At E3 2019 press conference, Bethesda announced a new piece of software called Orion. Despite all of the streaming terminology, Orion isn’t a streaming service itself, but it is software to help further improve existing streaming services.
As the company claims, Orion could be added to a wide variety of games across different game streaming services. Bethesda promises to give players a higher-quality experience accessible on slower internet speeds, and it’s opening a limited beta test later this year.
Orion is essentially a collection of software techniques that Bethesda is putting together in a unified software development kit.
Orion mitigates some of the major problems faced by cloud gaming. It could the minimum internet speed for platforms like Stadia, which currently suggests a 25Mbps connection. It could make your physical distance from a serverless important so that services could run on fewer data centers; that’s good news for companies that don’t have the massive resources of Google or Sony. And since we don’t know how well most of these services perform yet, anything that cuts latency and improves image quality could turn a mediocre experience into a good one.
Bethesda and id recently showed USA TODAY a demonstration of the technology streaming “Doom” on a 4K TV and smartphones, with the game on servers in Ohio and Frankfurt, Germany. Currently, there’s no game service partnering on Orion, but the software development kit can be used on the platform, and Bethesda expects to begin public trials later this year.
