EPTExpectations being high or low are irrelevant.
False advertising is evident. https://imgur.com/a/4AJVr13
Game failure is objective.
I've seen a non-banned playercount post on Reddit. Sparty, go get em'.
Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 258
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ChillFlame
121 Posts
Expectations being high or low are irrelevant. False advertising is evident. https://imgur.com/a/4AJVr13 Game failure is objective. I've seen a non-banned playercount post on Reddit. Sparty, go get em'. | ||
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_Spartak_
Turkey406 Posts
On August 29 2025 21:08 ETisME wrote: Stormgate will have a playerbase skewed more towards playing the ladder. I have seen someone who plays both games mention that Stormgate ladder was more active. SG definitely doesn't have enough players to have a functioning ladder system where matchmaking can find you a player of similar skill level quickly. So neither would Scouring.The scouring has higher 24hr peak than stormgate now, no reason why it can't have functioning ladder? | ||
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qwerty4w
35 Posts
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SoleSteeler
Canada5440 Posts
They also grossly overestimated how much the community would be willing to support them (fund them) through Early Access. In a world where they had an even larger budget (or used it more wisely) and more time, I don't think it's inconceivable they could make a really great game. Even in uThermal's video, he said (paraphrasing) "At first I was having fun, but then some bugs and issues stopped me from finishing my 100 game commitment" - his critiques were: dropped inputs, bad balance on some units (he specified fiends), hard to tell the power of some units/abilities (for example, miasma looks unassuming but does a lot of damage), random bugs (audio/lag) and slowness to fix these issues. He still feels Stormgate has potential, but is unsure if they'll make it due to their financial issues. I think that's a fair assessment. In my mind, I've been enjoying Stormgate, but always expecting it to be more in the future. I've been patiently waiting for things like: tier 3 units, high ground advantages, more maps (we have so many good community maps now... please put them on ladder), economy rework/tweaking, more spiky/impactful units (like using a reaver drop to turn around a losing game). There was mention of more units a while ago to fill in niches. They did experiment with 1v1 a bit this past year: removed creeps, sped up units and the economy. Those are pretty major, but I was hoping for more unit reworks/additional functionality beyond balancing the existing units. I had expected more shakeups to really feel like 1v1 was being more developed. Adding more units/functionality/maps/features could have really helped. I feel like they've been way too safe in regards to 1v1. The lore feeling weak (to me) has more been about the lore/campaigns being majorly unfinished. We barely know anything about Infernal/Celestial. The Vanguard campaign wasn't too bad but definitely a solid 6 or 7/10 for most people. I felt that it did feel "complete" but also a bit rushed. It lacked that Blizzard polish for sure. | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada985 Posts
On August 29 2025 18:30 _Spartak_ wrote: You say "multiple cracks at campaign, 1v1 and other modes" and then go on to say the scope was not issue. They could have had a bigger and more polished campaign and a more complete versus mode if they limited their scope. They don't even have all the units for 1v1 and only a 12 mission campaign. Not to mention the rven more unfinished modes. They didn't have "multiple cracks" at any of the modes, they barely had one crack. You don't get "fun" out of thin air. You get it through iteration and you get more iteration if you have more time. Their revamped campaign is much more fun than their early access launch campaign. How is that possible if they were fundamentally incapable of producing a fun game due to lack of skills and/or vision? In game development, the iteration to "find the fun" is supposed to be done early on, with a small team and a very rough prototype. A good example is Breath of the Wild: the team wanted to experiment with a bunch of new mechanics, so they whipped up a very simple 2D version of what would become the shrines (dungeons) and iterated on it until it was fun. Once they had that nailed down, they could build the main game. Frost Giant took the opposite approach. They ramped up very quickly to a large team and started working on a full campaign with cutscenes and a overarching story. When they released in Early Access, they fully expected players to be excited enough by the six released missions to want to find out what happened next. But it turned out that their story ideas were half-baked, their cutscenes were laughable, and the whole thing was a pathetic rip-off of the Arthas story, only with poor character motivation, goofy character models, and nonsensical character interactions. So they had to throw away the entire campaign and start again from scratch. Yes, technically, you could say that the launch campaign is "more fun" than the original EA campaign. You could say that. But the EA campaign was at best a 2/10, maybe a 1/10, and the launch campaign is at best a 4/10. Maybe if they threw the whole thing away and started from scratch a second time, they might be able to produce a 6/10 campaign. But this is clearly not a sustainable way to do game development. The scope was definitely an issue. Frost Giant overestimated their ability to deliver a game with that many game modes. But they also overestimated their ability to deliver quality in any aspect of game development. It's not just the campaign that's bad. The unit models are bad, the unit interactions are bad, the game balance is bad, the sounds are terrible and buggy, the game itself runs at a low framerate and suffers from jitters and lost inputs, it goes on and on and on. Another ten million and another year of development probably wouldn't have fixed that. | ||
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_Spartak_
Turkey406 Posts
On August 29 2025 23:39 qwerty4w wrote: I remember Tempest Rising's lead designer Wayward Strategy and Sins of a Solar Empire 2's lead designer Sovereign Echo both mentioned their dev team's size and budget are only a fraction of Frost Giant's. I don't think you need 3x or 5x resource of those AA games to make a really successful RTS, most if not all of the bigger RTS titles around mid to late 2000s likely cost less than that, such as the original SoaSE. You don't need a massive budget to make a successful RTS, yeah. You do need it if you want to make a Blizzard style RTS and want to appeal to a large audience. That audience has a higher bar of quality. Tempest Rising released with no replays, no observer mode, no fully customizable hotkeys, no map editor, no co-op mode and no 3rd faction. It still had positive reception from the C&C community. While they can be praised for prioritizing correct things and managing the scope of the game well, it also tells a story about different levels of expectation from different RTS fanbases. | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21738 Posts
On August 30 2025 00:48 _Spartak_ wrote: What SG delivered is so far off the mark of hitting a 'Blizzard style RTS' that Its barely worth talking about.You don't need a massive budget to make a successful RTS, yeah. You do need it if you want to make a Blizzard style RTS and want to appeal to a large audience. That audience has a higher bar of quality. Tempest Rising released with no replays, no observer mode, no fully customizable hotkeys, no map editor, no co-op mode and no 3rd faction. It still had positive reception from the C&C community. While they can be praised for prioritizing correct things and managing the scope of the game well, it also tells a story about different levels of expectation from different RTS fanbases. They didn't just miss the mark, the mark is in a different galaxy. | ||
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Gescom
Canada3440 Posts
On August 30 2025 00:48 _Spartak_ wrote: You don't need a massive budget to make a successful RTS, yeah. You do need it if you want to make a Blizzard style RTS and want to appeal to a large audience. That audience has a higher bar of quality. Tempest Rising released with no replays, no observer mode, no fully customizable hotkeys, no map editor, no co-op mode and no 3rd faction. It still had positive reception from the C&C community. While they can be praised for prioritizing correct things and managing the scope of the game well, it also tells a story about different levels of expectation from different RTS fanbases. I'm still struggling to understand your point. AA studio attempts to make a AAA game... bangs their head against the wall for 5 years without ever adjusting, crashes and burns because of lack of focus, scope control, poor management, and inability to be agile. "Oh well, this was unavoidable, its just the nature of a top notch RTS." Make a AA game. Have success. Expand the game over time with your now proven recipe. It's actually laughably simple. Even for the case of SC2, the scope and quality of the game in 2016 LOTV was another tier above 2010 WOL. Not sure if FG is even alive right now, but we're still seeing the same thing manifest right now. After four weeks of the game being out why haven't they done (or even said) anything. Doesn't take a 100 person team to issue a numeric balance patch, fix a couple bugs, post a youtube video, or even issue an official statement on discord..... | ||
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qwerty4w
35 Posts
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RogerChillingworth
2938 Posts
he did This isn't worth anyone's time. Share your Scouring gameplay videos or whatever else you're enjoying or not enjoying in the DORF waiting room and let Spartak eat his own boogers. Like seriously. Even though this game ended like a Sonny Bono ski trip, we can pretend it died peacefully in its sleep. | ||
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Gescom
Canada3440 Posts
Does that make me a bad person? | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada985 Posts
On August 30 2025 01:37 RogerChillingworth wrote: This isn't worth anyone's time. I mean, you're not wrong. But I find myself strangely compelled to try and analyze why everything went so utterly pear-shaped with Stormgate. On the surface, the answer is obvious: any time you see people touting the fact that they used to work at a big and successful company, the red flags fly straight up. How many flashy startups from "former Google" and "former Apple" employees crashed and burned? Is it all of them? Still, there's something about this whole mess that I find fascinating. It's a unique kind of game development failure, in a world with plenty of examples to choose from. Stormgate didn't fail in the same way as, say, Shroud of the Avatar, even though there are some similarities there. It wasn't exactly Concord, either. It was its own special, beautiful disaster. | ||
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crablogic
4 Posts
To take the most egregious example: was there not a single voice, either in Tim's head or from one of their employees, saying that they needed to nail the pricing and packaging of the different options? Or else, as actually happened, their strongest supporters would feel ripped off and hate them for it? Don't tell me they didn't have time for this either; there's no excusing this one. GiantGrantGames here is complaining at the start about how his Ultimate and Deluxe packages both don't include the OST! . That's not nearly the worst of it either; there are too many other examples of this to list, but they're all over the Steam reviews and forums. Was everyone at FG drinking the Kool-Aid? Did Tim shut down all dissent and debate? Did they just never hire anyone with the experience or business sense to know this? Or how about the art? To make an unfair comparison: Apple didn't need community feedback to know that the iPhone shouldn't have a wheel like the iPod, and shouldn't dial calls by spinning it like a rotary phone https://sonnydickson.com/2017/01/06/the-ipod-based-interface-that-lost-out-to-ios-for-the-iphone/. Apple had taste, and they threw out designs that weren't up to snuff. FG really thought their post-apocalyptic human survivors should have machines that look like fresh-out-of-the-box plastic figurines. Why? You could go on like this, but we can only speculate what really happened until some (former) employees spill the beans. | ||
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ChillFlame
121 Posts
he did But does he have a secret tunnel into his appartement to do this covertly? | ||
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_Spartak_
Turkey406 Posts
On August 30 2025 01:20 qwerty4w wrote: I don't think it would. It didn't in the heyday of RTS and definitely would't today. We will see I suppose. If Frost Giant messed up and it is so easy to make a Blizzard-style RTS, we will definitely see one succeed at a big scale. So far, all we are seeing are some games that people don't care about except when they want to invoke their names to use as a stick to beat Stormgate with.If you make a solid AA-level Blizzard style RTS, like Armies of Exigo, or a great 2D RTS like StarCraft, I think it would likely be well-received in today's market. Then you can use the revenue to add more features and content or make a bigger sequel next time. | ||
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Captain Peabody
United States3111 Posts
I have been following SG development since the inception, checked in on it from time to time, but have never really thought about actually downloading and playing. The reason, at least for me, is exceptionally simple: because it looks like games I've already played before. I still regularly play SC2; I've also played BW and WC3 and AoE. When I watch videos of SG, my immediate impression is that I'm watching an uncanny-valley version of precisely the 2-3 RTS games that I've played extensively and enjoyed thrown into a blender. I see Terran SCVs mining minerals on a WC3 map; I see an Undead player rushing Zerglings. This effect, to me, is not positive, but confusing and oddly unsettling. This is not despite the fact that I enjoy those games, but because of it. If I wanted to enjoy those games I would simply play them. Not only that, but fundamentally SG as it exists now is a competitive RTS 1v1 game, with all the basic frustrations and work that that implies for a player, particularly a casual player. Playing a slightly different version of games I know with slightly different races and units and mechanics to learn doesn't strike me as fun; it sounds frustrating and confusing and like work. And that's not even to mention that the game is incomplete and likely to change massively even if I did work at it. If I want to take some of my very limited gaming time to "get good" at a game, I would simply work to get better at SC2, a game I enjoy a lot and am familiar with and which still regularly delivers cool and new moments and which I have worked to improve at for years. I admit that at this stage at my life I'm a hard sell; but, particularly for a F2P RTS game, not that hard of a sell. For me, the fun of downloading a new RTS game would be less to have a slightly updated or altered or remixed 1v1 RTS grind, but to have some cool new things to play around with: to see the cool new art, or the cool new units, or the cool new races, or the cool new mechanics, or the cool new concepts. To capture some of the excitement of the games I enjoy when they were new, and mess around in a way that I can't really with the games that I've been playing for 10+ years. But from my engagement with it, SG doesn't really seem to offer much that's cool and new. The races, as I said, just seem like remixed Blizzard RTS races; ditto for the maps, the mechanics, the interface, etc. Even the campaign just seems like uncanny-valley, oddly-AI-seeming Blizzard takeoffs. The fact that the game isn't as polished as SC2 or WC3 I really don't think is fundamentally the problem. People like me don't notice bugs really. If it was cool and exciting, then I would want to play around with it; and if I played around with it and enjoyed it, I would start to play it more seriously. At the very least, I would be willing to plunk down some cash for it. Oddly enough, this is something that SC2 did very well that I think isn't sufficiently commented on. Yes, SC2 had the AAA Blizzard polish; but it was also in a lot of ways very incomplete and flawed upon release. But SC2, from the very first reveal video (where half of the units didn't even function or were completely changed) was cool and exciting. It very much didn't just try to appeal to people who liked BW and wanted more of the same or a slight remix; in fact, the marketing and updating tended to turn those people off, as I remember well from TL at the time. But I was absolutely transfixed by the first SC2 reveal video, and watched it over and over again: because it was all structured around these "cool new exciting" moments. And this wasn't just window-dressing, but extended to a large degree to the development process itself. For a game that was fundamentally based around innovating on a successful model, the SC2 team went hard on making sure that each race was centered around these cool, new, powerful-feeling units and mechanics that would grab and excite people and, most importantly, make them want to play around with them. The core fantasy of RTS games, in my opinion, is precisely this idea of being in control, of getting to play around with cool stuff and cool units and make them do cool things, in big numbers, to try things for yourself. And from the first reveal, SC2 made people want to play around with things, to try things for themselves. The Colossus reveal was thrilling! These giant War of the World walkers frying zerglings made me want to fry Zerglings. Hell, the zealot warp-in was exciting. The concept of Warp Gate I thought was crazy, and made me want to play around with it; I loved the idea of just clicking around and "transporting" units anywhere I wanted. Banelings were an absolutely crazy idea, and their reveal was devastating. "So many Banelings" was the iconic moment of early SC2 for a reason; because it made you want to mass a giant load of Banelings and a-move them into someone's base. And you could do it if you bought the game! That, again, is the RTS fantasy in a nutshell: getting to make big, exciting things happen for yourself. In between, there would be all the frustrations of a demanding click-heavy game with lots of annoying ways to lose; but those big moments were what you made you want to play the game in the first place. The "terrible, terrible damage" idea got made fun of, but it actually did contribute enormously to SC2's success. Overall, I think the person a few pages back that ascribed SG's failure to its inability to deliver on the idea of a "next-gen" RTS was fundamentally correct. RTS gamers aren't bored nostalgists who will get off on something that resembles the things they like as long as it's kind of new. They may play small games in the genre that remix existing concepts, but they will only get excited about things that seem dramatic and exciting and new. And the promise of SG wasn't that it would be an indie remix of Blizzard RTSes for people bored with their existing unit sets. It would be the next SC2; which meant, fundamentally, not "an uncanny-valley version of SC2 with a few features taken from WC3," but "the next, exciting step beyond SC2, the game-changer, the successor," which means necessarily the thing that has a whole new set of dramatic, exciting things for you, the RTS gamer, to hop in and take control of and play around with. And that, I would posit, is the fundamental disappointment that has prevented SG from gaining or retaining a playerbase. Anyway, I do wish everyone involved with the game well, and hope that the lessons learned from the project are learned by other people creating new RTSes. | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada985 Posts
On August 30 2025 06:27 Captain Peabody wrote: And the promise of SG wasn't that it would be an indie remix of Blizzard RTSes for people bored with their existing unit sets. It would be the next SC2; which meant, fundamentally, not "an uncanny-valley version of SC2 with a few features taken from WC3," but "the next, exciting step beyond SC2, the game-changer, the successor," which means necessarily the thing that has a whole new set of dramatic, exciting things for you, the RTS gamer, to hop in and take control of and play around with. And that, I would posit, is the fundamental disappointment that has prevented SG from gaining or retaining a playerbase. I think you hit the nail on the head there. One could argue that the inclusion of Stormgates in Stormgate (yo dawg, etc) was actually, finally, an example of Frost Giant trying to do this. But it was rushed and untested, like everything else in the game. It was too little and too late. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25539 Posts
We’ve all our own personal journeys and wants, I’m getting old man! Responsibilities too. I’d love to free up some time and really go all-in on a game again, and RTS is my personal jam. It’s also fun when you, and everyone else are all kinda experimenting with something fresh and working out the meta. Stormgate IMO isn’t some absolutely terrible game, it just doesn’t quite scratch that particular itch. By the time us mere plebs got our first shot at it, high level players who’d got playtest access had already somewhat fleshed out that particular iteration of the game, super minor complaint but a complaint nonetheless. Subsequently, they keep changing things, often for the better it must be said, but as you said, it’s less attractive to put the hours in to something that is so subject to change. Alternatively just gimme a niche, something you knock out the park. Again, personal biases aplenty here, but I’ve long felt team games in most RTS games I’ve played tend to suffer with balance, or quite samey optimal metas, and tend to be worse in those domains than 1v1. They’re still often fun to play, but rarely is it something I go all-in competitive with. If a team mode was genuinely great for competitive play that would be great, I could play with my folks, makes for a more social experience. Stormgate hasn’t thus far just failed to deliver on that, we haven’t even seen their twist yet. Maybe for the best, if it still needs work. That said, even if current builds lack a bit of true ‘wow’ factor, I think there’s perhaps enough there for people to be OK and wait and see. But Frost Giant exposed their potential audience to really underwhelming builds, multiple times and it’s super hard to recover from killing your own hype train | ||
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