‘GRID’ will have 40-car multiplayer race exclusively on Google Stadia

Racing game GRID on Google Stadia will reportedly have an exclusive 40-car multiplayer race, which the developers claim “isn’t possible with other hardware.”

Earlier this year, in the second Stadia Connect event, Orcs Must Die 3 was unveiled as a timed exclusive for Google Stadia. One of the key reasons for it being temporarily exclusive is that Stadia’s high-end hardware allows the game to have waves of as many as 500 enemies attacking, without any of the usual clever tricks game developers employ to bypass hardware limits.

The latest game to offer an exclusive experience on Google Stadia, is the racing game GRID, from Codemasters. In an interview with WCCFTech, the development director for GRID, Mark Green, says that Stadia has allowed for the development of a 40-car multiplayer race, which would be impossible on other platforms.

Development on any new hardware is always equal parts exciting and interesting. Perhaps the area with the biggest difference was the streaming, but also the ability of Stadia to talk to other Stadia so quickly transforms some ideas around multiplayer – for example developing a whole new mode for GRID Stadia which has 40 cars on track at the same time, something that just isn’t possible with other hardware.

Beyond potential graphical challenges of managing and rendering 40 different cars simultaneously, which Stadia’s hardware handles with ease, there’s also the matter of maintaining and synchronizing up to 40 different network connections between the players. As Stadia hardware is all connected through Google’s own network infrastructure, Stadia’s multiplayer experience is not plagued with “last mile” networking issues.

Back at E3, developers from Bungie, the creators of Stadia’s apparent flagship title Destiny 2, shared similar excitement for how Google Stadia has a positive impact on the multiplayer experience.

[…] if you’re playing on Stadia—with Stadia players—you’re all playing on the same cloud together. […] So, like, the additional latency you’re getting from your controller round-trip or whatever is gonna be offset in a positive way playing PvP on Stadia.

Green also notes that even for a fast-paced game like GRID, where input lag is very noticeable, Google is “able to deliver on what they promised” with Stadia’s lack of input lag.

I mean racing games are particularly sensitive to controller lag and yet I can’t feel any when playing on Stadia, the experience is fantastic.

While GRID is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, it will not be one of the twelve titles available for Google Stadia on day one, but we should see it released there later this year.