Ring all the bells and sound every alarm because there’s finally some Google Stadia news to share. According to a community blog post, State Share, a long-touted feature of Google Stadia, is finally coming when Hitman 3 launches later this month and will be available across the whole trilogy.
State Share is a feature exclusive to Google Stadia that is supposed to allow a user to share the specific elements of their game in the same way that you would capture and send a screenshot or video of it. Think of a game state as the things that define your experience with a game, like a difficulty, a specific level, a modifier or a loadout. So when you share the state of your game, you’re actually sharing a playable slice of your exact specifications with the ease of sending a Youtube link to someone.
According to the blog post, while Google is providing the “overall structure” of the feature, it’s on their partners and developers to actually specify and define how these states work. For example, Catherine Hsiao, a Stadia Product Manager working on State Share, opens up about how the feature looks specifically in Hitman 3. When sharing a state from that game, you can share not only your difficulty and your Agent 47’s loadout, but also your starting location and specific mission objectives, which can typically rotate and change. The person loading up the state would then take it from there and have their own experience, but work off of your preset conditions.
In their original explainer on State Share, Google claimed that they had some ideas of where they could take this feature that I’d be interested in seeing as it rolls out. These ideas included sharing a game state in a speedrunning video, which would then allow whoever saw the video access to the state and the ability race against the “ghost” of the player who’d run the level in the video.
Another idea seemed to be saving a randomly generated world and sharing that exact same world and seed with others to play through. So imagine you have a really good run in Hades, excitedly tell your friend about how lucky you got and then could share your exact run with them to try it for themselves.
According to their blog post today, State Share will be coming to more titles on Stadia in “2021 and beyond.” For now, the only games on Stadia that will support State Share are the Hitman trilogy. The feature will launch properly when Hitman 3 launches on Jan. 20.