Bethesda has announced Orion, a technology that aims to enhance the cloud gaming experience. To do this, they have developed an SDK that does not seek to compete with anyone, but rather the opposite, to serve as a complement to be able to bring the game via streaming to a greater number of users and with higher quality.
Orion and its commitment to cloud gaming
Orion is not a new gaming platform via streaming, it is a solution that seeks to complement any platform that is committed to the future of video games. In this way, its purpose is none other than to help overcome two of the great challenges faced by many companies that bet on cloud gaming: latency and necessary bandwidth.
Through an SDK that, according to them, will be very easy to integrate into any game engine, Orion will allow a greater number of players to enjoy the game via streaming, reduce costs and offer better quality. Three important promises not only for these platforms, but also for any publishers, streaming providers and developers who want to take advantage.
How will Orion work? Well, the idea is to add a series of changes, such as executing part of the task that processes the data on the local machine or system. In this way the load would be reduced by 40%. Another of the improvements would come from the compression algorithm of each frame. Orion would be able to reduce it by 30%, and that would also decrease the workload on the server by 20%.
In short, Bethesda's proposal on paper is interesting and beneficial to the industry. If you keep what you promise, playing Doom at 60 fps, with 4K resolution and no latency (even if we live far from data centers), we would be talking about a significant improvement. And it is that it does not seem easy to reduce the minimum requirements that, for example, Google requests with Stadia and are located in the use of connections with a bandwidth of at least 25 Mbps. This, if you have a fiber connection is not usually a problem, but when it is not like that, things change. Although the worst is the issue of latency, where it could be an obstacle when playing action games even for users with a wide bandwidth.
When can the Orion advantages be tested?
To demonstrate the advantages of Orion technology, Bethesda will release a version of Doom (2016) for iOS which can be accessed via streaming. Available this year, this version will allow you to play solo and arcade mode, no multiplayer or SnapMap for now. Regarding requirements, the only one will be to have a device with iOS 11 or higher.
If you are interested in testing what it will offer, how it will perform and whether or not it will really meet expectations, you can do so by registering at this link. It will be Bethesda who will choose the participants of that first public test at its discretion among the members of SlayersClub.
We will see how it progresses and what will be the next platform they choose to test, if PC, Android or both. For now, the game via streaming does nothing but become very interesting as a leisure option.