JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 95letdown. Every blurry background or
compression artifact becomes an
indictment of the entire platform. The thrill
of “Wow, I’m running Destiny 2 off a server
40 miles away and it works surprisingly
well!” is no longer enough.
And I’d be perplexed how to handle this
duality in a review, except it’s the least of
Stadia’s issues.SCAFFOLDING
A baffling amount of the Stadia experience is
still a work-in-progress. So much, in fact, I’m
hard-pressed to explain why Google didn’t
simply lock off the rest until a later date.
A PC is probably the best setup after the
Chromecast, and if you participated in
Google’s tests last year then it will feel familiar.
Games are accessed through Chrome,
popping a full-screen window over yourof other for-pay
game streaming
services, Stadia is a
rousing success.
I’m particularly
shocked how
responsive it feels.
Even the games I
was most skeptical
of at first proved
surprisingly
playable in an ideal
network
environment.
Google provided access to Destiny 2 and
Mortal Kombat 11 during our review period,
and I found I could consistently (with a slight
muscle memory adjustment) line up
headshots and tap in combos, respectively. It
looks good, too! Not great. Not on a par with
a high-end PC. But only the occasional
compression artifact gives away the gambit,
provided your connection’s good enough to
stream at 4K.
So much of Google’s messaging is aimed
at holding Stadia to an impossible standard
though. The way Google’s pitched it, Stadia
is The Future, and The Future can’t just be
“pretty good for a streaming service.” The
Future can’t be “playable.” It has to be
indistinguishable from running a game locally.
Better, even.
It’s not, and might never be. But if that’s
Google’s end-goal, then every stutter is a