Northern Ireland25694 Posts
Haha I was thinking of making this very topic on the subreddit! May as well join in with some of mine.
The chick who wrote the Celestial music - S,
An easy S. That theme is fantastic
The sound bloke/blokettes - F
The core sound(s) often aren’t good, there’s little weight to them. But worse still, it is mixed horribly. Levels are all over the place and not consistent, and it’s incredibly jarring because that is rare. Like genuinely I haven’t played an RTS (or indeed anything that isn’t like, an amateur for-fun indie game) where the sound is so over the place. We’re arguably at the stage where enough people, myself included have said ‘sound is the most underrated part of game design’, that it’s no longer underrated, but hey. I can open a BW VoD, alt tab to something else, and still kinda know what’s happening, the sound is that distinctive, and not just distinctive, but good. The boom of an Arclite shock cannon is bloody crunchy even when I’m not looking at it. Zealots smacking things sounds crunchy, marines going ‘that’s the stuff’ before shooting things with their Gauss rifles, that also sound like a weapon. It’s good shit.
The engine folks - B- or D
Some may feel the former is generous, but do bear with me, this will be the first of a pattern. I think its core feel ain’t bad, there some jankiness but as mentioned up the page, I think the game got prematurely exposed. My personal (unconfirmed) suspicion is that, especially in terms of performance, the game got hampered by a need to have flashy things like ‘the most responsive RTS ever’, and that wasn’t the engine folks’ call. If their work wasn’t made harder and gimped by requests from above to make those calls, and they themselves decided to gimp the game’s performance, then I’ll give them that D
Art Team - C
I don’t care as much about it as many do, if the game was banging, I don’t think it’s that big an issue. Equally overall it’s not well, good either. I think there’s some genuinely good work there, amongst some that’s well, not. I’m being perhaps more generous than I should, but as per a pattern across a lot of my ratings, I feel the art team got railroaded from above to pursue a certain style and aesthetic, and it’s not necessarily one they’d have went with if they were trusted to you know, do the game’s art design as per their job spec.
Writing Team - C-
I don’t care as much about others again, if the campaign blew my socks off with mechanical solidity and variety, I’m not that fussed if the story isn’t great. But man it’s, like insulting bad. It is genuinely just rehashes of previous Blizz RTS arcs, done worse. Another issue I have with the writing, and indeed the art is they don’t feel like they mesh at all. The art style kinda screams fun, irreverent campy goodness, like a Borderlands kinda tone, and the narrative tone is super, super serious business, it doesn’t even have the odd bit of light touches that Blizz would throw in to their classic campaigns, even when overall they were quite serious.
Monk - C (B- with caveats)
The problem here is a real lack of tangible vision, things feel more like throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks, rather than iterating and experimenting around a real solid core, established set of ideas. However in mitigation, his and the team’s work was thrown out and showcased way before it needed to be. In further, and bigger mitigation, I think Monk has talent, but eventually everyone finds their ceiling. He’s not a massively experienced professional RTS developer, and you’re making him your guy to oversee basically the whole core game, and ambitions of multiple modes to boot? Salah is a bloody good musician but you wouldn’t get him to pen a full symphony orchestra piece like. I think he’s got good ideas, but maybe put him under a real storied RTS lead rather than have him having to have the final say on everything.
The Community Team - B
Caveat, a lot of people complain about the Discord environment. I’m not on the Discord. From what I saw, they were pretty professional, enthusiastic and from where I’m sitting, they were continually tossed live hand grenades by their superiors to deal with.
Whoever OKed all the awful PR gaffes - F
‘Fully funded to release’TM, the Kickstarter is just for servers, biggest backers will get all content, the ninja edits. Every mistake made was then compounded by doubling down on them, and just shredded community goodwill. Community goodwill incidentally being the only reason a game miles out from release, with little tangible known about it ever got the funding, hype and eyes in the first place.
Tim Morten as a fundraiser and hype man - S
Can’t really be argued he ain’t good at that.
Tim Morten the visible face of Frost Giant the actual games studio - T
Can’t really be argued he is good at that
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On September 19 2025 07:54 WombaT wrote:
Writing Team - C-
I don’t care as much about others again, if the campaign blew my socks off with mechanical solidity and variety, I’m not that fussed if the story isn’t great. But man it’s, like insulting bad. It is genuinely just rehashes of previous Blizz RTS arcs, done worse. Another issue I have with the writing, and indeed the art is they don’t feel like they mesh at all. The art style kinda screams fun, irreverent campy goodness, like a Borderlands kinda tone, and the narrative tone is super, super serious business, it doesn’t even have the odd bit of light touches that Blizz would throw in to their classic campaigns, even when overall they were quite serious.
Sorry, I'm going to have to downgrade the writing team's score to an E because of the F-tier dialog, the completely nonsensical and stupid plot developments (oh no, we lost the mysterious pyramid artifact off-screen, oh, it doesn't matter because Amara can just run at it really fast and then defeat every single Infernal on Earth instantly, etc, etc) and the complete lack of voice acting direction.
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On September 19 2025 09:13 Jeremy Reimer wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2025 07:54 WombaT wrote:
Writing Team - C-
I don’t care as much about others again, if the campaign blew my socks off with mechanical solidity and variety, I’m not that fussed if the story isn’t great. But man it’s, like insulting bad. It is genuinely just rehashes of previous Blizz RTS arcs, done worse. Another issue I have with the writing, and indeed the art is they don’t feel like they mesh at all. The art style kinda screams fun, irreverent campy goodness, like a Borderlands kinda tone, and the narrative tone is super, super serious business, it doesn’t even have the odd bit of light touches that Blizz would throw in to their classic campaigns, even when overall they were quite serious.
Sorry, I'm going to have to downgrade the writing team's score to an E because of the F-tier dialog, the completely nonsensical and stupid plot developments (oh no, we lost the mysterious pyramid artifact off-screen, oh, it doesn't matter because Amara can just run at it really fast and then defeat every single Infernal on Earth instantly, etc, etc) and the complete lack of voice acting direction.
Hear hear
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EPT
