Stormgate - sci-fi/fantasy RTS from ex-Blizzard devs - now on Early Access

[Venser]

The gameplay footage shown was a showmatch between ex Blizzard dev and SC2 pro "TLO" and the pro won. Wish they would show the entire match to get a better picture of how it plays.

 

[motherfucker]

99.9% of the gaming population is bad at sc2 :D

Nah, I mean real bad. Scroll through the YT comments, there are people complaining they'd get instakilled in SC2 - literally too bad to handle bronze league 1v1.

Also closed beta's in July, make sure to get your application in, lads.

 

[ArchAngel]

99.9% of the gaming population is bad at sc2 :D

Nah, I mean real bad. Scroll through the YT comments, there are people complaining they'd get instakilled in SC2 - literally too bad to handle bronze league 1v1.

Also closed beta's in July, make sure to get your application in, lads.

There are serious competitions for Dota 2 and LoL because they are F2P games for casuals. If they can do it, so can Stormgate, it just needs to be fun enough.

 

[-M-]

They seem to market to people who were bad at SC2 - nuff said. How are they hoping to make a competitive game out of this is beyond me. Wanna bet it's gonna be f2p?

https://playstormgate.com/

It is F2P. Also the 'first truly social RTS' according tho them.

It really just looks like a group of people trying to mesh Warcraft and Starcraft together and they have no idea how to do it.

 

[motherfucker]

It really just looks like a group of people trying to mesh Warcraft and Starcraft together and they have no idea how to do it.

I mean, the studio is mostly SC2 devs and a couple WC3 dudes, so it goes without saying they have no idea how to make an RTS.
Also, I did some digging and it turns out that some SC2 names left Blizz before the development(balance passes and such) completely stopped, so there's a big chance that the people at Frost Giant are the ones responsible for HotS/LotV era mess and not the ones that turned it around in the F2P era. This ain't another Obsidian situation when disgruntled devs left to make their own studio, this is people too shit even for the shitshow that SC2 was trying to bank on the only big thing they've been a part of.

If they can do it, so can Stormgate, it just needs to be fun enough.

I mean, WC3 is still big in China, so Stormgate's aesthetic makes me think they identified an untapped turd world market and are consciously going for it.

Anyway, why am I even arguing, everybody here seems to agree that this is going to be shit.

 

[Tavar]

Day9 is reaching levels of cringe which shouldn't be possible.

The guy was always unbearable, even in the earliest day9 daily videos it was 80% puke-inducing Reddit-tier "quirkiness", 20% analytic content about SC.

I mostly know him from SC2 where he sometimes casted games. He had the bad habit of making a big deal out of completely irrelevant things, for example, he gushed over how great a pro split his workers at the beginning of the game (which at most makes a difference of maybe 10 minerals) and he'd keep pretending that a game was open when it had long been decided. Somehow he even got worse. At least they could've hired his brother Tasteless.

He is just doing well what he is paid for.. it is not his fault he is being hired over and over every year and told to do this shit.

He was still better than "I am half dead" Asmon that was presenting shit the other day.

I've got no idea who Asmon is or how he presents things, but do you really think Day9 did a good job here? Maybe it's a cultural thing but this fake excitement over a couple of minutes of gameplay feel so fake to me that they diminish my excitement for the product rather than increasing it.

And regarding the art style: Warcraft has much stronger colors then Stormgate and is more stylized. Just compare the shown video material to this:

 

[Jaedar]

I've got no idea who Asmon is or how he presents things, but do you really think Day9 did a good job here? Maybe it's a cultural thing but this fake excitement over a couple of minutes of gameplay feel so fake to me that they diminish my excitement for the product rather than increasing it.

Yeah, it's cringe. Maybe it's meant to be some countercultural thing (we're not like those stuffy suits at the publisher presentations!) or just trying to appeal to zoomers or something? Or maybe they just feel that they need something loud to make it feel like a cohesive presentation, and since the games are all grab bag that leaves having a "big personality" presenter?

 

[Akachi]

I would love a good new RTS since I stopped playing SC2 around when LotV came out, and WC3 was mutilated in its last patches by nu-Blizzard's bizarre, terrible changes even before they took it out back, shot it, and raped its corpse with the remaster (which both together killed off the sizeable playerbase it still had left). So I really want to like a game like this, I want RTS to come back from being a dead genre, but it doesn't look very promising even if some of it sounds good on paper.

Why do the graphics look so awful like all games these days? It looks like a bunch of splattered paint. Even if I could overlook that it doesn't look nice, the problem is RTS is probably the most important genre when it comes to graphics as part of the gameplay experience functionally speaking. It has to be clear, and everything has to be distinct; easy to tell apart at a glance. Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 2/3 (especially Warcraft 3, just look at it above compared to this game) are unrivalled in my opinion when it comes to looking good and conveying information, and though I found Starcraft 2 less clear with what felt like too much focus on it looking nice for observers rather than players, it was still decent compared to most games. If this game looks like a mess in screenshots, it'd be even worse in gameplay. Besides the graphics, I really hate space fantasy and would prefer if they had just gone with scifi or fantasy, but oh well.

The gameplay video from a couple days ago doesn't look to my taste either: fast paced battles where everything moves and dies fast. It's real time strategy, why does nothing focus on the strategy part? I want slower paced battles where I can make more than just split second decisions, with full control over my army that I'm more focused on controlling than my base (even if I'm doing both), where my strategy and approach to the game matters and not just skill at mechanics. In a good Starcraft 2 match, you might have constant action and back and forth with your armies on both sides; in a bad match, you spend most time building up only for it to end in an instant. That can happen in a slower game too (except in SC2, such victories are often decisive; in WC3, most I had like that were people giving up when it wasn’t over, but looked grim and not like an easy win), yet I found my average WC3 match to have better quality and more highs than my average SC2 match. A focus on micro is a lot more fun than a focus on macro, IMO.

At least they seem to have the right idea of focusing on more than esports—focusing on esports is always a mistake anyway, make a good game and that's how it becomes an "esport"—still, it sounds like they might be going too far in the other direction instead. What happened to when games were competitive in a normal, non-esports way? Maybe it's generational, since people seem to play games now like either streamer/guide/meta-copying bots or total casuals who can't stand losing but hate competition, none of which sounds like a fun mindset to play an RTS with. Maybe that’s part of why they’re dead now.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

I've got no idea who Asmon is or how he presents things, but do you really think Day9 did a good job here? Maybe it's a cultural thing but this fake excitement over a couple of minutes of gameplay feel so fake to me that they diminish my excitement for the product rather than increasing it.

Yeah, it's cringe. Maybe it's meant to be some countercultural thing (we're not like those stuffy suits at the publisher presentations!) or just trying to appeal to zoomers or something? Or maybe they just feel that they need something loud to make it feel like a cohesive presentation, and since the games are all grab bag that leaves having a "big personality" presenter?

Americans always present themselves as honest and enthusiastic. Not because public believe in that, but that is in good tone. If you don't do that, they see you as barbarian.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I just want fun gameplay, decent modding support, and a story mode with writing that doesn’t melt my brain.

There’s still a chance the story might be serviceable. It doesn’t need to be amazing, it just needs to avoid stupid Blizz cliches like idiotic villains and the demons being misunderstood good guys.

 

[-M-]

At least they seem to have the right idea of focusing on more than esports—focusing on esports is always a mistake anyway

One of the problems is that they ARE pushing esports for this, hence why they had two former SC2 pros "play" a match for the first public look of the game. One of those guys is the head of coop design for this game but when you look at his credentials he only worked there for two years starting in 2018...when 95% of the coop was already in place, save for a few commanders.

There’s still a chance the story might be serviceable.

Eh, they describe the game as taking place in a post apocalyptic world and the first thing they show us is a green forest map. I wouldn't get your hopes up. These are the same people who thought the best first impression they could give the public would be a 1v1 of a single race. Also since the game is F2P the story is going to be drip-fed over months or until they shut it down.

 

[ArchAngel]

Day9 is reaching levels of cringe which shouldn't be possible.

The guy was always unbearable, even in the earliest day9 daily videos it was 80% puke-inducing Reddit-tier "quirkiness", 20% analytic content about SC.

I mostly know him from SC2 where he sometimes casted games. He had the bad habit of making a big deal out of completely irrelevant things, for example, he gushed over how great a pro split his workers at the beginning of the game (which at most makes a difference of maybe 10 minerals) and he'd keep pretending that a game was open when it had long been decided. Somehow he even got worse. At least they could've hired his brother Tasteless.

He is just doing well what he is paid for.. it is not his fault he is being hired over and over every year and told to do this shit.

He was still better than "I am half dead" Asmon that was presenting shit the other day.

I've got no idea who Asmon is or how he presents things, but do you really think Day9 did a good job here? Maybe it's a cultural thing but this fake excitement over a couple of minutes of gameplay feel so fake to me that they diminish my excitement for the product rather than increasing it.

Asmongold is one the more popular streamers that has also gone into business with two companies: one makes expensive custom computers and 2nd will be gaming producer for indie games that will do more and take less of a cut (that is how they are marketing).

He organized and presented games showcase few days before this PC gaming show at start of this whole event where only indie games were shown.

As for Day9, he was obviously acting like that for cringe points, someone told him modern gaming audience wants "funny" cringe in between trailers and he did that well. It was super cringe so he did his job well.
I have watched his regular streams on twitch and he is not like that on those. He is way more calm and likes to go into long rants of explaining things

 

[Jaedar]

The gameplay video from a couple days ago doesn't look to my taste either: fast paced battles where everything moves and dies fast.

I actually thought the gameplay was slower than I expected (certainly slower than sc2). Even the small infantry guys could take 2 artillery hits and still be standing. The only thing that was dumb fast was the dropship micro.

Eh, they describe the game as taking place in a post apocalyptic world and the first thing they show us is a green forest map.

This is pretty hilarious when you point it out.

At least they seem to have the right idea of focusing on more than esports—focusing on esports is always a mistake anyway, make a good game and that's how it becomes an "esport"—still, it sounds like they might be going too far in the other direction instead.

Yeah. If it's good, people will make tournaments around it on their own. But it's become a meme that good rts must have a good esport scene. So much wasted potential when 90% of the audience just wants a good single player campaign.

 

[Venser]

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Warcraft and Starcraft together and they have no idea how to do it.

'member Armies of Exigo? Good shit.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Venser]

Kickstarter is live and it already surpassed 3x the goal in the first couple of hours.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Kickstartr ? For real?
But its good that they surpassed it flying colours. Still not sure about this game though.

Seems like asethetics are really important for me, especially in RTS games. Can't stomach this kind of looks anymore. I blame WC3 and LoL...

 

[janior]

this game will lack the edge
dead in two weeks

 

[ADL]

Stormgate is fully funded to release. This Kickstarter is in part a response to fan requests for a way to purchase a physical Collector's Edition of Stormgate. We think we've put together a truly special collectible for our most dedicated supporters, but producing the Stormgate Collector's Edition will require a commitment from our players to cover our manufacturing costs. We have also received countless requests for beta access. Scaling online multiplayer testing for a massive audience can get very expensive--beyond what we can support without additional funding. This campaign will allow us to welcome many more players to playtest Stormgate as a reward for directly supporting the studio.

I thought Stormgate was Free-to-Play?
It will be! When StarCraft II transitioned from a paid box model to free-to-play, it doubled the total number of players. We believe supporting the maximum number of players is the best decision we can make for the Stormgate community as it results in better matchmaking, a more expansive esports scene, and a more vibrant community. It’s more challenging to make money when you’re giving the base game away for free, but we believe this approach makes for a better game for everyone as a result of a larger ecosystem, better matchmaking, a more vibrant competitive scene, and a more active community.
If you’re wondering what’s free and what’s for sale, read on:
- If you’re a casual or competitive 1v1 player only interested in queuing up for a match, Stormgate is completely free.
- If you’re more of a campaign player who wants to experience our ever-expanding story, the entire Year Zero campaign, our first set of campaign missions is included in the digital Founder’s Pack. Going forward, we plan to sell new story missions in ‘chapter packs’ several times a year.
- If you enjoy playing co-op against the AI, we’ll be providing some Heroes for free and selling others. You can receive all of our Year Zero Commanders in the Founder’s Pack. Those playable Commanders will also be yours to use in our future 3v3 mode.
- If you enjoy creating your own maps or mods, the editor we plan to release after our official launch will be free. Some custom games will be available for free (or with optional purchases), but others may be sold directly by their creators. (Details are still TBD.)
- We will offer optional cosmetic items for players who enjoy personalizing their armies and Commanders.
- We’re also planning to sell Base Buddies (non-combat pets) to help spread some extra love and affection to your armies.
- While we will sell a variety of Commanders for players to choose from, we will not directly sell player power. If you win a head-to-head match in Stormgate, it will have been determined by skill (or your ability to execute some really dirty cheese.)

 

[Morgoth]

Go Free, go Broke?

 

[ArchAngel]

Go Free, go Broke?

No, this system will work well. Unless stuff they sell for $ will suck and not worth that money. Starcraft 2 stuff was fun. Co-op Commanders give you lots of hours of fun for not a lot of money and each one plays fairly differently.

 

[Lacrymas]

SC2 also has 3 extensive campaigns though. And the Nova missions.

 

[ArchAngel]

SC2 also has 3 extensive campaigns though. And the Nova missions.

And you need to buy each separately. This is how Stormgate will work as well.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

SC2's campaigns had brain-melting writing anyway. If these guys worked on that, then I'm not spending money on their campaign DLC without knowing in advance whether the story is worth investing in. I can turn my brain off, I guess, but I'd rather not resort to that just to enjoy a game. I get the sinking feeling that the Infernals are gonna go the Zerg route of initially appearing to be villains before being revealed as misunderstood good guys and losing their villain credentials. I hated when the Zerg underwent villain decay and I would hate to see that repeated. So I'm gonna stay with my current investment in Immortal: Gates of Pyre because most of the factions revealed so far are unapologetically imperialistic or genocidal and we need more of that in RTS imo. It's not what I actually wanted, but beggars can't be choosers.