. It's impressive. All that remains to be seen now are real-world tests. Hopefully Google gives us enough access and time to really test Stadia's capabilities before it's fully launched later this year. For the moment, however, I am optimistic with caution: this could be a very viable future after all.
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