I was playing Tomb Raider on my Stadia and was actually recording it on my phone while playing. And after 45 mins or so decided to stop the camera and maybe play a few more minutes. Out of nowhere, I get a message that my connection wasn’t strong. Since I was hooked to the Ethernet and did not see where my internet was down I ignored and kept playing. I then got a message saying the connection was weak and the game just stopped. Just to check I went on my phone to check my connection as well as cast a couple of shows and movies and had no issue. So my next course of action was I headed to the Stadia Discord to see if anyone else was having issues with Tomb Raider, as this was the first time I encountered this issue and it happens to be when I decided to give Tomb Raider a try.
After chatting with a few people and whatnot I chalked it up to a one-off on the server end. But this does leave me with a few concerns now. Because this happened with frankly very little people putting a load on the servers, I wonder what might happen if there was really a demand. And I was not the only person experiencing issues. One player for some reason can only get 15fps gameplay out of Destiny 2, and no issues with any other game. Samurai Showdown at times will display animation lag and slowdown. These are issues that are real and being experienced by players. Not people who have an ax to grind, but people who want Stadia to succeed because they put in their hard-earned to become a founder, premium member, basically an early adopter.
Despite these issues, I still give the overall gameplay a positive grade. But if I am to be honest my overall confidence in Google continues to waiver. Broken promises after broken promises continue to melt the already thin ice as we started off on a rocky note missing majority of the features. And then the latest was how they went from weekly updates for the community to only updating when it is convenient for them. Their reasoning, which I understand, as they did not want to waste people’s time by announcing nothing. Thing is there are updates that need to happen, like the status of half the features that were promised to subscribers. They could easily state that they are at this point in testing with promised feature a, we found this issue with game b, etc. Instead, they are silent or not forthright when they do speak and that is disheartening.
I believe there is potential in this cloud gaming system and can really soar to great heights. There are people excited and willing to take this journey with Google despite the criticism. Google sadly do not do enough to nurture and provide enough for the community to truly rally around. Not so much that people need a lot of rah-rah, but that people want to ensure that actual progress is being made to fulfill the promises made in truly a timely manner. These dropping bits here and there thinking it is enough just further prove the critics right in why it was a bad idea to buy in on this “experiment” of Google’s. People signed up believing this Stadia have potential. Now it is up to Google to make sure those people did not hope in vain. Because if they don’t there are others waiting in the helm.
