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

[Venser]

Not enough budget for the 3D unit portraits

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Not enough budget for the 3D unit portraits

They’ll probably add it in an expansion after they get sufficient profit.

In any case, 3D unit portraits are a cosmetic luxury that don’t serve any purpose.

 

[HeyCheckOutHowHardICanPee]

The section where they ask about LAN was all I needed to know that it's not going to be a good game.

 

[Kane]

I don't really like playing competitive sc

There is no such thing as non-competitive RTS. An RTS is either competitive or it is not an RTS. RTS are inherently competitive games just like FPS and devs have to go out of their way (and they regularly do, like e.g. not even bothering with multiplayer matchmaking or sub-60 frames per second in consolized FPS games) to turn them into a boring carebear cuckfest that shouldn't have been made.

To be frank, if you don't like the competitive aspect of RTS, stay the fuck away, whiny singleplayer carebears is what is killing, or rather already has killed this genre.

I am moved close to tears every time I visit the Petroglyph Studios website and look at their portfolio, the time they have to waste on meaningless bullshit like towerdefense maps or remasters of their old stuff, humiliating them while preventing them from doing the good stuff I know they're capable off. Infuriating, all thanks to stupid lazy carebears.

It looks like this developer "gets it", but considering so does Relic and seeing the abomination they delivered with DoW3, that is no guarantee for anything.

I believe it when I see it. Until then this developer is a bunch of autisitic nerdy cucklords trying to do something they don't fundamentally understand. Prove me wrong.

 

[Jaedar]

To be frank, if you don't like the competitive aspect of RTS, stay the fuck away, whiny singleplayer carebears is what is killing, or rather already has killed this genre.

Completely the opposite. I saw some poll a while back which stated plainly that something like 70% of the audience never touch the online mp. In terms of commercial viability, it's the casual singleplayers who are carrying the mp tryhards, not the other way around.

There is no such thing as non-competitive RTS. An RTS is either competitive or it is not an RTS. RTS are inherently competitive games just like FPS and devs have to go out of their way (and they regularly do, like e.g. not even bothering with multiplayer matchmaking or sub-60 frames per second in consolized FPS games) to turn them into a boring carebear cuckfest that shouldn't have been made.

Which is why games like half life, unreal, doom, etc are universally recognized as mistakes that should never have been made?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Completely the opposite. I saw some poll a while back which stated plainly that something like 70% of the audience never touch the online mp. In terms of commercial viability, it's the casual singleplayers who are carrying the mp tryhards, not the other way around.

I think it was 80%? In any case, it’s a demographic/market that RTS hasn’t really been very good at consistently catering towards. Most RTS don’t produce additional missions after initial release (games like C&CR and AoE which have a hundred or so missions are extreme outliers), and when innovations like co-op appeared most RTS devs didn’t incorporate it. SC2 is more or less the most successful in this regard with its co-op and mutations and stuff, but even then they ultimately gave up on further effort into it (apparently they were surprised by its success in the first place).

 

[Multidirectional]

Yeah I was surprised to hear SC2 co-op is a success too, I was so bored every time I tried to play it. But I guess I'm just one of those competitive fags. Not that I'm that competitive, I prefer just experimenting with shit on SC2 ladder and not worrying about rank. But playing RTS against computer was never that fun to me and that's probably why I couldn't get into them until I finally started playing against humans when already in my 30s. Before that I would start playing one of these games with idea to play campaign and then some skirmish because I thought I needed to warm up before I could try multiplayer. And then usually would end up dropping them before even finishing campaign.

Stormgate devs do say a lot of things I like and I would want to get hyped for this but reality is there's still zero gameplay to be seen. Only some crappy looking screenshot. Still ways to go to make me actually excited.

 

[ArchAngel]

Yeah I was surprised to hear SC2 co-op is a success too, I was so bored every time I tried to play it. But I guess I'm just one of those competitive fags. Not that I'm that competitive, I prefer just experimenting with shit on SC2 ladder and not worrying about rank. But playing RTS against computer was never that fun to me and that's probably why I couldn't get into them until I finally started playing against humans when already in my 30s. Before that I would start playing one of these games with idea to play campaign and then some skirmish because I thought I needed to warm up before I could try multiplayer. And then usually would end up dropping them before even finishing campaign.

Stormgate devs do say a lot of things I like and I would want to get hyped for this but reality is there's still zero gameplay to be seen. Only some crappy looking screenshot. Still ways to go to make me actually excited.

I still play sc2, I play Coop Comanders or skirmish vs Elite AI. I prefer it over playing vs players because you basically train your APM and skills without a need to worry about 50 different cheese builds players do and none of them are fun to play against and you don't learn anything. You just wade through those stupid games to then get a rare game vs human that does a normal build. More fun to just play vs AI as it is challenging enough that you lose if you are not good at macro or have a wrong unit composition.

 

[Multidirectional]

So you just want games where you can grind same shit over and over in peace. Yeah that's not what SCII ladder is. I love the unpredictability myself. 5 years in I still get surprised by shit some players pull to fuck with me sometimes. You only "learn nothing" if you get too butthurt to check the replay. You can learn plenty from that.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I want to see RTS with interesting missions. Good gameplay, writing that focuses on cultures, politics, economics, and military fiction. Is that unreasonable?

 

[thesheeep]

I want to see RTS with interesting missions. Good gameplay, writing that focuses on cultures, politics, economics, and military fiction. Is that unreasonable?

It appears so.

For some reason, most RTS try to go for the online audience that just isn't there outside of SC or AoE. And to compete with those two, you'd have to throw resources at the problem without end. For a very unlikely chance at succeeding.

This project, too, will most likely fail.

Almost every genre has this healthy split of SP entries and MP entries. Only RTS has almost only MP, with a few indie entries doing SP, but to be honest none of them have really produced a very good to great game. I'd recommend them, but none of them have much lasting power is what I'm saying.

Why nobody develops an RTS in the style of DoW1 or Warlords Battlecry 3, where you have huge amounts of single player replayability is entirely beyond me.
As has been shown many times, the single player audience for RTS is just bigger than the MP one. Much bigger.
And if there was a great RTS that would get good supply of new single player content - which is a normal thing in most other genres - it would do extremely well. No AAA production quality necessary.

Even the Spellforce 3 devs tried to go for the MP crowd (and obviously failed). When they instead could have poured that effort into a dynamic conquest-style campaign with some nice randomized elements to it.

The only reason I sometimes play (base-building) RTS in multiplayer is because that's pretty much the only way to play any of the new ones - their campaigns are all either shit or short or have zero replayabiltiy or any combination of those. But then I play a few times, notice that I suck against humans (and have no intention to spend the time necessary to git gud), lose interest and stop after a few days.
And playing skirmish against AI completely lacks that connective material that I desire ("leveling up" your faction in a campaign, conquering, planning on larger-than-battle scale, hell even LARPing I'll gladly take, etc.).

 

[ArchAngel]

I want to see RTS with interesting missions. Good gameplay, writing that focuses on cultures, politics, economics, and military fiction. Is that unreasonable?

It appears so.

For some reason, most RTS try to go for the online audience that just isn't there outside of SC or AoE. And to compete with those two, you'd have to throw resources at the problem without end. For a very unlikely chance at succeeding.

This project, too, will most likely fail.

Almost every genre has this healthy split of SP entries and MP entries. Only RTS has almost only MP, with a few indie entries doing SP, but to be honest none of them have really produced a very good to great game. I'd recommend them, but none of them have much lasting power is what I'm saying.

Why nobody develops an RTS in the style of DoW1 or Warlords Battlecry 3, where you have huge amounts of single player replayability is entirely beyond me.
As has been shown many times, the single player audience for RTS is just bigger than the MP one. Much bigger.
And if there was a great RTS that would get good supply of new single player content - which is a normal thing in most other genres - it would do extremely well. No AAA production quality necessary.

Even the Spellforce 3 devs tried to go for the MP crowd (and obviously failed). When they instead could have poured that effort into a dynamic conquest-style campaign with some nice randomized elements to it.

The only reason I sometimes play (base-building) RTS in multiplayer is because that's pretty much the only way to play any of the new ones - their campaigns are all either shit or short or have zero replayabiltiy or any combination of those. But then I play a few times, notice that I suck against humans (and have no intention to spend the time necessary to git gud), lose interest and stop after a few days.
And playing skirmish against AI completely lacks that connective material that I desire ("leveling up" your faction in a campaign, conquering, planning on larger-than-battle scale, hell even LARPing I'll gladly take, etc.).

This sounds like you should be playing games like Stellaris instead of looking for classic RTS to scale to your (low) level.

 

[Lagi]

Mike Mornhaime and some other Blizzard veterans recently left and made Dreamhaven, which houses 2 new game studios: Moonshot Games and Secret Door. Then these guys, who worked mostly on SC2, left and made Frost Gaint to make a new RTS.
So there's still a chance that one of the Dreamhaven teams makes a Diablo like game.

Someone please fucking make this:
http://androidarts.com/diablo/diablo.htm#diabloesque

Thats the same guy who did the Total Annihilation essay?
edit: yes it is

 

[thesheeep]

I want to see RTS with interesting missions. Good gameplay, writing that focuses on cultures, politics, economics, and military fiction. Is that unreasonable?

It appears so.

For some reason, most RTS try to go for the online audience that just isn't there outside of SC or AoE. And to compete with those two, you'd have to throw resources at the problem without end. For a very unlikely chance at succeeding.

This project, too, will most likely fail.

Almost every genre has this healthy split of SP entries and MP entries. Only RTS has almost only MP, with a few indie entries doing SP, but to be honest none of them have really produced a very good to great game. I'd recommend them, but none of them have much lasting power is what I'm saying.

Why nobody develops an RTS in the style of DoW1 or Warlords Battlecry 3, where you have huge amounts of single player replayability is entirely beyond me.
As has been shown many times, the single player audience for RTS is just bigger than the MP one. Much bigger.
And if there was a great RTS that would get good supply of new single player content - which is a normal thing in most other genres - it would do extremely well. No AAA production quality necessary.

Even the Spellforce 3 devs tried to go for the MP crowd (and obviously failed). When they instead could have poured that effort into a dynamic conquest-style campaign with some nice randomized elements to it.

The only reason I sometimes play (base-building) RTS in multiplayer is because that's pretty much the only way to play any of the new ones - their campaigns are all either shit or short or have zero replayabiltiy or any combination of those. But then I play a few times, notice that I suck against humans (and have no intention to spend the time necessary to git gud), lose interest and stop after a few days.
And playing skirmish against AI completely lacks that connective material that I desire ("leveling up" your faction in a campaign, conquering, planning on larger-than-battle scale, hell even LARPing I'll gladly take, etc.).

This sounds like you should be playing games like Stellaris instead of looking for classic RTS to scale to your (low) level.

I don't see what my level has to do with this.
PvP competition just isn't something I have much of an interest in, no matter how good I am at a game. I could get to a medium competitive level in something like AoE or SC if I wanted to... but why would I? All that time I can instead spend on something I actually find fun.

I just find it a lot more interesting and fun to have challenging single player campaigns than matches against humans. Sue me
That lack of connective tissue I wrote about relating to skirmish matches against the AI is exactly the same in MP. It just doesn't do it for me.

Nobody is demanding RTS games or campaigns to be easy (in fact, that would be horrible).
All people want is proper single player content instead of MP focus for an imaginary audience.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I tried 4X games like Stellaris. They don't scratch the same itch. Because of their structure, they can't have plot and characters in the same sense as RTS campaigns can have.

 

[ArchAngel]

I tried 4X games like Stellaris. They don't scratch the same itch. Because of their structure, they can't have plot and characters in the same sense as RTS campaigns can have.

that was not for you, that was for thesheeep because he said this:

Why nobody develops an RTS in the style of DoW1 or Warlords Battlecry 3, where you have huge amounts of single player replayability is entirely beyond me.

At the time of DoW1 last expansion there was really no games that gave you grand strategy and combat. Now there are games like Stellaris and others.

At the moment I am playing Void Destroyers 2 which is basically Homeworld in a living world where factions fight each other.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

I also fail to see the benefit of focusing on multiplayer right of the bat. Most popular rts titles in the past also featured a good campaign to start with. I can't recall a single title that was from the beginning advertised as multiplayer focused and succeeded, while the list of failures seems to keep growing. I'd even say that games with good campaigns also often had good multiplayer. Titles that come to mind are C&C, Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires/Mythology, Supreme Commander, Dawn of War 1, Company of Heroes, Stronghold and I'm sure I missed some. Good gameplay works for single- and multiplayer and that is something that I miss in never games. They also lack the novelty that rts games had in the past. I remember being curios what the unit line up would be and what abilities they would have. I'm not sure if I have just grown tired of it or if new games are simply lacking in the creative mechanics/units department.
The latest rts that I liked was Spellforce 3, but that was mostly for its strengths as rpg and not because of its rts parts. They were ok and not actively bad but that's about it. I never returned to it just to play a round of skirmish. I have no idea why the developers wasted time on pushing multiplayer, seems like a case of not knowing what people actually liked about the game. Or did its multiplayer take off while I wasn't watching?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Yeah, focusing on MP right off the bat feels like missing the forest for the trees. None of the popular RTS of the past got popular because they focused on MP, they got popular because the designers focused on creating games with good gameplay. In fact, Starcraft is actually something of a fluke in how it became the most popular RTS ever because of Korean esports. It was certainly never designed to achieve that and no other RTS has achieved even a fraction of that success. And to be entirely honest, the development of SC was apparently extremely tumultuous due to things like scraping and redesigning the engine and art direction after being embarrassed at E3, the plot of the story mode being a mess due to too many cooks working in different directions...

I'm looking forward to Immortal: Gates of Pyre and it's focusing primarily on MP to start with. That's not to say they won't have SP content, apparently their writing team has written huge books of lore that rival Tokien's Middle Earth in detail and they intend to tell non-linear stories in order to give every race its chance to shine. Sounds really interesting and unprecedented in the history of RTS.

 

[ArchAngel]

Yeah, focusing on MP right off the bat feels like missing the forest for the trees. None of the popular RTS of the past got popular because they focused on MP, they got popular because the designers focused on creating games with good gameplay. In fact, Starcraft is actually something of a fluke in how it became the most popular RTS ever because of Korean esports. It was certainly never designed to achieve that and no other RTS has achieved even a fraction of that success. And to be entirely honest, the development of SC was apparently extremely tumultuous due to things like scraping and redesigning the engine and art direction after being embarrassed at E3, the plot of the story mode being a mess due to too many cooks working in different directions...

I'm looking forward to Immortal: Gates of Pyre and it's focusing primarily on MP to start with. That's not to say they won't have SP content, apparently their writing team has written huge books of lore that rival Tokien's Middle Earth in detail and they intend to tell non-linear stories in order to give every race its chance to shine. Sounds really interesting and unprecedented in the history of RTS.

Starcraft 2 was bigger than Starcraft 1 and it was designed with esports in mind.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Yeah, focusing on MP right off the bat feels like missing the forest for the trees. None of the popular RTS of the past got popular because they focused on MP, they got popular because the designers focused on creating games with good gameplay. In fact, Starcraft is actually something of a fluke in how it became the most popular RTS ever because of Korean esports. It was certainly never designed to achieve that and no other RTS has achieved even a fraction of that success. And to be entirely honest, the development of SC was apparently extremely tumultuous due to things like scraping and redesigning the engine and art direction after being embarrassed at E3, the plot of the story mode being a mess due to too many cooks working in different directions...

I'm looking forward to Immortal: Gates of Pyre and it's focusing primarily on MP to start with. That's not to say they won't have SP content, apparently their writing team has written huge books of lore that rival Tokien's Middle Earth in detail and they intend to tell non-linear stories in order to give every race its chance to shine. Sounds really interesting and unprecedented in the history of RTS.

Starcraft 2 was bigger than Starcraft 1 and it was designed with esports in mind.

How much of that success is due to the brand name and other confounding variables? No other RTS has ever been able to achieve a fraction of the same success.

 

[ArchAngel]

Yeah, focusing on MP right off the bat feels like missing the forest for the trees. None of the popular RTS of the past got popular because they focused on MP, they got popular because the designers focused on creating games with good gameplay. In fact, Starcraft is actually something of a fluke in how it became the most popular RTS ever because of Korean esports. It was certainly never designed to achieve that and no other RTS has achieved even a fraction of that success. And to be entirely honest, the development of SC was apparently extremely tumultuous due to things like scraping and redesigning the engine and art direction after being embarrassed at E3, the plot of the story mode being a mess due to too many cooks working in different directions...

I'm looking forward to Immortal: Gates of Pyre and it's focusing primarily on MP to start with. That's not to say they won't have SP content, apparently their writing team has written huge books of lore that rival Tokien's Middle Earth in detail and they intend to tell non-linear stories in order to give every race its chance to shine. Sounds really interesting and unprecedented in the history of RTS.

Starcraft 2 was bigger than Starcraft 1 and it was designed with esports in mind.

How much of that success is due to the brand name and other confounding variables? No other RTS has ever been able to achieve a fraction of the same success.

It is because of name of Starcraft and name of Blizzard and sure, Starcraft 1 not only paved the road for Sc2 but for all other esport games as well.
But in the end Sc2 succeeded because game itself was good in competitive MP (and Blizzard was giving enough money for rewards).

 

[Blutwurstritter]

Starcraft 2 with expansions also contains some massive single player campaigns with production values that dwarf every other comparable rts that I know of. It offers something to all types of players, including those don't touch multiplayer. I don't think that a release of Starcraft 2 as pure multiplayer titled would have been as much of an success as it had been with the campaigns.

 

[ArchAngel]

Starcraft 2 with expansions also contains some massive single player campaigns with production values that dwarf every other comparable rts that I know of. It offers something to all types of players, including those don't touch multiplayer. I don't think that a release of Starcraft 2 as pure multiplayer titled would have been as much of an success as it had been with the campaigns.

At the time but most of its success after than came with MP and going F2P with Coop Commanders.
Stormgate will also offer all 3 things to its players.

 

[Jaedar]

Starcraft 2 was bigger than Starcraft 1 and it was designed with esports in mind.

Starcraft 2 was designed with everything in mind, because they had infinite money.

I'm not even kidding that much. WoL has probably the best RTS SP campaign ever made (at least from a gameplay perspective, the story is meh on its own and plain bad put in relation to starcraft before and after). WoL also had extensive sp challenges in the form of achievements, and lots of various 'mp preparation' sp challenges like various "can you micro dis shit perfectly for 3 minutes for a gold star?". And probably also more things I'm forgetting. Not to mention a very exhaustive editor.

And with LoV they made the coop mode, which is also good and non-competetive mp (and afaik this mode end up being the moneymaker, to the point that it killed future single player dlc).

I feel there's some deep insight into the RTS community to be had from the fact that the coop mode end up being the big thing, despite all the effort made to push people into the regular mp.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

the story is meh on its own and plain bad put in relation to starcraft before and after

SC has never had strong writing. The lead writer, Chris Metzen, has no experience writing outside of his work on the craft franchises, and most of that is just other writers expanding his pitches into actual stories. It shows, because everything he writes feels like it wouldn't be out of place on wattpad or a kid's first attempt at making a D&D campaign. I wrote a non-exhaustive list of plot holes, editing errors, bad decisions, etc in another post. According to World of Warcraft Diary, he constantly forgot what he wrote in his huge notebooks and had to make things up on the fly. Which explains so much. The one novel he apparently wrote was Of Blood and Honor, which is very weak and is easily his best work.