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It Took Way Too Long for a Game to Take Advantage of Stadia’s Killer Feature
And it’s disappointing
On July 1, Crayta, a game that allows people to collaborate on making other games, exclusively launched on Google Stadia. It brought with it the first beta of the platform’s State Share feature. First announced in March 2019, State Share promised to let players link out to an exact moment in gameplay for others to click on and interact with themselves; the moment when a fully decked-out character approaches a climactic boss fight after hours of questing, for example. It’s the kind of power that’s so far been reserved for save states in emulators and game modders.
Crayta’s implementation of the feature, however, doesn’t live up to this promise. And while the developers may be doing the best they can with the feature as it exists today, it highlights how far Google has to go to deliver on the lofty promises of Stadia.
The term “State Share” isn’t terribly descriptive, but players are intuitively familiar with the concept of game states, even if they don’t use the term. For example, in Skyrim, a player is able to arbitrarily save wherever they’d like (as opposed to at designated save points). Health, position, completed quests, whether certain NPCs are alive or dead, and countless other variables collectively make up a game’s “state,” which can be written to a save file. If a player chooses to quicksave, kill everyone in Whiterun, and then reload, the game has everything it needs to restore things to the way they were. It’s like a more complex version of taking a photo of a chess board to remember where the pieces are.
Skyrim players have long since figured out how to share their game save files to create a complicated version of what State Share attempts to accomplish. Entire communities exist to trade save files in various states from simple saves that skip opening cutscenes or tutorial levels, to challenges where players are already wanted criminals as soon as they start. What State Share does is make this process…
