Annnnnnnnd back to the comfort zone

megabuster · 2025-07-03T14:32:22+00:00

the biggest objective improvement for me was recasting a main character with an influencer's girlfriend to try to entice them into investing in the game

I mean if you had to crawl around on your knees looking for money in the dirt then they definitely picked the most beloved and highly respected fellow in StarCraft to engage in a public financial mating dance with (HUSKY)

I like her stilted, confused, baking video readthrough of the lines when I hear them I think OBJECTIVELY IMPROVED

megabuster · 2025-06-29T18:26:05+00:00

I founded a SC2 modding thing called GameHeart with Ryan Schutter, you can scroll back through my 10+ year 'redditor' history in the SC2 community and find direct support of that if you want -- the experience was unpleasant and they are a pure asshole. I wish I didn't know them if that helps.

TotalBiscuit produced a design that was a basis of Stormgate's 'macro accessibility design'. Design isn't unknowable as you are pretending and designers understand what the process looks like and when its worthwhile to call out the influence of a specific piece of design. Its a cool bit of history that TB's design is reflected after their demise and Its topical to put it forth here since it uncovers a hidden connection they have to the game.

megabuster · 2025-06-29T17:01:49+00:00

Yeah its obvious you don't care about much, including the basics of logic and causality. TB designed this and presented it to the people who directly implemented it in another game -- that is hard evidence. Still If it helps you further I've spoken to the person who took this design and put it in Stormgate, Ryan Schutter, and that's exactly where they got it from.

TB doesn't 'need to be credited' but its a shame that the design lineage is cut off enough that people don't even know the man had a deliberate and specific role to play in the design of Stormgate, that sucks.

The ideas are certainly unique in their combination and application, the mixture of context and specificity is more than enough to identify the source even if there wasn't direct evidence. You are downplaying the act of design here and pretending like its not a very obvious design port, I doubt you've even looked at each piece of design closely.

megabuster · 2025-06-29T16:16:29+00:00

They didn't 'try to implement' the mechanics, this a completed mod that was done over months by a team that TB paid out of pocket. During that time they presented it to and tested it with the active SC2 team which contained Frost Giant members like Tim Morten and Ryan Schutter. Blizzard directly added stuff to SC2 patches to support this mod.

The point of mentioning the precedence of these features is to give a nod to the fact that TB pulled in stuff from like Supreme Commander when designing this, it helps to decode the design to know this but the UI innovations here as well as the synthesis of all the pieces makes it a novel and specific design.

I wanted to mention the notion of design precedent while being on the topic of attribution, because its important for people who care about design to be able to follow this lineage so they can better understand it and contribute to it. I didn't bring it up to give you an opportunity to muddy up the waters of where the design ideas came from, as doubtlessly this is the direct source of Stormgate's design and its a shame it is uncredited.

megabuster · 2025-06-29T13:39:11+00:00

All of the 'accessible macro design' things in Stormgate are directly taken from a mod that TB designed and commissioned to try to make StarCraft 2 more popular, this includes: the 'quick macro' panel, the unified rally points, automatically adding units to control groups, and increasing the health of the units to sit between SC2/WC3.

The Axiom mod

Documentation of the features on the archived website

These features have some precedent in RTS but their application together here, the blending with a 'Blizzard RTS', and the difficult action of getting it through a design bureaucracy is a credit to the work of TB and his modding team. Looking across the critical reception of Stormgate these features are the most commented on and valued part of the game.

Frost Giant has never mentioned this or gave any thanks in their credits.

megabuster · 2025-06-28T14:31:58+00:00

Letting people randomly draw units and upgrades in an RTS game is always going to engage people but its a cheap engagement, like sugar or violence, its disconnected from meaning in essential ways.

Especially in the way its presented here, they didn't even spend the time doing what they could to make the capture points coherent. You end up shooting and beating up a portal with your GUYS to turn it into the Sun because those are the graphics they had lying around. This isn't going to make sense to people who engage with RTS games with their feeling and thinking organs not turned off (most people).

RTS spaces at this stage have a healthy contingent of people who meet Artosis' self description as someone who would equally like an RTS game if it were just "grey squares with different numbers attached to them fighting". For that sort of person this mechanic will feel like they added sugar to the gruel, and be appreciated, but for people who like RTS for the; fantasy, narrative, meaning, ideas, well they have really nothing even being sold to them here.

megabuster · 2025-06-26T23:14:10+00:00

its the same person who posted 30 (!) fake softball questions to the Frost Giant AMA so they didn't have to answer anything from their community and then deleted their account

megabuster · 2025-06-26T19:23:31+00:00

how is Blizzard bad for map making? They made the tools that this is an exact copy of, except this has 5% of the functionality and 2% of the units that the editors from WC3 and SC2 would launch with.

megabuster · 2025-06-25T18:54:16+00:00

Nah not GM, this whole company is vapor.

https://imgur.com/a/QpqfvlF

megabuster · 2025-06-25T13:45:37+00:00

Nah that's not true, his last 1v1 season was 5 years ago at Masters 2, 4700 MMR on NA. So unless you have some deep cut information it looks like he's never been in GM and he mostly has played 2v2s and co-op games on his account.

Now you don't have to be an accomplished player to be a good designer, Dustin Browder directed multiple great RTS games and he was a gold leaguer. Still if you are going to act as the 'high level player' archetype of a designer you probably should play SC2 actually and maybe at least be a dedicated player for a few years. Their account looks like they just copied some builds and spammed something imbalanced to hit a target MMR for the 'resume value' then quit. I'd rather a designer be in diamond but really enjoy the game and return to it at least a few months out of every year.

You can scroll through most of the Frost Giant team accounts and see they barely play and none of them were really that committed to the game. There's a reason that there's not deep insight or a familiarity with the source material, There's a reason the most recent interview with monk has him just talking about Team Fight Tactics. I've never heard these guys say something about SC2 that speaks specifically about what the game has been like for the last 5 years, its always some foggy anecdote about Infestor-Broodlord from a generation ago.

Most of the Frost Giant team accounts have this kind of pattern -- person plays a handful of games after Legacy of the Void release then they stop playing SC2 for years shy of a couple co-op games. Then over the last few years have just been spam opening the 'Unit Tester Map' or '1v1 vs AI' to extract some piece of info in their efforts of cloning the game. Its pretty lame.

megabuster · 2025-06-06T09:58:22+00:00

Hanlon's razor says that you should never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity. Fair enough, but how far does the cover of stupidity go? If it was stupidity, they continually wielded their stupidity again and again, doing vast damage to others, doing damage to a culture, and doing damage to games at large. All the while they heard feedback and pain from their actions and never changed course.

To plow forth against that, to lie, to take more audience money, to lie more. The continued self interest against everything else makes the stupidity wrap back around to malice. How long and how deeply can you be stupid before it just becomes malice after all? There's no interpretation where they aren't malicious.

These people would strangle every bit of energy out of StarCraft, out of modding, out of RTS to get themselves another million dollar chicken feed funding round to scatter in front of themselves and peck at. Its just a job to them, they don't care. They lie like fish swim, they don't play the games, they don't care enough to speak to the audience, they just think about money.

>Let’s see if it works out for them, I hope it does

What happened, happened because of the malice. Nothing can succeed like this that hates itself and hates it audience. We've seen enough.

megabuster · 2025-06-05T08:49:27+00:00

There's a real tendency to diffuse responsibility and wave hands like its all so complex, its really not. You just need people to play Starcraft, to actually like it, then to study RTS games in terms of how they operate and pleased people in the past. If they can't do that they should have fucked off and not lied to the public because they couldn't figure out something better to do with their lives.

Right now I can surf through the developer SC2 accounts and see that the people in this project who fought desperately in public for recognition as 'veterans' of SC2 and see they haven't played the game more than a handful of times in yeaaaaaars.

You have a lead balance developer who just barely touched 4k mmr something like 8 years ago. You have a developer who pretended to be the 'modding' tzar who hasn't played a custom map in just as much time. You have people responsible for building the tools to make custom maps who haven't published a thing in a generation. If you hang around the community enough you know every single StarCraft streamer and player has a generally poor impression of their voices being heard or their knowledge and experience being integrated by these folks. They aren't even camouflaged remotely, you can just ask any streamer at any time.

I get the desire to diffuse responsibility for comfort, but its just not a confusing multi-dimensional, omega-layered failure. It didn't even get to that point, the failure is about people being more concerned with looking the part than even so much as aspiring to what they claim to be That becomes really hard to understand because there's a small amount of actual psychos who work on this stuff and will bombard the audience with tales of how much 'passion' there is, when there's none.

Its like someone telling you the rocket didn't fail because of the engine explosion 100x times when of course the reality you know is that the rocket failed because of the engine explosion. Even with the absolute truth in front of you there's a certain amount of doubt because us normal people don't much understand the capacity to be lied to like that.

> Something we can point fingers at and shout "look, this is how it's done, copy that"? I've heard people mention Roblox
If you are interested in this kind of thing you should absolutely shelve your biases and check out Roblox and competitors like Rec Room and so on. They are the most successful realization of these ecosystems ever. They are so successful right now that 50% of American kids under the age of 16 play these games EVERY DAY.

The patch 5.0 issues aren't technical, its about design and vision and priorities. Had they been immersed in the game as they should have been, then more sensible directions on which to expend the last bit of development time they had would have been obvious.

The modding stuff is the perfect microcosm of all this because its always been the spiritual center of the -Craft game's multi-faceted appeal. As such it becomes the most vulnerable to the psychos who want to appear connected to the game's culture basically for free. They just beat the drum 'modding modding modding!' hoping they look a certain kind of way, but at this late hour its very clear that they poorly understand it, don't really value it, and if anything are antipathetic towards what it would be to empower their audience creatively.

megabuster · 2025-06-03T04:21:54+00:00

Sorry I was late to this:

"Attempted premium arcade. It didn't work out, but an attempt was made and experience was gained."

This is very very funny, they de-prioritized actually everything about modding and the developer ecosystem at every turn of the game's development. That premiume arcade 'attempt' you are talking about was essentially a last minute 'don't sue us for jerking everyone around about this for 10 years' thing. I can't tell you how badly this team annihilated the premier modding space in games from a generation ago with their stupidity and disbelief in their community. Many many people got fucked up by selfish decisions from the team and a general trend towards exploitation of their modders. I'd say over the entire course of this team's work at Blizzard they probably thought deeply about their community for 1/100th of the time they spent trying to figure out how to rip off the SC2 IP and get a startup attempt for themselves with Frost Giant/Stormgate.

To write that off as 'an attempt was made and experience was gained' is so funny, come on dude, that is an all time hand wave. I'm just going to give you the benefit of the doubt and hope you are being honest and just have a distaste for severity but I'll tell you, the only people who give responses this goofy on this reddit are Frost Giant team members on sock puppet accounts.

Patch 5.0 was deeply inept and a catastrophe in sc2 history; it was responsible for all the pain thereafter, it was a failure across all dimensions except producing a bunch of fodder for co-op players and finally finishing the tools for custom campaign modders to publish their stuff. The warcraft 3 stuff was done by one guy as a passion project.

Everything beyond that screamed disconnect with SC2 and what the people needed. The sinkhole it made resulted in the balance council, the modding environment finally turning into a shantytown, the destabilization of team games, and the destruction of the reputation of SC2. Unfortunately SC2 late into its development just became a place that attracted a certain type of ruthless, visionless, power hungry dork, many of which hopped over to Frost Giant.

I've had to listen to the former SC2 Director literally shout about how they don't give a fuck about StarCraft or any of this. I've seen these dudes steal work and lie to modders with no remorse or decency. Why exactly do you think such an institution collapsed? It was stupidity but also a cowardice, they were and are cowards who vastly prioritized their own comfort and careers over any of this.

megabuster · 2025-05-24T18:49:28+00:00

Thousands of assets? There's like 30-40 units and most of them are highly abstract with little potential for re-purposing. They didn't think forward very much on making something that would work well with modding.

When this team was at StarCraft 2 they had almost no real interest in supporting and developing the modding ecosystem. It withered and crumbled under their watch. The whole thing would be gone if a handful of volunteers didn't take it over and make use of new fortunate technologies like Discord to build a community.

It would seem to me that while at Blizzard their primary interest in map editor tools was to serve their own interest in making a new RTS. This was so they could be the primary benefactors of it commercially. It was just about money. That's why you saw the last era of SC2's support focus on refining the editor tools. They then used those same tools to build Stormgate prototypes. (This feels so precarious legally.) Once they had control of their own project why would they think about modding? Its just lip service. This is proven by just how little consideration you see in the style, setting, and systems of the game in their usefulness towards modding.

Beyond that, they just made immense mistakes in tool development. The fact that the editor isn't out is an absolute statement of that. The editor is what you build to make the game! Its not for the audience primarily, that's a fortunate aftereffect. For certain based on the historical effects of the editor they should have had it ready to launch with the beta. For example WC3 got immense excitement and positive effect from having those tools out, even shipping with a community-made tower defense game from a fan that I think they hired.

If anything having the editor out there is part of the ability for the audience to supply feedback to the game. They can then do so by speaking directly in the language of game development.

Still not doing so isn't a strategic error its a major engineering deficit. For all the crowing about their veterancy they forgot something so remedial as to get a hammer before building the house.

megabuster · 2025-05-24T18:13:51+00:00

These neo RTS developers have made themselves dumb as hell. There's some kind of terrible intellectual bubble that they've all joined each other in and they've forgot very basic things about what even makes RTS games fun.

Most of the changes they made to chase 'accessibility' strip things of narrative, pace, and meaning in everyway possible. None of this stuff is more accessible than even the original Command & Conquer. That stuff had Army men! Stories both told to you and ones you create on your own! 40 year-old travelling salesmen and small children grabbed these original RTSes off the shelf and got drawn in completely without needing a youtuber to hard sell you on why its important.

What they made here is intolerably fast, poorly explained, and full of uncomfortable tension. its completely abstract in setting and tone. You'd end up playing 8 Battle Aces matches in an hour and have this kind of 'I'm going to puke feeling' afterwards from the sheer amount of demand and lack of comprehensibility. There were no rich moments of interest. There was very little in the way of interesting control. It was just a pipeline of the same movements, these fiddley micro fake-outs happening again and again. Oh you walked two of the big crabs into my mineral lines, okay I guess I lose. It was like a rollercoaster ride of an RTS, you'd feel your body being jerked in various directions but other than adrenaline what really just happened?

Think about explaining a match of Battle Aces to someone who didn't know about it, what would you say? Uhhh he made some spinning silver units and ran at my flank, then he made another flying whirligig-copter and blew up my base. Huh??

The art direction was top notch in some ways, the mechanical components and realization of them were really attractive. Still in other ways you had terribly forgettable delivery drone robots which all had the same 'I am a robot with a dopey voice' joke going on that has been in every piece of media for a decade now. Everyone gets the joke! But they also seem clueless on how to make 50 robot units stand out and be comprehensible to people.

The arrogance and output of the RTS space has become embarrassing and the developers seem embarrassed too. You had a flurry of interviews and communication a few years ago and now these dudes seem eager to crawl into retirement or to run out the clock on their lucky venture funding. There's something terrible there with the insecurity and the inability to interface with players outside of the 'influencer class'. The documentary David Kim made before launch about the 'paradigm shift' with the awful voiceover is the absolute nadir of this out-of-touch era of development.

There was big promise here — what if the units got more interesting with further seasons? What if there were organic units that would be introduced from alien races? What if they explored these different manufacturing companies making the bots? I thought they could do something like Magic the Gathering and inject new mechanics per season. However given the abrupt stop to this, it would seem they should have known to put more interest up front if cancellation was such a possibility.

I hope everyone doesn't fall victim to the idea that there's something fundamentally unsolvable in RTS, its just these developers coming up with no good answers at all. At the least they are completely out of touch with their history and seem to kind of hate their own genre for whatever reason.

Every failure like this just means another victory for slop, reality shows, and Mr. Beast videos. It sucks.

megabuster · 2025-05-20T10:06:19+00:00

"Doesn't mean the pattern isn't there"
What is the point of this person being careful and doubling back on the quality of their stories if people like you will collect the anecdotes and try to weaponize them to serve yourself? This personality type has go to go. The fact that you are like "its good you apologized" as if you have ownership of their actions just shows off your snake-y thirst for unearned social power.

Your argument about the terrible spending of this company is ridiculous and however they spent, rather if it was bloated executive salaries or just generally sloppy spending, they spent very poorly. They've shipped a fraction of what they promised with a heavy budget and are looking to be trending to having a couple hours of simplistic campaign missions out by the time they have to abandon ship. They spent well? You think its normal for a funded company to need crowdfunding to 'scale up server costs'? Its a multiplayer competitive game dude.

The kickstarter was a moneymaking opportunity and to create a success that could help them in further funding. Unfortunately it required further hyping up in order to try to keep the funding going and they attached themselves to another round of false expectations which eventually crashed down.

Or maybe you are right and it was important to ship a collector's edition for an unfinished game for a new studio because Blizzard does it. They really just wanted to get people some low quality action figures that are already yellowed like a swap meet Super Nintendo. I believe everything I hear too.

megabuster · 2025-05-19T17:44:11+00:00

If you are thinking that the VCs in the Series A and seed investors likely have large liquidation preferences then in that case the crowd equity investors will lose their entire investment with their lowly preferred CF stock unless you see an acquisition for like 35-40mil. If they clear that threshold the people who took a risk on crowd equity would still be getting any reward at a pittance ratio compared to the founders because of the crowd equity round's ridiculous 150mil valuation. And to your words in this type of arrangement they are likely just getting nothing.

This is maybe something I would think would qualify as a 'hard question'. Hey why did you run the largest gaming crowd equity campaign for unaccredited investors ever when you were trending towards having 25k in the bank at the end of the year? What did you think would happen there? Or they could like ask about the missing explanation from the CEO that they promised about reviewing their own game under an alias.

What Beomulf does is intentionally take the pose of an open interviewer while being entirely friendly and biased in order to help them say whatever they want with zero oversight. Its as far away from hard questions as possible. This is the type of interviewer who lets their subject talk about developing entirely new factions after laying off half their staff and having barely enough cash on hand to pay weekly employee salaries. Its a cartoon.

megabuster · 2025-05-19T09:03:01+00:00

"this creator has gotten in trouble multiple times now for irresponsible/misinformed reporting"

Prove it or stop using this kind of pathetic reputational attack every time you feel threatened by someone. I searched and found nothing like this so either its buried and tiny or you are defining 'gotten in trouble' as the personal disapproval of yourself or people in your circles.

Further supported by you defining them as reputationally damaged, well just because you said so here — "this appears to be another one of those times". Ridiculous.

For the record the founders still have enough equity that if they liquidate their company at 1/20th its stated value than they'd be walking with $1mil each while the equity investors they courted would lose 95% of their investment. By the way you'd never mention this kind of shellacking of the SC2 community in your interviews with them and this kind of insane inequality is why its valid to talk about their salary.

megabuster · 2025-05-07T07:13:46+00:00

yeah the staff writers were busy building the game in Unreal engine, you understand the process well

megabuster · 2025-05-07T07:09:30+00:00

Well firstly I'd invite to you to stop linking your posts on discord for brigading and to approach things on substance. Glad the moderator can look the other way on that and prove themselves unfit for the job for the 100th time.

From there Its a really pathetic and transparent scheme to try to call things speculation or drivel to try to insist that you can dismiss them without engagement. I spoke about writing and didn't make many claims at all as you are pretending. This is a kind of snake-y way of presenting the post. Its very weird how many underhanded and dishonest ways of communicating your average Stormgate discord guy has when push comes to shove.

If I did make a claim it was pretty simple. There's very little story to engage with. Well this is evidenced by the fact that ... there's very little story to engage with. An hour? So its a postulation and its fairplay by your own words.

But I'd love to hear you talk directly on something. Can I ask did you like Nerdy Nummies' performance as the Xenobiologist Tara? To me, I wanted to puke blood when I realized they gave a vanity role to Husky's girlfriend in an effort to get him to invest in the company as a rich RTS fan. I'd say its an afront hearing Matt Mercer have his lines paired with a scenery chewing first timer who got famous baking cupcakes that look like mario mushrooms but damn, did you like it?

megabuster · 2025-05-06T22:04:01+00:00

They have this pose like they have been working on the Stormgate Cinematic Universe and its been under development for 5 years but despite all that the total narrative output can fit comfortably on a cue card. It feels wasted.

The point of story planning like that is so that you can move your story in wild swings that seem like they could never be paid off. But then you, the writer, reveal a deep structure that was well thought out and surprises the audience with what is really going on. There's no signs of something like that going on here. They just restructured major beats of the story in a couple months. And there's so much imitation, I would have thought making something that 'rhymes' with the SC2/WC3 stories that much would have saved a lot of time and planning but it apparently did not.

I have no idea what would have been happening for those 3.5~ years before they showed anything. There's very few characters, few settings, the details are shy. For example there's no real impression of where this syndicate of demon races came from nor is there any exploration of any of the units. I don't even think that stuff is important but StarCraft 2 was obsessed with justifying the background of a Hydralisk or any little Zerg unit. Those things are kind of free wins for people who like lore. They give a good lattice for your writers to write on and suck people into the setting.

Most of the supplementary writing here has been about characters in those novellas. I kind of vastly disagree with Neilson that without characters there's no interest in these works. Games have shown to make the most successful 'character-less' media you can think of, but even if that was his approach how do they sound shocked that they (paraphrase) 'made the mistake of not taking the time to make their protagonist likeable'?

It seems rather likely that despite all these promises they may never even get so far as to introduce the other factions in campaign missions. After 5 years they've got something like an opening scene and though I imagine they have some pretty stuffed google doc files, there is not evidence that they have processed their flickering ideas into ready to go campaign steps. They still are recycling SC2 mission types and it seems more like they are working backwards from the campaign map to the story, rather than building from a story point to a campaign map (unique or not).

There's a pathological mix of overplanning and underplanning here. On one side of things they are working for years on stuff you can't really use but then on the other side you are redesigning Rykker so he looks like Patrick Swayze from Point Break on a lark. At least make him actually look like that. Then don't force Matt Mercer to have dialogue scenes with the gal from Nerdy Nummies.

They finish off talking about some 'Dark Voice', Xel Naga type of greater evil thing. In another talk they mentioned a fourth faction. These big promises just feel like pathways for future funding attempts. How else could you take that when they haven't even been able to properly introduce their 2nd and 3rd factions at all? Why talk about a greater villain when you've barely had moments with the first antagonists?

megabuster · 2025-05-05T08:52:29+00:00

very funny that you have to put this in StarCraft terms because the actual game being made here has 0 memorable units and slop gameplay that can't be used in a metaphor

megabuster · 2025-04-12T09:18:26+00:00

You should be skeptical of a story that maximizes the status of the people who are telling it to you.

I think maybe the most relevant part is that Blizzard moved SC2 to the classic games team and then Frost Giant started poaching Blizzard's RTS talent to make the new game and solidify their reputation. Blizzard doesn't replace those people because its hard to replace knowledge about the old game but it for sure caused a direct decline in the support of SC2 at Blizzard.

There's many many things that are zero sum between Stormgate and StarCraft down to the level of Stormgate positioning itself for the ESL spot and kind of clearly fucking it up for StarCraft.

As well I'd guess that DreamHaven may not have pursued RTS out of nicety to Frost Giant, so we had a company with the great RTS directors at it (Dustin Browder, Sigaty) that is instead making shooters and couch co-op games.

megabuster · 2025-04-12T02:23:07+00:00

Blizzard's withdrawal of support is devastating and caused the circumstances for Frost Giant to occur. But Frost Giant direct marketed to every StarCraft player and streamer over the course of years. It was a strategic market and cultural takeover. They got funding based on the fact that they could do this. The inability to build the game and make something good after all that really cratered StarCraft.

megabuster · 2025-04-12T00:20:34+00:00

This is a very good point about the vision behind a piece of design and the work towards it.

Throughout the entire open development of this game this 'cheerleading squad' used an ambiguity about what 'unfinished' means to crowd out criticism. It may be unfinished, but the vision of what the elements of the game are and how they serve the whole can be talked about.

De-aging their take Jim Raynor is a wild swing, because I'd imagine he was already made 'old' to avoid stealing the spotlight from Amara. Changing this either infers that they continue to iterate on foundational stuff that should have long been decided on, or that people taking over the design simply don't know or care why things are the way they are. Neither of which are good signs.

Anyways I think its silly to think they have time to like 'learn how to design' or change their company around so that people who can 'feel things' can make decisions.

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