JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 99copies of Destiny 2 to everyone who
preordered the Founder’s and Premiere
Editions, because if they didn’t there would
be nobody playing. And indeed, that’s how
our review period has gone. I spent a week
running around empty planets and visiting
an empty Tower and trying to complete the
Haunted Forest on my own and it was very
weird. I’ll be curious whether the population
picks up after Stadia’s released, but it’s hard
to imagine it ever being as vibrant as the
existing console or PC versions.
Red Dead Redemption II: I was
particularly curious to try out Red Dead
Redemption II given that we struggled to run it
at 1080p (go.pcworld.com/strg) on an Nvidia
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Unshackled by local
hardware constraints,
could Google Stadia run
Red Dead better than a
high-end PC? And the
answer is, not really. It’s
hard to do an A/B
comparison given the
variables at play, but the
Stadia version’s lighting
seemed flatter, and the
otherworldly fog effects
that left me slack-jawed
on the PC were undercut
by omnipresent
compression artifacts.
Load times were
faster though! And
besides, it was Red Dead Redemption II
streamed to a $70 Chromecast. That’s pretty
impressive in its own right.
I also think games like Red Dead are a
better proof-of-concept for Stadia because
they’re not as reliant on tight timing windows
as shooters, fighting games, and the other
genres Google seems hellbent on proving it
can conquer. Red Dead’s shooting suffers still,
but its movement is so heavy and momentum-
based that a delay of a few milliseconds
barely registers. It’s the same reason
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey worked so well for
those early Stadia tests.
Kine: Another genre that fares great in
streaming: puzzle games. Kine isn’t a great
puzzle game, but I spent a lot of time playingThe Google Stadia controller (right) next to the PlayStation DualShock 4
(top) and Xbox One (left) controllers.