Trying to start The Elder Scrolls Online on PC is the best argument for Stadia I’ve seen
It’s no secret that I’m a Stadia fan. Don’t get me wrong, I still love my PlayStation, still play on my Switch almost every day, still dabble in PC gaming on occasion (but my chair sucks, so I tend to stop sessions due more to discomfort than because I’m not enjoying it). And we all know that Stadia got off to a rough start, with some fairly scathing reviews, followed by a long period of silence that left fans wondering what was next.
But after the first few weeks (months?) of turmoil while Stadia was getting off the ground, the platform has settled down nicely, and I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. Is seems that Google has righted the Stadia ship somewhat, and every new game announcement and functionality improvement just convinces me further that Stadia - and similar streaming services - are here to stay.
The announcement of two free months of Pro only helped stabilize the player base (btw - that offer will drop down to one free month in June, so snag your two months while you still have the chance!). After a few months of playing in barren wastelands, I’m actually finding the population in games to be decent these days. I dipped into Destiny 2 the other day and was surprised to see people swarming all over the place.
Because of that, I was pretty excited about yesterday’s announcement that The Elder Scrolls Online is coming to Stadia on June 16th. It seemed like a good opportunity to jump into the game with a bunch of new players. I’ve had a copy on PS4 for a while but have never had the time to commit to really getting off the ground with it. And after reading that the Stadia version would include cross-play and cross-progression with the PC version, I peeked into my ridiculously swollen Steam library, and sure enough, there was a copy hiding in there that I must have picked up from a Humble Bundle at some point.
Since the Free with Pro version of The Elder Scrolls Online is going to have the Morrowind DLC bundled in with it (awesome), I figured that I could get a start on the base game with my PC version, and then be ready to jump into the Morrowind stuff when the Stadia version releases. Solid plan, right? Wrong. I started yesterday afternoon, but I probably won’t be able to actually jump into The Elder Scrolls until tomorrow morning.
That’s because I had forgotten what a tremendous, raging pain in the ass it is to install a long-standing MMORPG on a PC.
The initial download for The Elder Scrolls Online is 82Gb, which, while far from the biggest game in my library, is significant. Both my wife and I – like much of the United States – are working from home, and between our Zoom meetings, Slack conferences, and the kids’ Netflix endlessly droning in the background, our poor overtaxed WIFI router can barely sustain us during working hours. There was no way that I could download 82Gb of data during the daytime without crippling our household.
So I set the initial download to run overnight. I woke up this morning, knowing that I would have an update to run, but hoping that it would be complete in an hour or two so I could play a little bit before starting work for the day. Nope.
First I installed the game, which I was thinking would automatically start the update. However, my computer just sat there, so I hopped into the task manager to make sure the install was done. Then I started The Elder Scrolls Online and was dismayed (but not surprised) at what I saw.
42 more gigabytes of data need to be downloaded. Heading into another workday, I knew that I would have to wait until bedtime tonight again to download the update. This, my friends, is a monumental inconvenience when I’m excited to start a game. PC fans can go on and on about how great the platform in (and in many ways it is great), but I think everyone can agree that regardless of platform, downloading and patching is pretty much the worst.
Then I thought about what this game will be like to start on Stadia. I’ll log into Stadia and accept the game. Then I’ll press the start button. There will probably be a screen or two fiddling around with account settings - linking this to that - and then I’ll be creating my character within about two minutes.
Suck on that, PC.
Look, I know that Stadia is not the end all/be all, and I know that a lot of people aren’t convinced that the platform will survive (it will). I know that Stadia won’t work for everyone, and that in some areas, the platform simply isn’t viable. And I’m not purposely baiting PC fans (as I said, I’m pretty platform agnostic). But good lord, loading this game on the PC is giving me the red ass. There is nothing fun about sitting for eight hours and waiting for a client to download. And knowing that in a month, I’ll just be able to click a button and play it?
I think I’ll wait for Stadia. See ya in a month, Elder Scrolls!
