With The Elder Scrolls Online: Greymoor coming to Stadia yesterday, it got me thinking: Are there any other MMOs I’d love to see come to a streaming platform, whether it be Google Stadia or Nvidia’s GeForce Now? With server infrastructure getting better each year, the idea of streaming video games to any device is slowly becoming more and more a reality. MMORPGs, with all the server back and forth required to play the title even on a traditional platform, could see themselves coming to phones or tablets in a more pronounced way soon thanks to these services.
As a result, I started to wonder how these experiences might fare on a product like GeForce Now or even streaming it using a service like Shadow. Especially traditional MMOS that heavily require mouse and keyboard to handle ideally, how would these games fare? What could these services do to limit latency issues while playing? How would they perform and would the developers need to restrict performance like framerate or lowered rendering resolution to make sure it works on these platforms?
Assuming the services had worked all this out – are there any MMOs you’d love to be able to pop out your phone and play on the train, or from a non-dedicated machine when you’re on vacation, just to name a few examples? For me, I think my main choice would be obvious – being able to enter Middle-earth wherever I am without an expensive laptop would be nice. Figuring out someway to play The Lord of the Rings Online on my phone – or even using a browser screen on a MacBook instead of needing to install it on a machine that might run it would be incredibly appealing. Being able to stop what I’m doing, wherever I am, and hop into the Shire for a pint at the Green Dragon would be fantastic. Of course, GeForce Now already lets you stream most of your Steam library, so this is already a reality for some, but I’m talking a bespoke experience tailor made to stream akin to what we see on Stadia currently, and not simply a virtual PC you’re logging into.
So – I ask the question: assuming all the issues that could crop up putting more MMOs – traditional or otherwise – on these streaming platforms are ironed out, what would be the game that you’d love to see make an appearance, and why? Do you even want MMOs streamable like this and if not, why?
