Frost Giant recently announced a closed beta for Stormgate, an upcoming spiritual successor to Blizzard RTS games from a bunch of ex-Blizzard developers. I’m pretty excited about it and I figured I would write on it.
A Good Thing’s Coming
I find the discourse around Stormgate to be pretty strange. I know that’s not a particularly insightful or precise comment, but I guess it is what it is. People just seem a little bit too excited or a little bit too cynical, with little of the way in-between. I find it off-putting; it just doesn’t feel real to me, and it makes me think none of it represents actual organic thoughts, and is mostly just endless posturing for not-very-good reasons.
I, by contrast, am a certified normal person, so I wanted to leverage this website I setup as a vanity project on my thoughts on RTS games, to talk about Stormgate’s upcoming closed beta and what it might mean for competitive RTS. I’ve critiqued the game’s marketing in the past, and while I stand by those thoughts, I think it’s also a fair response that I should try harder to assume good intentions when it comes to Frost Giant - particularly given that Age of Empires IV and ZeroSpace have been comparatively more brazen in their handling of relationships with prominent community members. (Notably, the content-creator-driven push for Sultans, featuring a leaky NDA and news spread across many large creators, put me off.) And I took that idea seriously, spending the past several months writing a variety of neutral analytical pieces, from accessibility to automated construction to an overview of Stormgate’s first publicly available gameplay footage. I also participated in the closed alphas (yes, I am under NDA) and tried my best to be a positive force of providing useful feedback.
I’ve been pretty happy with this play-and-ignore-the-noise approach to RTS. I feel like we’ve reached the end game of Web 2.0, the point at which user-generated content becomes so incomprehensible that it’s actually more enjoyable to just play the games (Age 4, most recently) and avoid everything else. I did receive permission from Frost Giant to share whether or not I enjoyed the Stormgate alpha, and I can say with confidence that I did indeed enjoy it. I’m looking forward to the beta, too.
I think for one thing there’s just a basic drought of new RTS games with compelling competitive multiplayer. To be sure, I think that RTS as a genre is doing really well, and anyone who tells you otherwise almost certainly does not actually play the games of old that they claim to be better. The fact that there are so many solid titles to look forward to - Stormgate, Immortal, etc - signals the ongoing strength of the genre, to me at least, and not the Hollywood underdog movement that people sometimes like to imagine.
And yet I’d also say that the competitive side specifically has seen better days. Take, for example, the bright-eyed wonder of the initial boom of tournaments in the late 90s and mid-00s; the early days of Wings of Liberty (from what I hear); the resurgence of StarCraft II in the early-to-middle years of Legacy; and the huge pandemic boom, across the board for the entire genre, as just a few examples.
I think about those time periods as we approach the end of 2023. I wrote earlier this year on StarCraft II’s ongoing longevity; that continues to be true, and yet the lack of active development, a professional scene that’s especially challenging for one race, and a fumbled community patch have all taken their toll. Competitive 1v1 has bled 20% of its games played per day year-over-year. Competitive Age of Empires II, meanwhile, is stable but slowly shrinking; its 1v1 ladder is down 10-20% in size from a year or two back, and its content ecosystem is no longer large enough to sustain some of its largest creators. And I can only speak for myself when I say that the game’s development trajectory would benefit from hewing closer to the core gameplay and away from gimmicky designs.
Age 4 is solid, surely, and I had a great deal of fun grinding to top 200. But I’m burned out on the game, and even a 3-week break wasn’t enough to rekindle my interest. The pacing is still a little slow for my taste; the end game feels endless at times, and there are too many turtley playstyles in the meta. But more generally, the title suffers from the same fundamental problem as competitive Warcraft III - it just doesn’t have a large enough player population at the present time, and that makes the ladder frustrating to grind for anyone that’s not already very high level. That, plus Steam family sharing, aggressive rating decay and a lack of developer moderation, and sometimes it feels like every game you play is a mismatch. (And that’s just 1v1 - mismatched team games are probably the most frequent complaint on Reddit.)
Basically, RTS as a genre is doing well, but competitive 1v1 specifically would benefit from a shot in the arm. And I think that’s a great opportunity for Stormgate, a game that’s reasonably likely to provide at least a couple good years of interesting competitive iteration. And more importantly, it’s a game that is actually coming - first alpha, now beta, and then early access.
It’s always fun to play competitive RTS games in their early days. But here we have the promise of an experienced, professional development team; sufficient community interest and spillover from other games to drive a decently large player population, at least early on; and a game that, honestly, just looks pretty decent. The Closed Beta is exciting to me, and I feel good enough about the game that I feel comfortable recommending that you go and sign up for the Beta if you haven’t already.
I’m not here to tell you that Stormgate is going to save the genre or anything like that, mostly because it doesn’t need saving. I think there’s lots of cool stuff happening in this space, from Sultans and The Mountain Royals to Immortal and Tempest Rising and all that. I myself think a remaster of StarCraft II would be wildly successful, too. But I think Stormgate is going to be good, and I think the promised years of content are going to be at least worth putting a few hundred hours in, and I think everyone should enjoy the excitement of looking forward to that.
What I think people should probably avoid doing is overhyping the game, because I think that’ll just lead to disappointment. For me personally that’s why I never endorsed the game up until now - it wouldn’t mean anything, and would accomplish little more than lessening my credibility (which, as we all know, is the gold standard in this community). There’s some kind of reality distortion field that this game seems to so reliably bring about, and from my perspective it just prompts cynicism about people’s intentions and ultimately lessens the positive feeling of anticipation. I think the title would genuinely benefit from the discourse taking things down a notch.
Final Thoughts
And that’s it! I know it’s a bit odd to write an entire article on the idea that an upcoming game is probably going to be decent and worth a play. But I feel like the coverage I usually read about it is so exaggerated and breathless (in both directions) that I wanted to write something a bit more down the middle. I’m looking forward to the game, and with any luck it should be a good time.
Until next time,
brownbear
You can sign up for Stormgate’s beta here: https://playstormgate.com/
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Well, see you in December on the ladder or in the coop mode then hehehe