Late last year, Americans – and those lucky enough with VPNs – were able to test something rather neat: Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, completely playable through a Chrome window. It was the first public outing of Google’s foray into cloud gaming.
We’ve been waiting for some time to see what the rest of that project looks like, and Google has kindly provided a few hints with a new trailer.
Google will hold a livestream at 0400 AEDT / 0300 AQST / 0330 ACST / 0600 NZDT / 0100 AWST on Wednesday, March 20. It’s expected that we’ll hear more about how Google’s cloud technology is slated to work, as well as what titles will be coming to the service.
A teaser video, released earlier this morning, gives us an indication of what to expect. There’s a shot of what looks like a tunnel leading out towards some kind of pitch, a car garage, a shot of the rear of a plane and what looks like the gates opening to a colosseum.
When Odyssey was trialled late last year and into early January, it wasn’t a buttery smooth experience. Jason reported some notable latency, and the frame rate was capped to 30 instead of 60. But it was more than playable, and playable through an ancient Macbook no less. So provided you’ve got a stable, solid connection, and given that Google has plenty of data centres locally, it means that Australians might actually have access to a reliable game streaming service. Nvidia’s GeForce Now is fairly limited locally, and PlayStation Now still isn’t available in Australia, even though the service’s reach throughout Europe was expanded week.
We’ll have the livestream up here for everyone to watch. Jason and Maddy from the US will also be attending Google’s GDC keynote, so stay tuned.
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