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Stadia game suggestions?
We don’t have a console and I’m a full time Linux user so gaming hasn’t been the best of experiences for me.
Today a Chromecast Ultra and two controllers arrived on our doorstep that my wife apparently ordered and wow is it awesome.
Zero input lag, 1080p with the option to go 4K, and some solid options for games that are playable instantly.
So far we have The Division 2, Grid, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Destiny 2, Monopoly, and a couple other indie games. There are some big titles coming - I’m most excited for FIFA and Madden - but I’m looking to find out if you guys have any suggestions for games.
We are looking for some fun two player action.
Also, if anyone else on here has Stadia, I’ll add you!
I'm a huge fan of Stadia. I play The Division 2, Destiny 2, and just got Breakpoint. My gamertag is OctaviusGooch. Add me.
Also, be prepared for a bunch of negative comments. I posted about Stadia on here a couple of weeks ago and got nothing but hate in the comments.
Awesome! I'll add you (I'm IHateTheYankees).
Oh, well. I've had an amazing experience so far so nothing negative on my end.
Same. It's fun, easy, and high quality. I love being able to play the same games with a controller on my TV or phone, and with a KB/mouse on my desktop or laptop. Even a low powered Chromebook.
Darksiders Genesis is a two-player game, and currently on sale. I haven't gotten to play this all that much, I'm still on the first chapter, but I love the style. You can leave anytime and your progress will be saved, but adding the second player can be difficult as you have to find a summoning stone. I accidentally progressed onto a boss before I could add the second player. I recommend leaving the game at a summoning stone so you can easily jump back on with both players.
There's also Spitlings, and Serious Sam Collection which are included with Pro—neither are excellent in my opinion, but they're enjoyable, local multiplayer, and free*.
Get Packed! is really fun. Though you might have difficulty with only two players. There's a level where one of the objectives is to pack a car. One person holds a stop sign to stop one lane of traffic (there's two), while the other players try and move the car. I've managed to do it with 3 players (it's still very difficult), but there's no way 1 person could drag the car along. It does support local+online though, so if you don't mind playing with others, that should make it a bit easier.
And since you brought up some single-player games, I also have to recommend Final Fantasy XV which is currently on sale. I've not played a Final Fantasy game before, but I got 10 hours in the day I bought it and there's a lot more left for me to do. It does support multiplayer, but only online—so you'd need to buy two copies if you wanted to play together.
Of all of these, I highly recommend Get Packed! and Final Fantasy XV. I'm Jedi#4759 if you want to add me!
Totally offtopic (so please feel free to label it as such), but this is why I don't quite understand all the flack Stadia has been getting about being "dumb/useless/pointless" and predictions there will be no market for it, by members of online gaming communities. Sure, Stadia isn't for me or other hardcore PC gamers, since we already have a high-end gaming PCs... but someone immediately jumping to concluding that it's a bad idea just because they personally have no use for it themselves, seems a weird response to me.
And IMO there are probably far more people out there like yourself, DougM, that don't have high-end gaming PCs already that could see a use for Stadia, than there are people who don't need it. Heck, even with my high-end gaming PC, if the experience is tolerable enough in terms of latency, I might even pick it up for my iPad just so I can occasionally play some of my favorite PC exclusive games while I'm away from home. Or even once my gaming laptop reaches end of life in terms of its ability to play new games on reasonable quality settings, I can see Stadia being useful so I don't need to buy a totally new gaming laptop to continue to play new games on it.
I've seen similar takedowns. To me, they're in line with a lot of the conflict-driven conversations we see at large, and I don't know if they're just particularly bad in gaming circles because of something specific to us (i.e. strong platform allegiance) or if that's sampling bias on my end because I spend far more time in gaming-related circles than in others.
I've seen countless criticisms of Stadia, many of them from before it even launched. These types of posts (about everything, not just Stadia) are common enough that I have a bit of mental shorthand for them: premature gravedancing. People will dig a grave for something well before it is even out or very early in its lifecycle and then dance on its seemingly certain demise, often pointing to the grave they just dug as proof. Furthermore, these positions are nigh-impossible to counter. "Let's wait and see" is a boring, tepid position that can't compete with immediate doom and gloom, and support often falls into the "happiness writes white" category of either not existing at all or carrying no import in the wider conversation. Furthermore, the product often can't even speak for itself in these situations because it either doesn't exist yet or is in its very beginning stages. More than any of this, however, is the idea that the person digging the grave is doing so with absolute confidence and even joy in the process. Someone that self-assured, especially when they're operating on such minimal information, perspective, and experience, is unlikely consider any other alternative in the first place. Someone who's enjoying the hatred and loving their gravedancing is unlikely to stop it.
If we need another example past Stadia, just look at The Last of Us Part 2. The game won't be released for yet another month, but already we have people waiting to bury it and reveling in its seeming downfall. The game could be good. It could be bad. We literally do not know because none of us have played it, but if you were to read about it online, opinions of the game have already seemingly calcified, many in the extremely negative. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens all the time. Sometimes the naysayers are right, but I've seen plenty of widespread pessimistic shot calls be proven wrong over the years.
Even over time this perspective often continues, at times seemingly only as a justification for the initial gravedigging in the first place. Gamers especially seem to take Miyamoto-style "a bad game is bad forever" thinking strongly to heart. Once it's determined that something is bad, as Stadia was before it even launched, many people will now keep it forever be bad in their minds, with no potential for change or growth. Plus, there's sport in maintaining this position -- the ongoing dance. No matter what they're focused on, gravedancers often welcome any information that reinforces their dislike, circulating any missteps, hiccups, or criticism as a "told you so". When we conduct ourselves as being strongly against something, it can carry with it a convincing compulsion that we need to hold that line.
Many of these criticisms take into account regional and economic differences. Some places have slow, intermittent and unreliable internet and are also less likely to be super close to a server. I live in a poor region of Brazil that is distant from major economic and political centers, and my criticism is intensified by the reality in which I and many others live.
You should also know that official support for such products in Brazil is very poor and prices are simply converted to our cheap currency, not adapted for our income. We buy ChromeCasts from local importers, not Google. So what is a great deal in the US is a luxury for us. Similar arguments can probably be made about other developing countries.
I also have major concerns regarding ownership and game preservation. I think this arrangement might harm future game history.
I definitely hear you on that, and I don't want anyone to think Stadia is above criticism. I have my own qualms with it, and I probably won't ever use it.
It's more that Stadia seems to garner a widespread type of criticism that isn't constructive or even seemingly genuine but instead is filled to the brim with both spite and delight, in very one-dimensional ways.
I don't hate Stadia for delay/image quality/pricing. All of this might get figured out. I just hate the general idea of a gaming trend leading to an ultimate-DRM-style always online experience with streaming-exclusive games. It's my personal horror scenario for the future of gaming. So every bad news about Stadia fills me with incredible amounts of schadenfreude. I want them to fail because I want game ownership to succeed as the primary way of playing games. It's a zero sum game, long term, because there's no way publishers won't jump on it 100% the moment it makes money.
Well if that's the case, I have some bad news for you, because that war was lost ages ago. On the vast majority of digital distribution platforms you don't actually "own" the games there either; You have merely registered to become a "subscriber" of their service, which then allows you to buy a license to access specific games, but any/all of which can be permanently revoked by them at any time, with no refund required, under any circumstances they describe as giving them that right in their EULAs.
@mrbig too, since they mentioned a similar concern regarding Stadia and game ownership.
I’m well aware of that. I can disagree with things that seem inevitable, and criticism does not entail a desire for the failure of its target. That’s certainly not my case here.
It's not the same as long as actual game code runs on people's computers. I'm specifically talking about publishers literally only sending a video stream.
Nostalgia and general technophilia pull me towards building a gaming rig, but I honestly have a hard time justifying it financially with services like Stadia or GeForceNow on the market. The pricing on it is really hard to top. Even a low end gaming PC will run you $600-$800. That would be anywhere from 5 to 7 YEARS before you get to a break even point on Stadia's $10/month pricing. (Assuming you're already getting gigabit internet).
Latency is an issue and I suspect it will never really be viable for people who are competitive tier RTS or fighting game players. But that's such a small segment of the market. 80% of Starcraft players, for instance, are below Diamond league. At that tier, the minor latency of cloud gaming isn't what's separating winners from losers (regardless of what they tell themselves).
Since I'm a Mac guy, getting a gaming PC on the side would be a more significant sacrifice for me since I would hate using it as my regular work computer. Services like Stadia or GeForce Now would kind of liberate me from needing to care about GPU performance and stuff in a computer. I could just get a Mac Mini or something and be on my way. The only thing stopping me is that I almost exclusively use the computer to play games that are impossible or annoying to play on consoles. These are basically Infinity Engine style games like Divinity: OS2 or Pillars of Eternity, or RTS games like Total War or Starcraft. I feel like I just don't PC game enough to justify a recurring monthly fee. Almost all my gaming happens on the PS4 or Switch. But at the same time, that means it makes even less sense for me to buy a gaming PC. The services also don't seem to target those games very much and are focused on the popular AAA games that play just as well on console instead.
It would be nice, though, if I could own title to the games licenses I buy so they were portable across platforms, including on my own machine if I wish it. I guess what I really want is just a very highly specced virtual machine to which I could sync my accounts on Steam, Epic, GoG, Origin, etc. That way I could play on my laptop with reduced settings if my internet sucks (like at a hotel), or I could step it up if the internet is good. That and I'm kind of waiting a bit for these companies to mature enough to where I trust they'll be around for a while. I suspect, over time, their prices might creep up to something higher too once they get a critical mass of subscribers. Probably not enough to change the math on PC vs. service though.
Absolutely. I am by no means a hardcore gamer and just having the ability to turn it on for an hour or two and play The Division 2 or Assassin’s Creed is perfect for me.
The better half has always loved Kingdom Hearts and someone recommended Final Fantasy to her and she’s having a blast playing it on Stadia.
I look forward to seeing where it goes.
My experience with Stadia hasn't quite been that way.
I took Google up on the 3 month Stadia Pro code they gave me. While I was impressed with the input latency (or lack thereof), the video quality was absolutely blurry, artifact-ridden and atrocious. It was like watching a YouTube video in 360p. I tried absolutely everything to fix this from using Chrome Canary, port forwarding, tinkering with settings on my browser, running in incognito, disabling extensions, switching my router to 5GHz even though I use a wired ethernet connection, different devices, forcing different codecs/resolutions through the Stadia+ extension, etc. Nothing has remotely made Stadia playable.
About a week ago, I tested a theory that Serious Sam BFE and Destiny 2 were only playing badly because they were free with Stadia Pro and were putting a huge strain on Google's network. So I bought Doom Eternal.
Doom Eternal was even worse. I had lots of missed frames, the picture quality frequently dropped to heavily pixellated levels and at one point the game even froze due to connection problems. If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would have just bought it on Steam and played it on my gaming laptop instead.
Apparently Stadia works phenomenally on Chromecast Ultras, but not on Google Chrome.
Interesting. I was using just using it on Chrome while in bed and it was perfect in every way.
I had a couple minutes of where it was in terrible quality but then someone on their Reddit said to install the app and check my data settings and they were right - it was set to “limited data usage”. As soon as I placed it back on “balanced” which is 1080p max, It was flawless.
Maybe worth a shot.
From browsing their forums and Reddit it appears a vast number of users are on Chrome so I’m sure there is a solution somewhere to your issue.