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

[RaggleFraggle]

Well, there’s also Zerospace and Immortal: Gates of Pyre.

 

[ghardy]

I spent a (rather enjoyable) twenty minutes reading the reviews on Steam for Stormgate.

• It looks as though the game merits all the opprobrium being heaped upon it
• The developers seem slow on the uptake

Between the art style, the monetization schemes and the campaign, it's being panned left and right.
It is estimated that the game is roughly two years away from a respectable finish.

 

[motherfucker]

Damn what riveting micro.

 

[Venser]

 

[Multidirectional]

Played a bunch of Zerg in this to start with, as I had during previous free access week. Had fun overall but started getting seriously triggered by Terran once I reached about 1.6k MMR. My army units kept derping, blocking each other while trying to chase their bio armies hopelessly. They just stutter-step backwards until my army disappears and it doesn't look like I can do shit. So switched to Terran. At first to figure out how to beat them with Zerg but ended up enjoying them quite a bit more so I'm sticking to that race for now. I mean, Terran in this game has both zerglings and chargelots, hard to beat that. Also they just seem to have much better unit choices in general and their army movement feels significantly smoother. This must be a race they made first as it's obviously the more developed one. Tried a few games of Protoss too but they seemed confusing as fuck and I wasn't feeling it, so I put it off until later.

This game, while also having lots of shit to do at any given moment, feels significantly less intense than SC II. Slower start and much lower lethality means significantly more time to react to things. I haven't had a single moment of "oops game lost because I looked away for couple seconds" in over 100 matches that I played so far. So this game could definitely appeal to people who like general idea of SCII but are intimidated by volatility of it. Provided devs end up polishing it to appropriate level and don't make too retarded decisions with balance patches. They need to fix performance too, game can drop below 60 FPS for me in 1v1 late game stage with massive armies. Scrolling replays also gives pretty bad FPS drops. I hear they are planning to include 3v3 soon and I find it hard to believe it will be playable for most people. Unless they bring some miracles of optimization with it somehow.

And oh yeah, league system in this seems to be baby mode, as I've never lost ranking points once. Actually there were some instances where I gained points even after I lost the game. Even got promoted like that once. It seems anybody can reach "high leagues" here as long as they play long enough. So MMR is pretty much the only thing that actually matters.

 

[thesheeep]

From the latest KS update:

Early Access, like our previous development phases, is about improving the game with each release as we move towards achieving our vision for 1.0. That said, we’re well aware that many players had higher expectations in terms of art and audio for our day one Early Access release, so we’re going to dedicate significant efforts to improving key areas that players have identified need additional work. We’re going to be updating the body proportions for the unit models in our in-game cutscenes and reworking Amara’s character design. We’re also going to be making changes to our map visuals that we’re excited to roll out for you all to see.

I guess the massive negative feedback in the form of "wtf is this shit" reviews finally made an impact.
Idiotic that they didn't foresee this.

I wonder if those changes will actually have an impact - but the main character not looking like a frog person caricature anymore would be an improvement either way...

 

[ghardy]

I spent (a rather enjoyable) twenty minutes reading some of the reviews of this train wreck on Steam. The developers really missed the boat.

Well, at least it's not Dustborn, good God!