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Day two of Stadia’s ‘Good Stuff’ reveal event just wrapped up and we received another five-minute video showing off what’s new with the cloud gaming platform. I’m not going to sugar coat this and say that I was super impressed. I think that instead of holding the best stuff for tomorrow, which it seems the Stadia team may be doing, they should have sprinkled it throughout yesterday and today as well. While the announcements we got were decent, I don’t feel they were anything to fall out of your seat over. Perhaps my expectations are just not in alignment with their intentions. If you missed day one of Stadia’s event, you should get caught up or you can watch day two here.
When I hear the ‘Good Stuff’, I think that this is the stuff they’ve been holding back and the features that will bring the service up to par with what they’ve promised. Features like Family Sharing and UPlay+ integration are still missing from the event, despite tons of evidence that they’re on their way. Tomorrow, I hope that these things get announced and I hope to be writing about how I should have held my criticisms, but we’ll see. With all of that being said, today’s event included the reveal of Ark: Survival Evolved coming to the Stadia Pro lineup next year, a quick glimpse at Outcasters, an Orcs Must Die 3 expansion named ‘Drastic Steps’, and a beta for HUMANKIND that you can play right this instant.
ARK: Survival Evolved
Ark: Survival Evolved is a survival game that allows you to kill or tame dinosaurs while going up against other players on a mysterious island and features a heavy focus on crafting and resource collection. The amount of stuff you can do in this game is just insane and it’s gained a lot of popularity over the years, despite how buggy it’s been known to be. You can breed and ride dinosaurs, create your own farm to make food for survival, build a house, summon gods, create your own tribe, develop your stats, explore, and more with over a hundred players per server. I’m interested in seeing if Stadia has plans to increase this player limit with their impressive cloud supercomputers.
Orcs Must Die 3 ‘Drastic Steps’ Expansion
The new ‘Drastic Steps’ expansion for Orcs Must Die 3 adds a new Endless Mode and five new scenarios to play. Internally being called ‘boss scenarios’, these new milestones feature massive open battlefields, as well as more constrained choke points in the level design to add variety. You can add traps to the entire battlefield with no restrictions too.
Think Helm’s Deep: “It’s very much like a Lord of the Rings-style fight where you’re defending the gate and the outside as long as you can. (There’s some players that are so good they never lose the gate, but these are the hardcore guys at our company that are just ridiculous.) You get that feeling of falling back and having to relinquish the gate and start putting your traps inside, and defending the rift from a different perspective, as the waves progress during a War Scenario.”
Lead designer Jerome Jones in an interview with PCGamesN
Orcs Must Die 3 will also soon be receiving the Stream Connect feature which is exclusive to Stadia and lets you see other player’s screens in real-time if they’re on your team. Honestly, this feature is so awesome and useful that It’s weird to go without it on my Playstation 4 after using it on Ghost Recon: Breakpoint for Stadia and I’m glad to see more developers on the platform considering the unique tools available to them.
HUMANKIND Beta
HUMANKIND is a 4x or tactical game similar to the Civilization series which lets you reshape the course of your society’s development over a 10,000 year period. There are 60 historical cultures from the Ancient to Modern age. Each culture brings its own gameplay style with tons of possible outcomes.
Below, I’ve included the fine print for Stadia’s new demo feature that’s driven by something called ‘OpenDev’, which is a community-driven approach to game development. When ‘Stadians’ play a demo of a game like HUMANKIND, PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle, or Fenyx: Immortals Rising, the developers have the opportunity to collect valuable feedback in order to improve the game before it officially launches to the public.
Demo games are provided at no cost to you and will be available to claim from [09:00:00 PT] on 21/10/20 to [09:00:00 PT] on 28/10/20. Once claimed, a demo game will be available to play in your Stadia Library until 28/10/20. Upon expiry of the availability period, the demo game will no longer be available to play or as part of your Stadia Library.
Stadia HUMANKIND splash page
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