Wolfenstein New Order and The New Colossus are great FPSFor the first time this whole gen. I feel like playing a shooter, after watching this! (sm1)
At 1080p and 60 fps, Doom Eternal worked pretty much flawlessly, and I played it using Google’s custom Stadia controller that comes bundled with its Founder’s Edition for $130 (with a Chromecast Ultra and three months of service) or sold separately for $69. A Stadia spokesperson later confirmed to The Verge that the server streaming Doom Eternal was a remote one in a Google data center, meaning it was not brought into LA specifically for the event.
For me, the experience was quite impressive. I could not detect any noticeable input lag, and there was no discernible on-screen effects indicating the visuals were being streamed from a cloud server to the Pixelbook, and then from the Pixelbook to the Samsung TV. Granted, I wasn’t playing an online game, so there’s no telling what types of latency issues you might run into there. But had you not told me I was playing a Doom Eternal streamed over the internet, I wouldn’t have been able to tell.
Now, there were a couple issues I encountered. At one point, my Stadia stream stopped receiving inputs from the Stadia controller, leaving my unfortunate Doom Eternal character squashed up against a wall while I got pounded on by angry demons. Instead of rebooting the stream, we just waited for my character to die, unplugged the controller, and re-synced it. I was good to go again in about two to three minutes.
At another point about 25 minutes into the demo, the stream did crash. There was no telling what the culprit was; Google says the platform is about six months out from launch, so it’s reasonable to expect some issues while it irons out these kinks. That said, we were up and running again in less a minute after simply reloading the Chrome browser window and resuming full-screen mode.