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Stadia Multiplayer Will Be “Way Better Than What You Could Get Out of a Console” – Google

CyberPanda

CyberPanda

Banned
With Stadia, it’s the world’s largest LAN party,” says Jack Buser, Director of Games at Google Stadia.


There’s a fair bit of trepidation around Stadia and what Google is planning to do with it, thanks to questions of whether or not they have the sort of infrastructure in place they will need to successfully run it. But there’s no question that if they do manage to get it off the ground, they’ll have something special on their hands. Accessibility is, of course, going to be a huge boon for the service, but cloud streaming can also have a major and tangible impact on actual game design and the way we play games.

One area where such an effect can be felt is multiplayer gameplay, and speaking in an interview with Kinda Funny Games (which you can view below), Jack Buser, Director of Games at Google Stadia talked about how Google is planning on achieving that. Buser posited the example of battle royale titles, saying that the reason they took so long to come about was the fact that a game had to be coordinating multiple dozens of players and their devices in a single match at the same time.

“Another example we give is, if you take a Battle Royale game, you got like a hundred people playing,” said Buser (via Wccftech). “And basically your PC or your console is busy trying to coordinate with my PC and my console. And there’s 98 other PCs and consoles, and they’re trying to network them all together to make it look like there’s a hundred people running around the same battlefield, right? It’s a very tough engineering problem, which is why Battle Royale games are relatively new, it took a while for us to figure out. How do you synchronize a hundred different consoles and people’s living rooms with varying degrees of Internet connectivity all over the world? It’s tough.”

With Stadia, which will see all players running on centralized processing data centres, which can offer “ultra high bandwidth and super, super stable connections between every person playing” multiplayer games can, as per Buser, be “way better than what you could get out of a console”. According to Buser, Stadia can enable multiplayer games where it’s not just a hundred players in a single game, but thousands.

“But with Stadia, it’s the world’s largest LAN party,” Buser continued. “Ultra high bandwidth and super, super stable connections between every person playing. ‘Is multiplayer going to be good on Stadia?’ Oh yeah, way better than what you could get out of a console. Because all of these cloud instances are all talking to each other with these very, very robust, high bandwidth pipes. You can imagine multiplayer worlds with like, forget hundreds, thousands of people all running around a play field together all at the same time, all being rendered up on the screen.”

Considering the fact that multiplayer gaming on Stadia requires no additional payments, if Google can make good on their lofty promises, they really could have something special on their hands.

Stadia is going live in various countries in November, so we’ll find out soon enough how successfully it manages to do what it wants to. A few months after its launch, Google will also be offering free trials to those who want to test the waters before diving in. Meanwhile, Google also recently announced a Premier Edition for Stadia- check it out through here.
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gamingbolt.com

Stadia Multiplayer Will Be “Way Better Than What You Could Get Out of a Console” – Google

gamingbolt.com gamingbolt.com

Google is funny eh?
 
Bootyful

Bootyful

Banned
giphy.gif
 
Quezacolt

Quezacolt

Member
CurryPanda said:
“Another example we give is, if you take a Battle Royale game, you got like a hundred people playing,” said Buser (via Wccftech). “And basically your PC or your console is busy trying to coordinate with my PC and my console. And there’s 98 other PCs and consoles, and they’re trying to network them all together to make it look like there’s a hundred people running around the same battlefield, right? It’s a very tough engineering problem, which is why Battle Royale games are relatively new, it took a while for us to figure out. How do you synchronize a hundred different consoles and people’s living rooms with varying degrees of Internet connectivity all over the world? It’s tough.”
Click to expand...

Imagine when google finds out that mmo's were a thing for many years and that they already do this in the open world
 
jshackles

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
It definitely flips the traditional client/server model that we're all used to on it's head.

As long as you have a solid connection to Google, you should be good to go.
 
jakinov

jakinov

Member
What he's saying from a technical point of view isn't necessarily wrong. It's more efficient and would be in theory faster to coordinate all the game instances through them then every player doing so through the Internet. In theory, assuming that it works, I think you will probably see less rubber banding and client side "issues". If the service is failing (from customer POV) I would assume you'd see nothing but if it was failing you probably wouldn't be in a great position for low latency online play anyways.
 
L

LazyParrot

Member
Probably not a coincidence that they explicitly mention consoles and not PC. Much harder to notice additional input lag when you're using a controller instead of a mouse.
 
Naru

Naru

Member
nkarafo said:
I remember playing WoW back in 2005 with thousands of other players in the server.

Was that all just a dream? What is real anymore, i can't tell.
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Bad example. Even years later open world PvP was pretty much impossible due to extreme lag and the servers crashed if there were more than a few raids in a single zone trying to kill each other.
 
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L

LazyParrot

Member
nkarafo said:
I remember playing WoW back in 2005 with thousands of other players in the server.

Was that all just a dream? What is real anymore, i can't tell.
Click to expand...

You can't really compare MMOs to BRs and other shooters, though. Latency isn't nearly as important in those games. You could play Everquest or WoW with pings of 200+ and be reasonably competitive in both PvE and PvP. In PUBG or CSGO a ping that high would be a death sentence.
 
nkarafo

nkarafo

Member
Naru said:
Bad example. Even years later open world PvP was pretty much impossible due to extreme lag and the servers crashed if there were more than a few raids in a single zone trying to kill each other.
Click to expand...
I don't know, i stopped playing after a few years and only used private servers ever since. I don't recall having major problems even in those unstable, buggy private servers. I mean, there were the occasional lag spikes, crashes, etc, but i could play for 6+ hours and never deal with such issues.

LazyParrot said:
You can't really compare MMOs to BRs and other shooters, though. Latency isn't nearly as important in those games. You could play Everquest or WoW with pings of 200+ and be reasonably competitive in both PvE and PvP. In PUBG or CSGO a ping that high would be a death sentence.
Click to expand...
Fair enough.
 
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Lort

Lort

Banned
If you have enough bandwith to recieve 4k 60 fps video .. you have enough bandwith to recieve location data for all players around you .. even “thousands”.
 
TheWanderingOgre

TheWanderingOgre

Member
As if people werent suspicious enough about Stadia.

Google, you are drowning in money and phds but take this free advice from a quasi-illiterate poor sap: People are dumb but still wise enough to know that such bolds claims are spit when you have little to actually show.
 
Tesseract

Tesseract

Banned
possibly, we'll have to see if the infrastructure can get there

he's absolutely right about the utility of mass performance

it would be wonderful if something like apex legends was a never ending emergent battle that didn't hop and skip with heinous client predictions

Lort said:
If you have enough bandwith to recieve 4k 60 fps video .. you have enough bandwith to recieve location data for all players around you .. even “thousands”.
Click to expand...

wrong
 
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M

MadAnon

Member
Lort said:
If you have enough bandwith to recieve 4k 60 fps video .. you have enough bandwith to recieve location data for all players around you .. even “thousands”.
Click to expand...

If so, then WoW wouldn't freak out when a 100+ player pvp starts in one place.
 
jshackles

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
Lort said:
If you have enough bandwith to recieve 4k 60 fps video .. you have enough bandwith to recieve location data for all players around you .. even “thousands”.
Click to expand...
This is a true statement.

But - the places where Stadia could potentially get interesting is if developers start planning on and building games around their unique infrastructure. This reminds me a lot of the debates that took place early on in my career when old fogies sat around and argued "Why would anyone want to replace a mainframe application with some sort of client / server application? Think of all the unnecessary bits that will be traveling across the wire!" except now in reverse. And at the time, their concerns were 100% valid - bandwidth was limited so it made more sense for users to connect to one centralized server for direct collaboration, rather than having state data transmitted over the wire for every user in the system. This was especially true for applications that needed 100+ workers acting simultaneously and needing instant updates about data that other users were entering.

So of course, if a multiplat console game is designed for traditional console multiplayer is running on Stadia people won't see much benefit especially if (like Lort Lort points out here) you already have enough bandwidth to stream a 4K/60fps video stream. Personally, I'm excited to see what developers come up with when every game's multiplayer essentially becomes what MMOs have been for the past few decades.
 
Shifty

Shifty

Member
Lmao at the train of laugh gifs. This is the first bulletpoint for Stadia that can actually be argued as a worthy innovation and y'all do 'em dirty like that :messenger_tears_of_joy:

All multiplayer being 'local' (to the data center) has the potential to be interesting and allow devs to break out of the limitations imposed by current netcode - at the cost of being streamed, obviously - but there are some technical caveats on top of that. In order for it to pull off 'thousands of players on the same playfield' with LAN-quality networking, all of those players are going to need to be connected to the same data center.

That's dandy for popular stuff that's guaranteed a shot at a thriving playerbase, but it's going to exacerbate the 'dead multiplayer' problem a lot for titles with shorter lifespans. No players on your local data center? Well, either switch to another one and eat the loss of stream quality, revert to the traditional netcode model with data centers talking to other data centers, or get fucked and go play something else.

Lort said:
If you have enough bandwith to recieve 4k 60 fps video .. you have enough bandwith to recieve location data for all players around you .. even “thousands”.
Click to expand...
Tru Fax. Game state data is tiny in comparison to even the most aggressively compressed video feed.

You do have to start dealing with lag compensation and various other netcode stuff at that point though.
 
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