So, on a previous thread I was poo-pooing the cloud gaming future that's being rapidly hyped. My reasons were both technical and proprietary; I said that I didn't think it would really work anytime soon for the median household and that it was bad anyway because it's taking away control from consumers.
Last week I became aware of Project Stream, and thought myself a good test case for the service, so signed up for the beta. Got the invite earlier today and just did some preliminary dinking around.
First, set-up was easy, Google did a quick network test through Chrome, then I had to do a one-page sign-up for Ubisoft, then I clicked play. The Chrome tab went fullscreen, I signed in to Ubi, and there the game was running, detecting my wireless Xbox 360 controller automatically.
I quickly skipped through the intro videos and gameplay section to get to the starting island. My first impression is that Odyssey looks like a first-gen PS4 game or a PS3-era PC port. It's very weirdly uneven, with some of the models looking good, and some stuff, like trees and rocks, looking terrible. It also seems to load in strangely, with a sub 720 resolution wall a hundred meters away. Overall I'd say it looks considerably worse than Origins did running natively on my mediocre laptop.
But it's playable, runs at a smooth framerate, and never hitches no matter how much I jerk the camera around. Most impressively, and what I thought would be the big problem, there's no noticeable lag. I'm probably not attuned to it like some AV folks, but to me it felt like playing Origins natively, or even a bit smoother, as Origins tended to hitch here and there depending on what was going on. Loading appears to be about the same, though, which is a bit of a let down.
To mess around more, I logged out of Project Stream on my laptop and dusted off my Chromebook in another part of the house closer to the wireless router. I clicked the new synced Chrome bookmark and had to do another network test. This time I failed, with only 7 mbps out of a minimum 15. I tried again a few times moving around a little bit and was able to clear the bar. The game started right back up without additional sign-ins and within a minute I was where I left off when playing on my laptop. This time, though, the visual quality was much worse, with the screen frequently doing weird pixel blur-outs, and a persistent notification that my connection was too choppy (though it never actually kicked me off). This is somewhat curious because as far as I know my Chromebook has a better wireless card than my laptop, and is otherwise more tailored to the Chrome environment Project Stream runs on.
Finally, the beta comes with $10 in free Ubi-bucks! I bought the XP booster, because this seems very similar to Origins, and I'm mostly interested in running through the story on this game to test out the service in more depth.