On October 22 2025 23:51 AmericanUmlaut wrote: It can simultaneously be true that making software is getting drastically easier over time and that making a AAA game is exorbitantly expensive and insanely difficult.
Making software is getting easier and easier, not just in the gaming space. I've been writing code professionally for twenty years, and everything is easier now than it used to be. Tools are better, languages are better, libraries are better, and these days we have AI assistants who have all the knowledge of StackOverflow and every manpage baked into their brains and never make a syntax error. It's amazing to me how much more productive I can be now than was possible when I started my career.
At the same time, the quality expected by consumers has grown dramatically over the same time period. I love games from the era when solo developers were writing them in assembler, but no one would play Adventure or Pitfall today. People expect better graphics, better animation, more responsive gameplay, a well-written story, networking, and, and, and... Just the manpower it takes to produce the 3D assets for a modern AAA game is an enormous investment.
It's true, and awesome, that one passionate dude can make Balatro or The Scouring. Those are awesome games. But they're categorically something different than what FG was trying to make. It's like you're looking at the failure of John Carter and say "it's ridiculous that they could blow $250 million on that; anyone with an iPhone and CapCut can make a movie today." It's not wrong that you can make a movie, even a great movie, with a couple hundred bucks and a dream, but it's absurd not to understand that you're not playing on the same field as someone trying to produce an international blockbuster.
Sure, making AAA games is expensive and hard. So why is a start up with 30 million in financing trying to do it?
That is the question Tim doesn't seem to answer when he complains about how expensive it is to make a successor to SC2. Blizzard didn't start by making Warcraft.
(and that is before we get into that based on the quality of product they delivered, I don't think another 100 million would have produced a smash hit)
It maybe wouldn’t have, and I’ve slammed FG as much as anyone.
Thing is FG did set out to make a big budget game, and they got a bunch of funding early, funding that completely dried up.
I think they should get cut more slack here than they get. In this domain, very specifically.
All other criticism aside, they raised 40 million pretty easily in the good times , and I don’t think they intended to build a 40 million game. They went ambitious, thought they’d be able to keep that coming, and general economic conditions squashed that
But then you’re left with your game with a 40 million budget, that you thought you’d have an 80 million or w/e budget on, you’ve promised a lot of things but now you don’t have the money to deliver.
Now, I don’t have enough time today to go through all the mistakes I think they made, independent of that, and pissing away the money they did have.
I think this one is a fair mitigation. A miscalculation
Like if I was a director making a blockbuster film, I’ve already got 40 million of budget, I’ll do crazy stuff, big set pieces or whatever.
If someone then goes ‘ok well you’re not getting more budget’ I’m stuck with like the first half of my movie being a big spectacular and it being very bare bones on the second half.
I am a big fan of RPG games. I don't know what I like more: RPG or RTS.
My favorite games of the genre are Fallout 2, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, Tyranny, and Fallout New Vegas.
If you played them, you see the pattern. None of them is finished. The reasons are different. Inadequate deadlines by publishers, low budget, and sometimes publishers went broke. Nevertheless, these are brilliant games, and when I think of them, I wonder what they could be if circumstances were more favorable.
When I think of SG, I think: "Why not sooner?". Nothing is interesting in what we got, and I don't have any reason to believe we would get something interesting if the devs had more money.
IMO, if Tim had $1b, he would do what Chris Roberts did. He would just ask for more.
Fair points. Tyranny is one of my all-time favourites, and New Vegas smacks hard.
To clarify, I’m talking about two different things. 1. To make an SC2/WC2 quality game takes a decent budget 2. How Frost Giant used their budget
The thing with Stormgate is, it doesn’t feel like a magical game that ran out of budget.
Like I don’t have that ‘what if?’ moment. I played some game called Rumbleverse with my kid which was basically Battle Royale but wrestling. Shit was fun as fuck and actually worked, didn’t do the numbers and got canned after a few weeks but both me and kiddo thought that was a shame. Indeed like a year+ later we were debating what to play and kiddo went ‘shame Rumbleverse is dead’, like it made an impression, game was fun as fuck but failed.
Stormgate doesn’t really have that
The game would simultaneously be more and less disappointing if it was shit hot, but merely ran out of money.
Nothing really grabbed me there. On the flipside, as per point 1 I think you need that level of ambition to maybe deliver such a product
On October 22 2025 23:51 AmericanUmlaut wrote: It can simultaneously be true that making software is getting drastically easier over time and that making a AAA game is exorbitantly expensive and insanely difficult.
Making software is getting easier and easier, not just in the gaming space. I've been writing code professionally for twenty years, and everything is easier now than it used to be. Tools are better, languages are better, libraries are better, and these days we have AI assistants who have all the knowledge of StackOverflow and every manpage baked into their brains and never make a syntax error. It's amazing to me how much more productive I can be now than was possible when I started my career.
At the same time, the quality expected by consumers has grown dramatically over the same time period. I love games from the era when solo developers were writing them in assembler, but no one would play Adventure or Pitfall today. People expect better graphics, better animation, more responsive gameplay, a well-written story, networking, and, and, and... Just the manpower it takes to produce the 3D assets for a modern AAA game is an enormous investment.
It's true, and awesome, that one passionate dude can make Balatro or The Scouring. Those are awesome games. But they're categorically something different than what FG was trying to make. It's like you're looking at the failure of John Carter and say "it's ridiculous that they could blow $250 million on that; anyone with an iPhone and CapCut can make a movie today." It's not wrong that you can make a movie, even a great movie, with a couple hundred bucks and a dream, but it's absurd not to understand that you're not playing on the same field as someone trying to produce an international blockbuster.
Sure, making AAA games is expensive and hard. So why is a start up with 30 million in financing trying to do it?
That is the question Tim doesn't seem to answer when he complains about how expensive it is to make a successor to SC2. Blizzard didn't start by making Warcraft.
(and that is before we get into that based on the quality of product they delivered, I don't think another 100 million would have produced a smash hit)
It maybe wouldn’t have, and I’ve slammed FG as much as anyone.
Thing is FG did set out to make a big budget game, and they got a bunch of funding early, funding that completely dried up.
I think they should get cut more slack here than they get. In this domain, very specifically.
All other criticism aside, they raised 40 million pretty easily in the good times , and I don’t think they intended to build a 40 million game. They went ambitious, thought they’d be able to keep that coming, and general economic conditions squashed that
But then you’re left with your game with a 40 million budget, that you thought you’d have an 80 million or w/e budget on, you’ve promised a lot of things but now you don’t have the money to deliver.
Now, I don’t have enough time today to go through all the mistakes I think they made, independent of that, and pissing away the money they did have.
I think this one is a fair mitigation. A miscalculation
Like if I was a director making a blockbuster film, I’ve already got 40 million of budget, I’ll do crazy stuff, big set pieces or whatever.
If someone then goes ‘ok well you’re not getting more budget’ I’m stuck with like the first half of my movie being a big spectacular and it being very bare bones on the second half.
Right, your movie would have these amazing pieces, and a lot of shit. It would be a bad movie and get panned for it but parts of it would, presumably, be good.
I don't see that in Stormgate. There is no 'the money dried up halfway through the campaign". That's why I say that I don't think budget was a problem at all for SG, the moment you get beyond the initial concept of "I want to make a SC2 successor" it goes wrong. From the very first screenshots they shared the art style was 'problematic'. Money and time would let them redesign the entire aesthetic, but wouldn't solve that they thought that was a good art style to go for in the first place. The engine, presumably the very thing they started with back when they thought they had plenty of money, can't run the unit counts they envisioned. They had to reduce unit caps in 2v2 to make it work and it probably is the reason 3v3, which I took to be the most anticipated gamemode, doesn't exist at all.
"We didn't have enough money to finish the game we wanted' is a convenient excuse that lets you avoid the confrontation that no amount of money would have made the end result not a disappointment.
OK, so, is the overall conclusion that the biggest problems with SG development were:
1. Lack of vision beyond "let's make a new SC2" 2. Not hiring people who would push the game in a better direction 3. The attitude of "we'll get there with more money"
From my perspective, as someone who came here because of SC2 but was also a huge WC3 and Dota stan, those would be my takeaways.
I agree with most folks here, to me, from day one when I saw the "let's make SC2 but more like LOL" artstyle and the generally bland and uninspired idea of "Demons, robots and humans" which is, let's be honest just Terrans can stay but let's change Protoss to robots and Zerg to Demons to make it less obvious it seemed clear to me that this is more of a money making scheme then a project with any passion behind it.
The fact that there was 0 technical innovation even mentioned at any point was also very worrisome.
Now, since I worked in the industry I'm aware that studios with millions of funding very rarely exhibit real passion, but this whole thing just seemed doomed form the get go, unless, you know, they actually listened to their intended fan-base instead of sticking to their guns.
On October 23 2025 00:19 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i think they started by porting over kids education titles. that got their foot in the door manipulating sprites and on screen action. and, it kept the lights on.
grassroots built studios are far healthier than places like 343 or Halo Games or whatever they are called now.
On October 21 2025 13:51 ChillFlame wrote: Sparty guy is really trying to keep it professional, but he's too biased to succeed :D
The funny part, he's certainly not the worst. For example, some of them just deleted my steam topic for "misinformation" despite it being 100% accurate and supported by facts and links. It's quite emotional, yes, but neither facts or emotions can be misinformation. https://archive.ph/1EoHl
They haven't bothered to describe the reason of the ban, so they just copy pasted the whole post in the text box as example of misinformation. The text box has max character limitation, so it just cropped my post in the middle :D
The post was quite popular, and after they deleted it, other folks on Steam started to repost it. Mods tried to ban or lock all the other posts, but gave up after some time.
So now there are ar least 2 copy pastas of my post, but my post is still deleted.
I think the real reason of the ban/post deletion is my post was the first one in SG community hub on Steam, with tons of comments and support, and was indexed by Google. Even now, if you type "Stormgate is scam", "Stormgate scandal" , or something similar, you'll see the post in the search results, despite my post being deleted.
I don't know any other explanation of why they deleted my topic, but let the copypastas be.
cool and interesting. thx for posting this.
343 started out with like 12 people
I don’t even understand what constitutes ‘grass roots’ in your conception.
On October 23 2025 00:19 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i think they started by porting over kids education titles. that got their foot in the door manipulating sprites and on screen action. and, it kept the lights on.
grassroots built studios are far healthier than places like 343 or Halo Games or whatever they are called now.
On October 21 2025 13:51 ChillFlame wrote: Sparty guy is really trying to keep it professional, but he's too biased to succeed :D
The funny part, he's certainly not the worst. For example, some of them just deleted my steam topic for "misinformation" despite it being 100% accurate and supported by facts and links. It's quite emotional, yes, but neither facts or emotions can be misinformation. https://archive.ph/1EoHl
They haven't bothered to describe the reason of the ban, so they just copy pasted the whole post in the text box as example of misinformation. The text box has max character limitation, so it just cropped my post in the middle :D
The post was quite popular, and after they deleted it, other folks on Steam started to repost it. Mods tried to ban or lock all the other posts, but gave up after some time.
So now there are ar least 2 copy pastas of my post, but my post is still deleted.
I think the real reason of the ban/post deletion is my post was the first one in SG community hub on Steam, with tons of comments and support, and was indexed by Google. Even now, if you type "Stormgate is scam", "Stormgate scandal" , or something similar, you'll see the post in the search results, despite my post being deleted.
I don't know any other explanation of why they deleted my topic, but let the copypastas be.
cool and interesting. thx for posting this.
343 started out with like 12 people
I don’t even understand what constitutes ‘grass roots’ in your conception.
Bungie got bought out by Microsoft and given a bunch of money to do Halo.
Marathon and Myth are two of my favourite franchises ever, but let’s not pretend they didn’t get a big cash injection that pushed them to the big time. Halo was originally meant to be as a Mac killer app game, in early reveals was a totally different game, and ended up selling Xboxes.
On October 22 2025 23:51 AmericanUmlaut wrote: It can simultaneously be true that making software is getting drastically easier over time and that making a AAA game is exorbitantly expensive and insanely difficult.
Making software is getting easier and easier, not just in the gaming space. I've been writing code professionally for twenty years, and everything is easier now than it used to be. Tools are better, languages are better, libraries are better, and these days we have AI assistants who have all the knowledge of StackOverflow and every manpage baked into their brains and never make a syntax error. It's amazing to me how much more productive I can be now than was possible when I started my career.
At the same time, the quality expected by consumers has grown dramatically over the same time period. I love games from the era when solo developers were writing them in assembler, but no one would play Adventure or Pitfall today. People expect better graphics, better animation, more responsive gameplay, a well-written story, networking, and, and, and... Just the manpower it takes to produce the 3D assets for a modern AAA game is an enormous investment.
It's true, and awesome, that one passionate dude can make Balatro or The Scouring. Those are awesome games. But they're categorically something different than what FG was trying to make. It's like you're looking at the failure of John Carter and say "it's ridiculous that they could blow $250 million on that; anyone with an iPhone and CapCut can make a movie today." It's not wrong that you can make a movie, even a great movie, with a couple hundred bucks and a dream, but it's absurd not to understand that you're not playing on the same field as someone trying to produce an international blockbuster.
Sure, making AAA games is expensive and hard. So why is a start up with 30 million in financing trying to do it?
That is the question Tim doesn't seem to answer when he complains about how expensive it is to make a successor to SC2. Blizzard didn't start by making Warcraft.
(and that is before we get into that based on the quality of product they delivered, I don't think another 100 million would have produced a smash hit)
It maybe wouldn’t have, and I’ve slammed FG as much as anyone.
Thing is FG did set out to make a big budget game, and they got a bunch of funding early, funding that completely dried up.
I think they should get cut more slack here than they get. In this domain, very specifically.
All other criticism aside, they raised 40 million pretty easily in the good times , and I don’t think they intended to build a 40 million game. They went ambitious, thought they’d be able to keep that coming, and general economic conditions squashed that
But then you’re left with your game with a 40 million budget, that you thought you’d have an 80 million or w/e budget on, you’ve promised a lot of things but now you don’t have the money to deliver.
Now, I don’t have enough time today to go through all the mistakes I think they made, independent of that, and pissing away the money they did have.
I think this one is a fair mitigation. A miscalculation
Like if I was a director making a blockbuster film, I’ve already got 40 million of budget, I’ll do crazy stuff, big set pieces or whatever.
If someone then goes ‘ok well you’re not getting more budget’ I’m stuck with like the first half of my movie being a big spectacular and it being very bare bones on the second half.
I am a big fan of RPG games. I don't know what I like more: RPG or RTS.
My favorite games of the genre are Fallout 2, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, Tyranny, and Fallout New Vegas.
If you played them, you see the pattern. None of them is finished. The reasons are different. Inadequate deadlines by publishers, low budget, and sometimes publishers went broke. Nevertheless, these are brilliant games, and when I think of them, I wonder what they could be if circumstances were more favorable.
When I think of SG, I think: "Why not sooner?". Nothing is interesting in what we got, and I don't have any reason to believe we would get something interesting if the devs had more money.
IMO, if Tim had $1b, he would do what Chris Roberts did. He would just ask for more.
Wait the pattern here is also "Tim Cain" with the exception of New Vegas.
On October 22 2025 23:51 AmericanUmlaut wrote: It can simultaneously be true that making software is getting drastically easier over time and that making a AAA game is exorbitantly expensive and insanely difficult.
Making software is getting easier and easier, not just in the gaming space. I've been writing code professionally for twenty years, and everything is easier now than it used to be. Tools are better, languages are better, libraries are better, and these days we have AI assistants who have all the knowledge of StackOverflow and every manpage baked into their brains and never make a syntax error. It's amazing to me how much more productive I can be now than was possible when I started my career.
At the same time, the quality expected by consumers has grown dramatically over the same time period. I love games from the era when solo developers were writing them in assembler, but no one would play Adventure or Pitfall today. People expect better graphics, better animation, more responsive gameplay, a well-written story, networking, and, and, and... Just the manpower it takes to produce the 3D assets for a modern AAA game is an enormous investment.
It's true, and awesome, that one passionate dude can make Balatro or The Scouring. Those are awesome games. But they're categorically something different than what FG was trying to make. It's like you're looking at the failure of John Carter and say "it's ridiculous that they could blow $250 million on that; anyone with an iPhone and CapCut can make a movie today." It's not wrong that you can make a movie, even a great movie, with a couple hundred bucks and a dream, but it's absurd not to understand that you're not playing on the same field as someone trying to produce an international blockbuster.
Sure, making AAA games is expensive and hard. So why is a start up with 30 million in financing trying to do it?
That is the question Tim doesn't seem to answer when he complains about how expensive it is to make a successor to SC2. Blizzard didn't start by making Warcraft.
(and that is before we get into that based on the quality of product they delivered, I don't think another 100 million would have produced a smash hit)
It maybe wouldn’t have, and I’ve slammed FG as much as anyone.
Thing is FG did set out to make a big budget game, and they got a bunch of funding early, funding that completely dried up.
I think they should get cut more slack here than they get. In this domain, very specifically.
All other criticism aside, they raised 40 million pretty easily in the good times , and I don’t think they intended to build a 40 million game. They went ambitious, thought they’d be able to keep that coming, and general economic conditions squashed that
But then you’re left with your game with a 40 million budget, that you thought you’d have an 80 million or w/e budget on, you’ve promised a lot of things but now you don’t have the money to deliver.
Now, I don’t have enough time today to go through all the mistakes I think they made, independent of that, and pissing away the money they did have.
I think this one is a fair mitigation. A miscalculation
Like if I was a director making a blockbuster film, I’ve already got 40 million of budget, I’ll do crazy stuff, big set pieces or whatever.
If someone then goes ‘ok well you’re not getting more budget’ I’m stuck with like the first half of my movie being a big spectacular and it being very bare bones on the second half.
I am a big fan of RPG games. I don't know what I like more: RPG or RTS.
My favorite games of the genre are Fallout 2, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, Tyranny, and Fallout New Vegas.
If you played them, you see the pattern. None of them is finished. The reasons are different. Inadequate deadlines by publishers, low budget, and sometimes publishers went broke. Nevertheless, these are brilliant games, and when I think of them, I wonder what they could be if circumstances were more favorable.
When I think of SG, I think: "Why not sooner?". Nothing is interesting in what we got, and I don't have any reason to believe we would get something interesting if the devs had more money.
IMO, if Tim had $1b, he would do what Chris Roberts did. He would just ask for more.
Wait the pattern here is also "Tim Cain" with the exception of New Vegas.
Damn, you have better patter recognition for sure :D I forgot he was working on Arcanum and VTMB.
a year ago, Tim Campbell boasted that Frost Giant would create a post apocalyptic universe. Well, that post apocalyptic universe is here! its in this thread. its on the subreddit and its on the Stormgate Steam Forums!
On October 23 2025 00:19 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i think they started by porting over kids education titles. that got their foot in the door manipulating sprites and on screen action. and, it kept the lights on.
grassroots built studios are far healthier than places like 343 or Halo Games or whatever they are called now.
On October 21 2025 13:51 ChillFlame wrote: Sparty guy is really trying to keep it professional, but he's too biased to succeed :D
The funny part, he's certainly not the worst. For example, some of them just deleted my steam topic for "misinformation" despite it being 100% accurate and supported by facts and links. It's quite emotional, yes, but neither facts or emotions can be misinformation. https://archive.ph/1EoHl
They haven't bothered to describe the reason of the ban, so they just copy pasted the whole post in the text box as example of misinformation. The text box has max character limitation, so it just cropped my post in the middle :D
The post was quite popular, and after they deleted it, other folks on Steam started to repost it. Mods tried to ban or lock all the other posts, but gave up after some time.
So now there are ar least 2 copy pastas of my post, but my post is still deleted.
I think the real reason of the ban/post deletion is my post was the first one in SG community hub on Steam, with tons of comments and support, and was indexed by Google. Even now, if you type "Stormgate is scam", "Stormgate scandal" , or something similar, you'll see the post in the search results, despite my post being deleted.
I don't know any other explanation of why they deleted my topic, but let the copypastas be.
cool and interesting. thx for posting this.
343 started out with like 12 people
I don’t even understand what constitutes ‘grass roots’ in your conception.
Bungie got bought out by Microsoft and given a bunch of money to do Halo.
Marathon and Myth are two of my favourite franchises ever, but let’s not pretend they didn’t get a big cash injection that pushed them to the big time. Halo was originally meant to be as a Mac killer app game, in early reveals was a totally different game, and ended up selling Xboxes.
I mean that’s what happened
a cash injection long after they'd already defined themselves and made working, profitable games. Bungie did not start off with investor money. Also, M$ owned the platform. It is not a standard venture capital type investor.
On October 23 2025 01:24 WombaT wrote: Nothing really grabbed me there. On the flipside, as per point 1 I think you need that level of ambition to maybe deliver such a product
That's the problem. You need ambition and great idea. But at the same time you also need to be able to identify the core essence of it and slice up a piece that you can reliably work on and that will capture the audience to keep coming back for more.
SC didn't really kick off that hard before Broodwar, WC3 really shone after TFT, SC2 without the expansions was mediocre.
None of those games started fully fleshed out, but they had good enough leads to be able to deliver an initial product that could capture people's hearts and minds. With this solid foundation they were able to sustain themselves long enough to polish and add to this foundation and realize the full vision behind it making those games achieve GOAT status.
SG looks like there was no plan at all. Only some vague ideas focusing not on the world they're building (lore, stories, characters) but abstract functionality. That's why they weren't able to select the important core and focus on that.
That's really all there is to this story IMO.
Edit: You need a good story and then know how to tell this story. This in turn will inform you on what kind of game you're making and what functionality you need.
On October 23 2025 09:07 JimmyJRaynor wrote: a year ago, Tim Campbell boasted that Frost Giant would create a post apocalyptic universe. Well, that post apocalyptic universe is here! its in this thread. its on the subreddit and its on the Stormgate Steam Forums!
On October 23 2025 00:19 JimmyJRaynor wrote: i think they started by porting over kids education titles. that got their foot in the door manipulating sprites and on screen action. and, it kept the lights on.
grassroots built studios are far healthier than places like 343 or Halo Games or whatever they are called now.
On October 21 2025 13:51 ChillFlame wrote: Sparty guy is really trying to keep it professional, but he's too biased to succeed :D
The funny part, he's certainly not the worst. For example, some of them just deleted my steam topic for "misinformation" despite it being 100% accurate and supported by facts and links. It's quite emotional, yes, but neither facts or emotions can be misinformation. https://archive.ph/1EoHl
They haven't bothered to describe the reason of the ban, so they just copy pasted the whole post in the text box as example of misinformation. The text box has max character limitation, so it just cropped my post in the middle :D
The post was quite popular, and after they deleted it, other folks on Steam started to repost it. Mods tried to ban or lock all the other posts, but gave up after some time.
So now there are ar least 2 copy pastas of my post, but my post is still deleted.
I think the real reason of the ban/post deletion is my post was the first one in SG community hub on Steam, with tons of comments and support, and was indexed by Google. Even now, if you type "Stormgate is scam", "Stormgate scandal" , or something similar, you'll see the post in the search results, despite my post being deleted.
I don't know any other explanation of why they deleted my topic, but let the copypastas be.
cool and interesting. thx for posting this.
343 started out with like 12 people
I don’t even understand what constitutes ‘grass roots’ in your conception.
Bungie got bought out by Microsoft and given a bunch of money to do Halo.
Marathon and Myth are two of my favourite franchises ever, but let’s not pretend they didn’t get a big cash injection that pushed them to the big time. Halo was originally meant to be as a Mac killer app game, in early reveals was a totally different game, and ended up selling Xboxes.
I mean that’s what happened
a cash injection long after they'd already defined themselves and made working, profitable games. Bungie did not start off with investor money. Also, M$ owned the platform. It is not a standard venture capital type investor.
I never said they were.
Not my fault your posts are frequently wrong or contradictory.
On October 23 2025 01:24 WombaT wrote: Nothing really grabbed me there. On the flipside, as per point 1 I think you need that level of ambition to maybe deliver such a product
That's the problem. You need ambition and great idea. But at the same time you also need to be able to identify the core essence of it and slice up a piece that you can reliably work on and that will capture the audience to keep coming back for more.
SC didn't really kick off that hard before Broodwar, WC3 really shone after TFT, SC2 without the expansions was mediocre.
None of those games started fully fleshed out, but they had good enough leads to be able to deliver an initial product that could capture people's hearts and minds. With this solid foundation they were able to sustain themselves long enough to polish and add to this foundation and realize the full vision behind it making those games achieve GOAT status.
SG looks like there was no plan at all. Only some vague ideas focusing not on the world they're building (lore, stories, characters) but abstract functionality. That's why they weren't able to select the important core and focus on that.
That's really all there is to this story IMO.
Edit: You need a good story and then know how to tell this story. This in turn will inform you on what kind of game you're making and what functionality you need.
Absolutely. You need a certain budget to do the thing, but merely having a budget is no guarantee.
It’s all so very meh.
I must have read at least 85 posts on the sub about factions and lore/flavour that in the abstract I actively would prefer.
On October 23 2025 01:24 WombaT wrote: Nothing really grabbed me there. On the flipside, as per point 1 I think you need that level of ambition to maybe deliver such a product
That's the problem. You need ambition and great idea. But at the same time you also need to be able to identify the core essence of it and slice up a piece that you can reliably work on and that will capture the audience to keep coming back for more.
SC didn't really kick off that hard before Broodwar, WC3 really shone after TFT, SC2 without the expansions was mediocre.
None of those games started fully fleshed out, but they had good enough leads to be able to deliver an initial product that could capture people's hearts and minds. With this solid foundation they were able to sustain themselves long enough to polish and add to this foundation and realize the full vision behind it making those games achieve GOAT status.
SG looks like there was no plan at all. Only some vague ideas focusing not on the world they're building (lore, stories, characters) but abstract functionality. That's why they weren't able to select the important core and focus on that.
That's really all there is to this story IMO.
Edit: You need a good story and then know how to tell this story. This in turn will inform you on what kind of game you're making and what functionality you need.
Absolutely. You need a certain budget to do the thing, but merely having a budget is no guarantee.
It’s all so very meh.
I must have read at least 85 posts on the sub about factions and lore/flavour that in the abstract I actively would prefer.
No amount of budget is going to help you when you're just blindly stumbling about and have no idea what you actually want to do.
On October 23 2025 01:24 WombaT wrote: Nothing really grabbed me there. On the flipside, as per point 1 I think you need that level of ambition to maybe deliver such a product
That's the problem. You need ambition and great idea. But at the same time you also need to be able to identify the core essence of it and slice up a piece that you can reliably work on and that will capture the audience to keep coming back for more.
SC didn't really kick off that hard before Broodwar, WC3 really shone after TFT, SC2 without the expansions was mediocre.
None of those games started fully fleshed out, but they had good enough leads to be able to deliver an initial product that could capture people's hearts and minds. With this solid foundation they were able to sustain themselves long enough to polish and add to this foundation and realize the full vision behind it making those games achieve GOAT status.
SG looks like there was no plan at all. Only some vague ideas focusing not on the world they're building (lore, stories, characters) but abstract functionality. That's why they weren't able to select the important core and focus on that.
That's really all there is to this story IMO.
Edit: You need a good story and then know how to tell this story. This in turn will inform you on what kind of game you're making and what functionality you need.
Absolutely. You need a certain budget to do the thing, but merely having a budget is no guarantee.
It’s all so very meh.
I must have read at least 85 posts on the sub about factions and lore/flavour that in the abstract I actively would prefer.
No amount of budget is going to help you when you're just blindly stumbling about and have no idea what you actually want to do.
That does look cool, I think it’s the second seemingly gem I’ve wishlisted from your posts here!
I’m not disputing that small teams in the indie space can’t make great games, some are amongst my favourites.
It just seems tricky to do in the RTS space. Perhaps there are reasons for it, or perhaps we just haven’t got that project yet.
Plenty of good games sure, just not anything (that I’ve played) that’s like SC or WC3 tier.
Perhaps you don’t need the AA+ budget I think you might, and someone will knock it out of the park.
One of the big frustrations with Frost Giant is they did get a sizeable budget, and fucked it. They had a basically unique opportunity which every other indie not only didn’t, but is less likely to get in the future given how Stormgate went. Ofc not all of this is on record but most estimates put Stormgate’s budget as a decent chunk higher than AoE4, which initial teething issues aside, very solid game, or the upcoming Dawn of War game.
One of the big problems is simply that ‘let’s make the next big RTS’, and all that fundraising and hype came before they had an idea of what that actually looked like. It never felt they had a real core idea, and I mean without that you’re gonna struggle. It’s also why it kept changing all the time.
Considering they’re ex Blizz, I’m intrigued as to why that was, or how things looked. I’m sure ‘let’s make another Warcraft game’ preceded some of their ideas sure, but I’m pretty sure the kind of core concept of heroes, creeps etc came quite early. Indeed, if my memory of very early screens in my Mac magazines back in the day are anything to go by, the initial WC3 idea was to be even less base buildy than they ended up going with.
Iterations and tweaks are fine, not really having a central idea is not.
WC3 has a hero focus, and systems like items, creeps, lower supply caps that work around it. SC2 was StarCraft 1 with a shit hot UI and engine, more fast-paced, and unique macro mechanics for the factions.
Stormgate is…?
That said, and I think it goes under the radar a bit. Hate the artstyle or whatever, as a WC3/SC methadone it was shaping up ok at one point. Vanguard and Infernals felt like decent, fleshed out factions with their own identity and twist. Even when it was Vanguard only, it was very bare bones, but the skeleton felt solid enough.
Celestials came in and, what, the, fuck? Take some of the most hated aspects of SC2 Protoss and run with it. The visual design for much of the faction wasn’t good either.
They were so wonky in their mechanics that they completely broke balance, and kept having to be redesigned. And all that redesign isn’t free, and if the budget is running tight…
I think that was a completely insane decision. And I really do think it pushed a lot of people away from cautious optimism to losing faith.
It also showcased how good Blizz were in balancing asymmetric factions, even if yeah it’s not 100% perfect. Even in WC3 with 4. Stormgate’s balance went from acceptable but not ideal with 2 factions, to a complete shitshow with 3. And OK not a factor for campaign or co-op minded players, but a big turnoff for PvP focused ones.
Ironically as well, given they’re criticised a lot for being Teemu Blizzard with no original ideas. The Celestials were actually quite original but, awful and incredibly problematic in terms of balance.
À propos Celestials. Are there any insights in how they fit the initial lore? Like crazy professor guy opens door to chaos world yada yada in come Celestials?
On October 24 2025 09:42 WombaT wrote: Ironically as well, given they’re criticised a lot for being Teemu Blizzard with no original ideas. The Celestials were actually quite original but, awful and incredibly problematic in terms of balance.
I hear that Celestials were original quite often. It's important to put it in the context.
1. They are original in comparison with other SG factions in a sense they were ripped off just partially. There are still lots of protoss design elements in Celestials. Both visually and gameplay-wise. Is this actually a problem? Maybe Celestials the worst faction because FG tried to do something by themselves.
2. Originality is not a virtue by itself. Honestly it's overrated. People often say SG lacks originality, but it's just because it's bad, IMO. If they ripped off T, P, and Z 1:1, but made it cool and fun, people would see it as a refined design of Blizzard RTS. Very few people would mention the lack of originality as a con.
3. Celestials are not a faction, they are more like a shitpost. When I first saw them in a beta, I was fucking astounded. There were protoss looking guys, but zealots had 4 hands and started to comically roll like banelings after the upgrade. There were some strange prism and triangle shaped things. There were some worm-like robots. There was a fucking meowing drone thing. At this point if they added some Amish people or furries, it wouldn't become much worse. Sometimes I wish they went fucking Bionicles or some other shit. At least it would look like a faction.
On October 24 2025 09:42 WombaT wrote: That does look cool, I think it’s the second seemingly gem I’ve wishlisted from your posts here!
I’m not disputing that small teams in the indie space can’t make great games, some are amongst my favourites.
It just seems tricky to do in the RTS space. Perhaps there are reasons for it, or perhaps we just haven’t got that project yet.
Plenty of good games sure, just not anything (that I’ve played) that’s like SC or WC3 tier.
Perhaps you don’t need the AA+ budget I think you might, and someone will knock it out of the park.
One of the big frustrations with Frost Giant is they did get a sizeable budget, and fucked it. They had a basically unique opportunity which every other indie not only didn’t, but is less likely to get in the future given how Stormgate went. Ofc not all of this is on record but most estimates put Stormgate’s budget as a decent chunk higher than AoE4, which initial teething issues aside, very solid game, or the upcoming Dawn of War game.
One of the big problems is simply that ‘let’s make the next big RTS’, and all that fundraising and hype came before they had an idea of what that actually looked like. It never felt they had a real core idea, and I mean without that you’re gonna struggle. It’s also why it kept changing all the time.
Considering they’re ex Blizz, I’m intrigued as to why that was, or how things looked. I’m sure ‘let’s make another Warcraft game’ preceded some of their ideas sure, but I’m pretty sure the kind of core concept of heroes, creeps etc came quite early. Indeed, if my memory of very early screens in my Mac magazines back in the day are anything to go by, the initial WC3 idea was to be even less base buildy than they ended up going with.
Iterations and tweaks are fine, not really having a central idea is not.
WC3 has a hero focus, and systems like items, creeps, lower supply caps that work around it. SC2 was StarCraft 1 with a shit hot UI and engine, more fast-paced, and unique macro mechanics for the factions.
Stormgate is…?
That said, and I think it goes under the radar a bit. Hate the artstyle or whatever, as a WC3/SC methadone it was shaping up ok at one point. Vanguard and Infernals felt like decent, fleshed out factions with their own identity and twist. Even when it was Vanguard only, it was very bare bones, but the skeleton felt solid enough.
Celestials came in and, what, the, fuck? Take some of the most hated aspects of SC2 Protoss and run with it. The visual design for much of the faction wasn’t good either.
They were so wonky in their mechanics that they completely broke balance, and kept having to be redesigned. And all that redesign isn’t free, and if the budget is running tight…
I think that was a completely insane decision. And I really do think it pushed a lot of people away from cautious optimism to losing faith.
It also showcased how good Blizz were in balancing asymmetric factions, even if yeah it’s not 100% perfect. Even in WC3 with 4. Stormgate’s balance went from acceptable but not ideal with 2 factions, to a complete shitshow with 3. And OK not a factor for campaign or co-op minded players, but a big turnoff for PvP focused ones.
Ironically as well, given they’re criticised a lot for being Teemu Blizzard with no original ideas. The Celestials were actually quite original but, awful and incredibly problematic in terms of balance.
Well, there are titles that went ok done with AA quality/budget (Armies of Exigo in the past, Iron Harvest and Tempest Rising now). I think the biggest problem for smaller teams is marketing their product and being able to reach wider audience. SG did great in the marketing department but they had shit product.
As for SG being ex-Blizz veterans this might actually work to their detriment. Doing any kind of software development in a huge corp is vastly different from smaller company environment. I've recently talked about it with my friend who did hiring for his company (mid-size) and they got a lot of candidates from Facebook and Amazon after mass layoffs there. He said they were basically un-hirable because they might be smart and knowledgeable but their attitude was completely wrong and they probably wouldn't be able to adjust to the processes used at smaller scale where things move faster. I have worked for all kinds of companies as a software dev in my life, ranging from small start-ups to some of the biggest corps on the planet and I can tell you it can be night and day when it comes to how you do your work.
EPT
