Baldur’s Gate 3 looks to be a next-level RPG, and part of the reason for that is it leveraging unique features on game streaming platform Google Stadia. Baldur’s Gate 3 Crowd Choice functionality won’t be available to those playing BG3 natively on PC via Steam, so stick with this guide to see whether the Stadia-exclusive Baldur’s Gate 3 features might be enough to make you a convert.
Stadia-exclusive Baldur’s Gate 3 Crowd Choice feature explained
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is, by its very nature as a multiplayer tabletop game, quite a social experience. It follows then that developer Larian Studios is seeking to leverage Stadia in order to bring Baldur’s Gate III closer to that experience when played on Google’s streaming platform.
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As the “Crowd Choice” moniker indicates, should you, a friend, a popular streamer, or anyone in between, choose to livestream their Baldur’s Gate 3 Stadia gameplay with the feature enabled, viewing audience members will be able to participate. When activating certain triggers, a poll will appear in the stream chat — supported streaming platforms haven’t been announced, though, since it’s owned by Google, YouTube seems like a certainty — and allow viewers to either help or hinder the streamer.
Examples of what might trigger a poll are narrative choices and the outcome of dice rolls, which could either turn the odds in or against a streamer’s favor depending on the goodwill of their viewership. More impressively, poll results can be interpreted and used to allow BGIII to “affect what’s happening in the game.” This could alter things like loot drops and NPC dialogue behind the scenes.
The standard PC version will reportedly allow players to see decisions being made by their friends in cooperative multiplayer, presumably via a text log. Stadia Stream Connect could potentially make this far more exciting, however; it allows for a picture-in-picture view of co-op partners’ game feeds, which would facilitate real-time interjections as you’d find in tabletop D&D. Stream Connect isn’t a confirmed feature yet, but with Larian actively leveraging Google’s technology where it can, it shouldn’t be ruled out.
