One of the main issues with Stadia is that they didn’t even do the basics. I saw basically no marketing, and on top of that, I heard all kinds of rumors about the business model that were entirely false. They made no effort to combat the misinformation. It was never the case that you literally had to purchase the game on top of the subscription fees, but that was like the number one issue brought up in every discussion.
There was a bad experience version you could use without a subscription to games you purchased outright, and they included "free" games with your subscription, but to get a reasonable experience you had to pay for both.
The subscription was only necessary if you wanted to play in 4K or wanted "free" monthly games. Everything else worked just fine without the sub, with no change to performance.
From everything I can see, you did have to buy games on Stadia. They would give you a free game a month, but if that wasn't the game you wanted to play, you had to buy it. The base version of Stadia was free, but the Pro version gave you a discount on games - it did not make them free.
This is the official support forum and there are many Q&A's about purchasing games:
... If you have an Android device, you can also try via the Stadia app to purchase games (once purchased, you can play them everywhere, on mobile, TV or PC).
I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with one without paying the subscription. The interface was horrible and clearly designed to force you into subscribing before you could even use the thing.
It was never the case that you literally had to purchase the game on top of the subscription fees
It depends on the game. There were a bunch of games under “Stadia Play” that came along with the subscription, GamePass style. And then there were games you had to outright purchase.
The main problem with stadia was Google. I knew it was doomed from the start and that’s why I never bothered with it. I actually know a lot of people that didn’t bother with it because it was from Google. It’s basically a self fulfilling prophecy at this point that most of their shit ends up on the Google graveyard.
A lot of people actually don’t trust Google anymore since they’ve already been screwed over many times by them.
Because everything ran locally at a datacenter, the real killer app of Stadia would have been a super-massively multiplayer game. There wouldn't be any problems with latency between game states, (any lag would be between the server and the console.) Imagine massive wars or mediaeval battles with thousands of participants. They never developed games that took advantage of what was unique about the platform.
AFAIK, MMOs keep all the game state on the servers already. The difference is that what they send to the client is key deltas to the game state, which the client then renders. Stadia type services instead render that on the datacenter side and send the client images.
With their expertise at networking and so-on, Google might have been able to get a slight advantage in server-to-server communication, but it wouldn’t have enabled anything on a whole different scale, AFAIK.
IMO, their real advantage was that they could have dealt with platform switching in a seamless way. So, take an addictive turn-by-turn game like Civilization. Right now someone might play 20 turns before work, then commute in, think about it all day, then jump back in when they get home. With Stadia, they could have let you keep playing on your cell phone as you take the train into work. Play a few turns on a smoke break. Maybe play on a web browser on your work computer if it’s a slow day. Then play again on your commute home, then play on the TV at home, but if someone wanted to watch a show, you could either go up and play on a PC, or pull out your phone, or play on a laptop…
Larger massive multiplayer capability was one of the features Google was touting upon Stadia's launch:
Over time, Buser [Google’s director of games] says we should not only see additional exclusive games on Stadia, but also cross-platform games doing things on Stadia “that would be impossible to do on a console or PC.” Instead of dividing up virtual worlds into tiny "shards" where only 100 or 150 players can occupy the same space at a time because of the limitations of individual servers, he says Google’s internal network can support living, breathing virtual worlds filled with thousands of simultaneous players. https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/6/18654632/google-stadia-price-release-date-games-bethesda-ea-doom-ubisoft-e3-2019
Sure, they claimed that, but it’s telling that nobody ever took them up on that.
Google’s internal network may be good, but it’s not going to be an order of magnitude better than you can get in any other datacenter. If getting thousands of people into the same virtual space were just a matter of networking, an MMO would have already done it.
A shard is going to be storing the position, orientation and velocity of key entities (players, vehicles, etc.) in memory. If accessed frequently enough they’ll be in the processor’s cache. There’s no way the speed of accessing that data can compare with networking speeds.
That doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been some kinds of innovations. Say a game like Star Citizen where there are space battles. In theory you could store the position and orientation of everything inside a ship in one shard and the position and orientation of ships themselves in a second shard. Since people inside the ship aren’t going to be interacting directly with things outside the ship except via the ship, you could maybe afford a bit of latency and inaccuracy there. But, if you’re just talking about a thousand-on-thousand melee, I think the latency between shards would be too great.
You’d only be able to play with people local to you, in the same Stadia datacenter. If Stadia wanted to minimize latency, they would increase the number of datacenters (thus making fewer people per instance).
I will never, ever, understand why Stadia was something thay had to be “ported into” at such high cost. Specially for games that were ALREADY working on Linux. Like, what the fuck was the hold up. I read up stories that it was basically like porting to a fourth console and that just sounded outrageously stupid in my head.
Whatever tech stack they had, they could have made it way more profitable by making it generic windows boxes that partially run your library elsewhere. I dunno if there’s some hubris or some licensing bullshit behind it, but fact is, if I want to do this on GeForce Now, I can do it, no questions asked, and as the costumer, that’s the beginning and end of my concerns.
Google engineers always choose the hardest route to solve problems. Why wouldn’t they? If your products are going to be shutdown in a few years anyway, might as well have a glowing resume from working on those products (resume-driven development).
Think about it, every time Google made a product with sensible tech stacks, those products were actually started outside Google and later bought by Google (Android, YouTube, etc). If Google made Android from scratch, there is no way they’ll use java and Linux, they’ll invent a new language and made their own kernel instead (just like fuchsia os which might be canned soon).
might as well have a glowing resume from working on those products (resume-driven development).
This is so true. Getting promoted requires showing impact. If you use off-the-shelf tools (that happen to be easily maintainable) that’s not an impressive impact. If you invent a new language (and make up a convincing reason it was necessary) and so-on, that’s really impressive and you can get promoted. The minefield you leave behind that makes maintaining your solution so difficult is just another opportunity for someone else to get promoted.
Only Microsoft can run decently windows in a decently big data centers. Because they can tweak it, as they do for Xbox os as well. For everyone else scaling windows server VMs or containers is a pain, because windows is a bad, poorly optimized, resources-hungry OS developed with main goal to make hardware obsolete every 3-5 years.
I don’t know what nvidia is doing, but when I use it at my friends’ places, lags are painful.
Linux was the right call in theory, in practice gaming industry is pretty broken on the PC side with its lock on windows, as we see on every new AAA port… Let’s hope valve can save it, but I doubt.
It is not a conspiracy though. Planned obsolescence is a well known real thing. There is a reason unix computers last on average longer than windows computers, and Linux is the stereotypical OS for old pcs.
If people are downvoting for this, they should learn how computers and operating systems work
Don’t worry, I was expecting the downvotes. This place is full of angry windows fan boys that believe they are tech expert because they watch ltt and can install a skyrim mod. Less than reddit luckily
The thing was clearly designed to force you into paying a subscription fee. You can’t let people have something they could possibly easily use and play games that aren’t on your subscription if your entire purpose is to milk a monthly subscription from the users. Google, fuck you capitalism woohoo.
I’m so excited to play this on PS5. Survived a 50 hours playthrough on PS4, liked the story enough but almost purely ground my way through due to shitty performance. This time I wanna just enjoy it as it was meant to be played :)
Tbh I'm still not sure what the point of it is. In gtav you get into trouble with police if you rob shops, steal cars or drive over pedestrians, among other things like scripted missions. In saints row it's about gang warfare and them being a nuisance during your city demolition. In mafia you have to obey road laws, hide weapons from plain sight and they are generally a bigger threat.
You can't rob stuff or do heists in 2077, you can summon your own car for free at any point so no need to steal them and since you can fast travel you don't drive as much anyway. The missions that do have car chases are heavily scripted and on the rails.
Is this something just for people who want to go out of their way to fight endless waves of cops and thats it or am I missing something that makes it such a hype worthy feature?
It was a huge immersion breaker for anyone not going stealth/low profile (as the author admits he does). In fact, it was the reason I haven’t played until now. I guess I’m a patient gamer and it irked me what was missing from launch. I’d built my 2070 machine for this game years ago and now I’m stoked to have a 3080 to break it in with.
Seems more immersion breaking to me that you can fight maxtac and get away with it in the first place, or that they all still just forget about you if you hide for a minute or two out of sight, but we'll see. Maybe I'm just missing something and will appreciate it ingame more.
Just leaves the other half of the game to be fixed. I swear I gave it another go a month ago, and it was as buggy as the first time I played it. Just with new bugs, this time around.
I never suffered from the game-stopping bugs others had, but IMO the other half of the game that needs fixed is the storyline itself. The character’s storyline itself is so linear that nothing you really do makes a difference, your background is just reduced to a set of extra dialogue choices. It’s all just window dressing over a very on-rails game. All they needed to do was just copy GTA V more and it’d be an improvement over this game.
I think so. The AMD 3D cache CPUs are impressive in terms of gaming performance (though the inability to overclock them still leaves some benefit to non-3D cache CPUs. Non-3d cache CPUs are also great for everything other than gaming).
You know what kind of news about Dragon Age would actually interest me? News on a goddamn release date. It’s been 9 years. They can either make the damn game or shut the fuck up.
I’d love some news about them going back to the dark fantasy and writing style of Origins/Awakening over the high fantasy BS Inquisition set them on, tbh.
Origins’ story was so good that it got me to go to the library in the height of my teenage “reading is lame” phase just to get more exposition from the books. I really wish they’d stayed in that vain in the sequels.
Not exactly a unique situation to Stadia. Look at any failed console and lack of games is a prominent reason given why.
Not to mention the issues raised from a cloud service streaming platform that plagued previous attempts. I’m honestly surprised Stadia lasted as long as it did.
Which is why steam went whole hog into proton development for the steam deck. It’s brilliant strategy. Suddenly their game catalog is immediately available on the device. So users can play games they already own and will have access to hundreds of others day one.
The problem with this game is its design choices. Over simplified enemies leave much to be desired from previous titles. A world that levels with you means you never feel like you get better. I had to get lucky with a fucken item drop just to make my druid viable. Restarting every season? Only streamers and NEETs have time and desire to do that. This game was a pile of the worst design choices of the last 10 years. They even managed to make an established character (Lilith) bland by trying to make her seem morally grey. Chick has been trying to turn Sanctuary into her own faction for the Eternal Conflict since its inception. If I could I would refund this game, which sucks they already got their money.
I agree with you on some things and disagree in others. Random mobs don’t need to be particularly complex imho. I have skipped D3 but in D2 the most complexity random mobs had were the immunities, which imo is also not good design. The boss battles is where skill and brains and preparation should play a role, and in that regard I think D4 does a good job. The problem is that when playing I felt everything was a slog and enemies were a damage sponge at all times.
Also, seasonal resets were a known quantity and are standard for this kind of game, so I don’t really see the point on complaining about those. PoE also does resets and it’s never been an issue. The forced grind is where the problem lies.
As for Lilith, I didn’t feel she was morally grey. I felt that she was manipulating everything in such a way as to always be or be perceived as the lesser evil, trying to find her way to the top via underhanded means and manipulation, but always purely out of self interest. Definitely a black character, but in a more interesting way than the simple “I am evil so I must destroy”
That said, I have not touched this game since I completed the campaign. The story was decent, but the game was simply not fun, even though I like a lot of the artistic and technical details.
Hopefully it’ll be fun at some point, for now I still consider the money I spent to buy the game strongly in the not well spent category
The somewhat niche ARPG space is already competitive enough in strong game design with the likes of PoE, Grim Dawn, and Last Epoch for subpar games to make it long term.
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Aktywne