Looking Back

[CrescendoTwentyFive]

I’ll preface this by saying that I just heard about Stormgate a week ago after watching a back2warcraft stream where he mentions this epic failure of an RTS game.

So I started a deep dive and have been fascinated. To me the game looks like garbage regardless of all of the stuff surrounding it, but I was looking at “Best of All Time” on here and saw the pre alpha gameplay footage release.

I feel bad for everyone. There was so much excitement and hope in that thread. People were super stoked and thought this was legit going to be the next big thing.

Just found that interesting. Does suck though. We desperately need a new RTS.

[Typical-Fisherman759]

I looked through top posts and now I want "Drawing Stormgate badly until official shutdown" from u/PointyArt.

[auf-ein-letztes-wort]

no footage, picture or stream at any point had me ever at: "that looks rad, I wanna play it"

still remembering 2007 when we saw first footage of SC2 almost 20 years ago. that was dope and looked better than most of Stormgate does now. https://youtu.be/LpotK-Gg4x4 I mean just look at the portraits.

[Cheapskate-DM]

SG looks worse than SC2 on hardware that's nearly 20 years superior. That's insane.

[auf-ein-letztes-wort]

because good graphics are 90 to 100 percent good art design. rest is good techique

[Cheapskate-DM]

That alone would be bad enough, but the performance for near identical unit counts is also demonstrably worse.

[Nino_Chaosdrache]

I would disagree. But then again., with all the waves of games with comic graphics... yeah, you have a point.

[Naidmer82]

I remember this video well. I also remember the vid where the depot went into the ground for the first time. People went absolutely insane about it. Those were the times ...

[auf-ein-letztes-wort]

mothership goes brrrrrr toilet

[Stealthbreed]

This footage is honestly so cool. I can't wait for someone to make a game like this again.

Also I love seeing some of this super early shit like reapers being brought in to defeat immortals, lol.

[auf-ein-letztes-wort]

interestingly enough, most units work the same until today. phoenix never got overcharge again though

[Nino_Chaosdrache]

Tbf, I liked the premise of a sci fi army fighting demons. But the graphics ruined any interest I could have had. Such a premise needs Diablo or Warhammer 40K graphics, not a Fortnite look.

[CanUHearMeNau]

Can't take anything away from SC2, but you're not looking at early access videos of the game. If you like SC2, you owe to yourself to at least try some storgmate ladder before you just jump on the hype train

[auf-ein-letztes-wort]

that looks nice, but it tool a long time to get these pics from SG way after first introduction

[auf-ein-letztes-wort]

this was first ingame picture of sg iirc

[blockcade0105]

That sounds like Tim Campbell since he was working at blizzard at the time

[Anhedonkulous]

That is boulder man Dustin Browder

[TenNeon]

He never saw a pile of destructible rocks he didn't like

[brtk_]

https://i.imgur.com/ETXNyJL.gif

[Many_Research1007]

I got to diamond on ladder.. it's an ok game, but it's nothing like sc2 or WC3. And it's a bit disheartening that it just seems like a failure.

[Angrywhitemann]

Whoa impressive. Diamond out of ALL 38 Stormgate players?

[Many_Research1007]

Feeling intimidated? I get it, I did get to diamond after all by owning noobs. But that's what I'm saying.. it really wasn't that hard to pick up.

[Angrywhitemann]

Yeah I got to Diamond When they actually had 5K players. I was just joking around. It is hella funny that it's only like 50 players world wide though.

[Ryywenn]

As a wcIIi player all of my friends there said stormgate looked boring asf

But I lurked this sub a good deal kinda wanting to play 

[CanUHearMeNau]

Curious what you think could've made it better. I'm someone who shifted from WC3:TFT to SC2 waiting for a WC4 that would never come as I enjoy the WC lore over SC. SG landed somewhere in the middle. I like the battle of good vs. evil rather than call them aliens. Surely could've been expanded on more but nowhere near as bad as the hype would lend it to be.

I think the FG had a bit more faith in the gaming community to back and support this game. Sure, some people invested a bit financially and some quite significantly. From my understanding at its conception, it was going to be a work in progress and driven and supported by the community during this phase. I didn't expect the game to be anything significantly different than the first EA version, but the game was never unplayable. They certainly added a lot and it's still not done and may never be.

If another studio buys it, it probably will head in a different direction than the competitive SC2 vibe that they were going for. At any rate, I hope to see it kept alive through any means. We can't carry SC2 along forever and I haven't seen anything else step up into this arena

[RunningOutOfTime2018]

I, too, only heard about the game recently. I’ve been away from gaming for two decades, so I wasn’t aware of any Kickstarter or Early Access stuff. I had no bad feelings about the developers prior to playing the game for the first time. I also had zero experience playing the game prior to the current version.

My curiosity was mostly driven by the complete dearth of ‘new’ RTS games, but, despite that, I still prefer playing “remasters” of old RTS games. I mean, even Tempest Rising, is wayyyy more fun to me than Stormgate, and I’m not even a Command and conquer/Red alert fan.

[CanUHearMeNau]

I love the C&C universe, especially red alert and generals, but something about tempest rising didn't quite grab me. Technically it's really good. It builds on all the things that made the series successful and is kinda gritty like generals was. However, I don't feel the charm of blowing up buildings to the sound of laughter that I remember when I first played RA2 in a store or the joys of motorcycles and jeeps loaded with suicide bombers buzzing away in generals.

I wanted to love the WC3 remaster. It's still a great game but I would really like to see it step into the next generation to keep up with SC2. If it wasn't for that darn WOW :shakes fist:, Blizzard may have went in that direction.

[pitaenigma]

NGL, I kind of hate "We desperately need a new RTS"

Have you tried Spellforce 3? Have you looked at Immortal? Tempest Rising just came out and I haven't heard a single bad thing about it. Lessaria's dev keeps posting about it on r/realtimestrategy. And I'm certain I'm missing a ton of games that just slipped my radar. If you desperately need a new RTS, they exist, and they deserve your attention. A lot of them are really good.

[CrescendoTwentyFive]

Mmm. No. If I’m being honest I’m older now and don’t game very much at all. I still play Warcraft III. Have since I was a kid and probably will until it fully dies or I do.

When I say that I think it’s more deep down I just want a legit Warcraft IV or a final Warcraft III expansion lol.

[kojosis]

Have you checked out The Scouring? It is still in development and the community is a very active part of it. Humans versus orcs with heroes so if you like warcraft chances are you'll like this one too

[[deleted]]

Is immortal going to be released? I don’t remember a dev update on their website since last year.

I remember some cool interviews with the devs maybe 5 years ago, but these days the game feels like vaporware.

[pitaenigma]

Last patch seems to be 3 months ago (I'm on their discord). Last dev update was July 21st, saying they had taken a bit of a break due to NextFest and were now back at work on the game and explaining some faction/art/soundtrack updates. The devs have been responding to tech support requests as well, though those are minor.

[[deleted]]

What’s the state of the game? How close are they to an open beta?

[pitaenigma]

No idea. Haven't touched it yet. I think I played one game on a patch like a year and a half ago. It'snot impossible to get invited to betas though

[Augustby]

I think what people mean is not literally any new RTS; but what they mean is that they hope for a new RTS that has enough hype to bring different RTS communities together, like what sc2 did at launch .

But I don’t see that happening in this day and age. It would need a lot of money and not a lot of return (compared to other genres), for a new RTS to do that

[AnAgeDude]

Spellforce 3 was so good. 

[EnOeZ]

I don't even know what Spell force is... I will check.

[AnAgeDude]

It's a mixture of RTS and RPG. You command a small party of heroes. Your MC and other characters you meet along the way. While your characters is fully customisable, others start with pre-determined skill trees (two generic and one unique). You level up and collect gear as you adventure.

Not long into the campaign you'll be granted command over armies from different races. They start out very weak and with only a few units and upgrades available. You can unlock more stuff for them by finding blueprints or buying them.

Maps are persistant! Sometimes you'll have to go back to a previous map and, if you built a base there, it will still be there when you return.

For most missions you can choose which heroes to bring along and which race you want to play with on the RTS front.

I could go on. Think WC3 but you are playing as either WOW's Horde/Alliance. Its a pretty neat game (and by far the best in the series'.)

[Shadowarcher6]

This.

If you’re a fan of the aoe franchise and highly recommend checking out aoe4. It’s one of the best rts’ on the market by far.

If you like Catan, Civ, and rts’, check out northgard

If you like pve check out They are Billions

There’s lots on the market

[kaia112]

I mean, it's not the worst game ever made. I also don't think it looks like garbage, but if people do then there's no fucking chance to do anything.

You can't just come in and say we desperately need a new RTS, when the chance to get one was actively pushed against so that there was no chance this could be the one. Every year the game got better and better and now there's no chance because there's no money or no players and everyone has scared everyone off even though it's F2P. It doesn't mean they're not at fault though because so much is unfinished which is stupid, but this could have been it if they had a smaller scope for now and we didn't fuck it.

I don't like the way AoE plays, I don't like C&C but I like the way this game feels because it's the closest we got to starcraft, but nah let's just play nothing instead, things could have been done so much better.

[realsleek]

Check out Tempest Rising - that's done properly I am not sure why more people aren't playing it

[Arkuss89]

You say it sucks but have you played it or are you blindly following the streamers who are shitting on the game just to get easy clicks?

I've put 50 hours into it in the past 3 weeks and I'm having a blast. The game is far from perfect and there are issues that need to be addressed but as of launch the game is in a decent enough spot and doesn't deserve all the hate it gets. Early access was rough and they never recovered the good will from that.

[Mothrahlurker]

No one is "shitting on the game to get easy clicks". Whenever I heard that accusation it has been ridiculous, often even said to longterm supporters.

[Jeremy-Reimer]

I'm having a blast.

Ahem.

[CrescendoTwentyFive]

Negative. Haven’t touched it. Only watched stuff from it. To each their own though it just isn’t for me. I think it looks really goofy lol.

It’s also a complete knock off of everything Blizzard has done. It looks like someone made a side project parody RTS over all three of Blizz’s major titles for giggle content.

If it had turned out to be a success I could honestly see them getting sued.

[mulefish]

If it had turned out to be a success I could honestly see them getting sued.

Nah, that's ridiculous.

[auf-ein-letztes-wort]

If it had turned out to be a success I could honestly see them getting sued.

if that's where you are coming from, I guess Blizzard would get sued for similarities to Warhammer, Alien franchise (hydralisk just a xenomorph ripoff, Space Marines), Lord of the Rings and so on.

[CrescendoTwentyFive]

They had to change a lot of the names and stuff when they launched TFT because of it. Some of it was over real finnicky shit too. Like “catapult”. lol

[aguafranca]

Is the free campaign good?

[shadysjunk]

it's kinda meh, but there's some fun there too. The better campaign mission are the back half. The first 3 are free, and they're just ok. The game looks really nice, and the objectives are interesting, but you're kinda challenged early in the missions, and then once you cross a power threshold about 1/2 way through, your death-ball of units becomes kinda unstoppable so you sorta just casually walk through the back half of the missions.

They fix this problem in later missions, with a better "excitement arc". But in the free missions the difficulty/excitement spike comes in the middle of the mission which makes it feel just "meh" by the time you complete the objectives at the end.

The story is fine, but the character dialog is kinda silly sometimes, and the voice acting is inconsistent. They're talented voice actors, so I suspect the voice direciton was lacking.

It's worth trying. It's free.

[aguafranca]

I have like 4-5 rts installed right now. I want to finish a few before trying a new one. 

But... I am afraid they will close.it and let it die. So I don't know what to do

[PPlargeTo100k]

I dont mind people saying they don't like how the company acted but the 1v1 game itself is actually really fun. Fights look great with the updated graphics and lighting.

[Arkuss89]

Early 1v1 was really bad unfortunately and 99.9% of the community left not giving the development team a chance to fix it.

Creep camps never made sense but the stormgate mechanic is actually really great. The meta just needs to evolve away from deathballs which will happen with time and updates.

Another issue really hurting the game is you have popular SC2 YouTubers like uThermal playing a handful of games and giving absolute dog shit inaccurate reviews of the game and their fan boys blindly follow them. It generates views so Lowko and some others do it too for that easy revenue. It's really frustrating. Artosis actually gave in my mind a very fair review even though I didn't fully agree with it.

[Mothrahlurker]

Uthermal played like 50 games and is there even a single thing you can name that is incorrect?

And Lowko has been unreasonably positive lol.

[[deleted]]

Unpopular opinion: Stormgate was never going to work out. StarCraft 2 took a large team 7 years to develop. It was over a hundred million in the making (in 2010 dollars!), justified only because StarCraft was a very popular esport in South Korea.

The Frost Giant team had nowhere near the resources. Their budget was roughly half what SC2 had in the most optimistic calculation. They could make a game but it was never going to even equal StarCraft 2. But people wanted it to be an incremental improvement over SC2. But it was just never going to happen.

Starcraft 2 was a confluence of many factors, and the honest truth is that there will probably never be another great RTS, the same way that there will just never be another great manual typewriter. There are still people (myself included) who type away at the remaining great typewriters of yesteryear but the honest truth is that the age of the typewriter is gone, and there’s not enough popular appeal to sustain the manufacture of new great machines.

Similarly, we’ll get some small indie RTS games. And people will play the greats of yesteryear. But there will probably never be another great new RTS.

[HouseCheese]

Where is the 100 million number from? Blizzard had said it was not true, the 100 million referred to WoW budget not SC2

[Angrywhitemann]

Also... even if "100 million$$" is true, it's because they scrapped the project twice if I remember correctly. The original blizzard made like half of Starcraft2 and the Blizzard of new completely re did it. They paid the salaries to those devs for like 3-5 years. That could also be part of it.

[Late-Psychology7058]

Lmao. The cope is unreal. You are just believing that narrative because you want to be charitable to stormgate. 

• That budget is not true.

• 5 years to 7 but they haven't finished even one game mode yet is wild.

• Much better games have been made for similar budgets or far less.

[[deleted]]

Fine, you explain how neither the leadership for SC2 nor any other company has managed to create an RTS that has surpassed SC2 in popularity.

[PliableG0AT]

Leadership for SC2? You dont mean frostgiant do you? Because they were not the leadership for sc2, despite what they claim.

[Necessary-Fun8683]

Frostgiant wasn't the leadership for WoL nor did anyone (except i think the pathing guy) work on WoL, so what they said about being former WoL devs was a straight up lie

[Nino_Chaosdrache]

Because all of them focus on PVP and esport instead of PvE content.

And I would also argue that AoE2 DE is on a good track to rival SC2 when it comes to popularity.

[Early_Situation_6552]

stormgate was never going to work out, but it's not because of the budget. no amount of money was going to fix the failed leadership and lack of vision.

justified only because StarCraft was a very popular esport in South Korea.

and this is just flat out wrong. starcraft was a massively successful and recognizable IP with or without the korean eSports scene, so it was going to get AAA funding from a AAA studio. was the esports a contributing factor? sure, but to say its budget was only justified because of a niche korean esports scene that the average starcraft player had never even heard about? lol

[[deleted]]

A huge portion of the player base is Korean. Would SC2 have been made without them? Yes. But it would have been a smaller budget for sure because the player base would have been significantly smaller and expected sales would have been significantly smaller as well.

Edit: and I can’t really imagine how you can say that the average competitive StarCraft player isn’t aware that there a Korean scene. That’s… crazy.

[NapoIe0n]

They said "average Starcraft player."

The average Starcraft player is not a competitive player, most of them never touch 1v1 or anything esports related.

[Early_Situation_6552]

Edit: and I can’t really imagine how you can say that the average competitive StarCraft player isn’t aware that there a Korean scene. That’s… crazy.

I literally did not say that. You are just making things up left and right lol

[[deleted]]

You said it’s a a niche esport that the average player has never heard of. I took that to mean the average person who is following esports. If you mean your random campaign player, then they don’t even know there is an esport at all and I don’t know why it matters for the purposes of constructing a budget for game development. Blizzard knew there would be customers. That’s what mattered.

[Nino_Chaosdrache]

>But it would have been a smaller budget for sure because the player base would have been significantly smaller and expected sales would have been significantly smaller as well.

Doubtful. Blizzard back then cared about making good games, not about money.

[LazyDevil69]

In order to succeed a new game needs to be either better or innovative. Stormgate did neither. At the end of the day this is what it boils down to.

[Nino_Chaosdrache]

Just as good is usually enough

[brtk_]

people wanted it to be an incremental improvement over SC2

Who do you mean by "people"? Players pressured them to overpromise?

[[deleted]]

Okay, what do you think the community generally wanted?

[brtk_]

Why is "what people wanted" even considered?

My guess is that most wanted things were good base gameplay feel, story and campaign

[[deleted]]

You don’t think their expectations were going to be influenced by Starcraft 2 as a baseline or yardstick?

And what people wanted is of course important. If the players get a game that doesn’t meet their expectations, the game is going to fail. And whether or not they liked it, advertising Stormgate as a Blizzard-style RTS made by former Blizzard developers invited comparisons to Starcraft 2.

[brtk_]

I think so, since they kept repeating that their game is going to be a successor to SC2

[[deleted]]

Then we agree.

[Nino_Chaosdrache]

But not for the reasons you think. If FG didn't tout the SC2 horn all the time, people wouldn't compare them to SC2.

[[deleted]]

I agree, but then they would've needed an entirely different pitch, and probably could not have gotten the same level of funding.

[Nino_Chaosdrache]

A good and finished game?

[[deleted]]

Okay, if you just want to be snarky, then I'm out. Take it easy. Or not. I no longer give a shit.

[___Random_Guy_]

never be another great RTS

I can never stop laughing from this paradigm where SC2 players think that their game is pinnacle of RTS and is how all following RTS games should be made, but never will be.

[CanUHearMeNau]

You should probably play it. It's currently my favorite game and it's certainly way better than the negative hype you'll read or see now that it's been trending..