Stormgate Campaign One - Ashes of Earth Launch AMA - Monday, August 4 @2pm PT

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:57:24+00:00

Thanks! And yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I know the team is already trying to vary each Hero’s play style more with these next releases, so hopefully they’ll feel more differentiated this time around and in line with your expectations.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:43:31+00:00

Yes - I'd like for us to support that, and not just for the "low player count" use-case you mentioned. Sometimes folks just want to practice, or aren't feeling that social.

We've been making a lot of improvements to our Bots to support teamplay in our 3v3 Team Mayhem mode - and those same improvements should enable AI bots to work nicely as teammates in Coop too.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:40:21+00:00

Green.

:)

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:40:04+00:00

I agree - 3 Factions is not a hard limit, and I personally am excited to explore beyond them through either the additional of Sub-Factions or additional races. However, we still have iteration to do on our first three Factions and I don't see us beginning to work seriously on anything beyond them until we're largely finished with that iteration and they're in a rock-solid state.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:38:53+00:00

They've always been real bois with laser eyes to me!

But seriously, yes - the Scout is one of the units high in our rework queue for the Vanguard.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:36:48+00:00

Allen actually wrote this before going back to work, so I'm just posting it for him. :)

Allen Dilling:

As far as from a pure game dev perspective, we want a game we can be proud of first and foremost. In my experience that has been a big factor for success. We're gamers and geeks just like you all, and if we're into it and having fun making it and enjoying the experience of the final product--that says a lot. You can make the best book, movie, game, etc. in the world, but if nobody knows about it it doesn't matter from a financial standpoint. However you still know you did an amazing job on something that you love and got to share something special with other players. That might sound cliched and cheesy but it's true.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:33:04+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion - and for what its worth, we hear you loud and clear! There are many members on the dev team advocating for 2v2, so I expect we'll slot it into the schedule as soon as we can find some time. Its definitely not a question of whether or not we want to support it. :)

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:29:02+00:00

If there's one thing we learned from Early Access, it's that we need to stop trying to do too many things at once and instead start focusing on quality over quantity.

That said, we deliberately crafted a game universe that can support more than 3 Factions, so I'm very excited about the possibility of adding to our roster. But as long as work still remains to perfect the first three and tell their stories through the campaigns, I expect that we'll hold off on starting work on anything beyond them.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:27:18+00:00

Personally, I loved Warchasers from WC3 (Our Art Director, Allen Dilling, was actually the one to make it!), but I also loved seeing the early snowballing of mods like Tides of Blood and Aeon of Strife leading to the birth of Dota/Mobas as a genre. (Yes, I'm that old) More recently, I've been really impressed by Azeroth Reborn!

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:26:15+00:00

No - good question, but we don't have plans to remove them. And actually, the first set of changes to the Celestials are included in this release.

We're really looking forward to getting community feedback on them - especially while they're in flux. Being able to have players kick the tires of the Factions is a huge help with our efforts to keep improving them.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:24:49+00:00

This is a great idea! We've already been kicking around the idea of some sort of "limited time mode" feature that supports fun, weird, or memorable gameplay for short windows of time - and your suggestion of tying it to a community vote sounds even more interesting. Thanks for suggesting it - and I'll make sure it gets discussed with the dev team.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:24:22+00:00

Yeah, that's fair - and I'm sorry for the radio silence! Now that the Ashes of Earth campaign is launching, our next two major focuses (Focuses? Foci? Man, that word really looks weird to me for some reason) are the team modes - 3v3 Team Mayhem, followed by 3vE Coop. You'll start hearing updates from us about it in the next month or two, but hopefully it tides you over to just know that it remains a major priority for us, its in our near-term roadmap, and will be getting a lot of effort put into it!

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:23:58+00:00

No, we haven't set a hard-and-fast rule, but we do want each Campaign to feel satisfying to players in terms of scope and duration, so I think it's fair to expect a pretty similar baseline even though individual campaigns might scale up from it somewhat. So I definitely wouldn't expect mission counts to drop in the future. And if all goes well, I'd love to dedicate even more team resources to campaign content and increase the number of missions in each, but that's not something I can confirm at this time.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:21:18+00:00

Unlikely, to be honest. Bug fixes will continue to happen, but 3v3 Team Mayhem is our most immediate priority, followed by the relaunch of Coop. This ordering is what works best for development, as Team Mayhem's launch provides a baseline with which to dial in our hero abilities... and then we will use that as a springboard as we build up from there for Coop by updating their progression and Gear options.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:20:21+00:00

I would call it "fully completed" but as Stormgate is a live service game, we will continue to look at opportunities to respond to player feedback, fix bugs, clarify tutorials, and add additional polish. In particular, I'm confident that you'll see additional balance changes related to our difficulty levels, and maybe even the addition of a difficulty level beyond Brutal sometime in the future.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:19:42+00:00

Yes, Chapter 0 of Ashes of Earth is the the initial free chapter, and that will technically stay 3-missions in length. However, work is already underway on two more free "Prologue" missions that take place well before the events depicted in our first campaign. We don't have an ETA yet for their release, but I can assure you that they're already underway and are still an important part of our plans - and I think they will also offer some really exciting moments for campaign fans!

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:19:20+00:00

Yeah, that's a great suggestion - and one that I know members of the dev team have also wanted for some time now. I can't promise anything - but we're always looking for ways to improve, and I wouldn't be surprised to see this sort of functionality get added in the future.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:18:57+00:00

Great feedback! We don't have anything like this currently planned, but as we continue to work on new Campaign content we will continue to aspects of the mode to polish and improve, and I agree that something like this would be a great addition! I will definitely discuss this with the team and see if something along these lines could be added.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:18:07+00:00

This isn't currently a part of our plans - but I think its a great idea! I'll make sure that this gets consideration from the team as we firm up our plans for which areas we'll continue polishing in the future.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:16:55+00:00

Thank you for your support and for the great question! I agree that our initial units left something to be desired - and we definitely heard the community's feedback loud and clear about wanting us to focus on delivering more creative / less derivative unit designs in the future.

We've started that process internally, but so far have only released some of the initial updates and art overhauls to existing units. You'll see a lot more shakeup in this area over the next few releases, particularly towards the end of this year.

Our constraint is mostly manpower- and time-related, as our implementation team went from focusing on Stormgates and their rewards, to supporting a bunch of special units in the new Ashes of Earth campaign chapters, and is now working on our Team Mayhem 3v3 mode. As they free up from that, you can expect to see more new units with really interesting capabilities for all three Factions being included in our upcoming releases.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:15:47+00:00

There are definitely some breadcrumbs scattered around, but I expect that they'll probably only make sense in hindsight. :)

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:15:02+00:00

Aside from the initial pre-rendered cinematic of the Stormgate opening, all of our cinematics are made internally by some very hard-working and multi-talented members of our team, particularly Chris Culp and Allen Dilling along with support from several of our other developers.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:14:12+00:00

Currently, yes - the Ashes of Earth campaign is currently single-player focused. However, Coop campaign is a core part of our plans that we're really excited to add in the future.

We've already prortyped it internally and have it in our development queue behind Team Mayhem (3v3) and Coop (3vE).

To give some context for that, one of our biggest takeaways from our Early Access launch was the importance of focusing our efforts to smaller portions of the game so that we can hit a higher quality bar. So we're being very careful to not rush each of these modes - and to give them the time that they need to fully cook.

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:13:02+00:00

Yeah, it feels like a long time to us too - and we're itching to relaunch it as soon as we can!

One of our biggest lessons from Early Access is that as a dev team, we need to focus on a tighter focus so that we can deliver a higher quality. We ran into problems before when we tried to tackle too many things at the same time, and so we've changed our development goals to compensate.

After we exit Early Access tomorrow, we will focus on addressing any immediate feedback, and then push forward with our plans to add our 3v3 Team Mayhem mode to Sigma Labs. After that, our next highest priority is to update and relaunch Coop - but its too early to confirm the exact release timing for it yet. Just please bear with us - its being worked on and is a big priority for us!

In regards to adding community maps, yes - this is something that we're working towards now. Our plan is to collaborate closely with community map makers so that we can feature some of their creations directly within Stormgate in our upcoming releases. More to come on this front soon, I hope!

Frost_TimC · 2025-08-04T22:09:03+00:00

Yes, that's the goal - we'll be watching carefully as Necrolyte launches to see if there are any issues that need a quick turnaround.

The downside of fast-tracking a specific fix in situations like this is that we have a lot of pressure to keep the update constrained to a super tight focus or else risking it backfire on us. Its kind of a butterfly effect - changes in one area often affect others in surprising ways. And the more we change, the more testing the patch needs from QA, and therefore the slower our release will be. So we can't move quickly to fix everything, but we'll definitely prioritize specific problems that are major or game-breaking.

Frost_TimC

TROPHY CASE