EPT(still it will do nothing, this game is dead as a doorknob)
Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 302
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22597 Posts
(still it will do nothing, this game is dead as a doorknob) | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada1220 Posts
These changes were developed alongside the community. Unit design changes and balance ideas were implemented by an incredible team of JSON wizards using the map editor for playtesting. A crack team of map makers designed dozens of new maps for inclusion in the ladder, and over 100 playtesters tried the changes and provided feedback over four months. Meanwhile, a small group of us from Frost Giant volunteered our time to bring these ideas into the game, adding polish, new quality-of-life improvements, and new features such as the 2v2 ladder. Gobsmack was the lead, coordinating everything, and a couple of former Frost Giant engineers helped out with things he couldn't do from the engineering side. The full list: Frost Giant Contributors Austin Hudelson - Engineer Chris Culp - Implementation Architect/Designer Eleazar Fernando - Engineer Eric Tse - Engineer Harrison King - Project Lead/Designer Huijie Bao - System Designer James Farris - Engineer Ryan Schutter - UI Engineer Tim Campbell - Project Support and Consultation Interesting that there are no artists listed here. The new units and textures must have been entirely fan-made. | ||
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Miragee
8707 Posts
On December 19 2025 06:35 Jeremy Reimer wrote: Interesting that there are no artists listed here. The new units and textures must have been entirely fan-made. AI | ||
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CicadaSC
United States1990 Posts
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Manit0u
Poland17843 Posts
To access: open the editor, look to the top left and control+click the Yeti 10 times. That's really how you unlock it. Really? | ||
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crablogic
29 Posts
Here's to fresh Stormgate content! Here's to more SteamCharts posts from the peanut gallery (incl. me)! | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland27387 Posts
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada1220 Posts
On December 19 2025 07:54 crablogic wrote: Kudos to Gobsmack et al. for finishing it. Didn't even take the 5 months that I said. Here's to fresh Stormgate content! Here's to more SteamCharts posts from the peanut gallery (incl. me)! Yay to Steam charts becoming relevant again! Here's the patch bump from today: ![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/iLWJ29R.png) Of course the big bump will be on the weekend, no doubt. | ||
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ChillFlame
327 Posts
On December 19 2025 08:25 Jeremy Reimer wrote: Yay to Steam charts becoming relevant again! Here's the patch bump from today: Of course the big bump will be on the weekend, no doubt. Isn't that PTR? On the second thought ~80% of people left would most likely check PTR. | ||
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SoleSteeler
Canada5472 Posts
All the changes and new units are overwhelming to read, and it feels like a waste assuming no one will still play anyway. >_< | ||
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Agh
United States1104 Posts
I'll give it a shot over the weekend (assuming I can actually find a game) but my kneejerk is that the gameplay is just going to be objectively worse. I sincerely hope I glossed over something. Sadly the only thing that jumps out as a positive is the shifting around of some units in the tech tree & requirements. (eg. medtechs being tier 1.5 instead of tier 2) Looks like we'll (yet again) highlight how the economy doesn't really function when a race is able to have multiple charges of instant units available. (Literal risk free greed option) Also segmenting and putting emphasis on 2v2 when the base layer needs so much work is a choice. Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised but doubtful. | ||
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CicadaSC
United States1990 Posts
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Harris1st
Germany7407 Posts
I liked and hyped (is that some new YT feature?) the trailer and will look into the game on the weekend. If only just to show game devs and publishers that RTS is not dead. | ||
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Agh
United States1104 Posts
On December 19 2025 17:01 CicadaSC wrote: How do you make that big ultralisk looking thing? I had every tech building and tier 3 and couldnt figure it out. I made the Pandora guys though... Pretty sure it's just on your Town Hall (T3) next to the dragon. Project got put on hold so I ended up playing a handful. Got worried because I searched for about 9 minutes but then started to find games. Played every matchup except for Celestial mirror. Everything played out about how I expected. Ignoring cheeses/turbo 1 base builds, Infernal too strong and Celestial>Human. Human & Celestial Town Hall being 400 minerals (+90sec) feels pretty bad. Just make it 350 to match Inf and call it a day. The good: -Celestial pylon morphing for free lets you make early walls and chokes (would probably take 5-10 sec off transformation time though). -Argent base move speed finally where it should have been. The bad: -Maps leave a lot to be desired. Step up from the 2* we had before but a couple of them are extremely low effort. Also not having a baseline map for balance tuning is crazy. -Still a lot of tooltip and icon errors. (Hexen upgrade still references miasma, New Celestial caster has old Scythe icon during production, spell values not listed or showing) -Not sure who asked or thought the first Stormgate spawning 30seconds faster was a good idea. Makes early game very scripted and boring and limits options. -Snowballing. Playing from behind is pretty much non existent so the decision to nerf defense made no sense. (Imp range, bunker time, servo charge movespeed, etc.) It's very clear the intention to make offensive bunkers and depots less viable but that needs to be done in a way without neutering their intended purpose. -Player count still abysmal Balance standouts: Infernal having not only the most streamlined economy opening, but also the best harassment/scouting via fiends/phantoms/whatever they're called now. Anti air options/cost efficiency severely lacking. Hu and Inf(outside of shadowflyers) can both find themselves in awkward game states vs heavy hornets and seraphim. No meaningful base defense options. Old top bar things that would fall into this category have been phased out. Maps with multiple entrances into your base make it more apparent. Prisms too frail/Fiends too good. Too easy for inf to get efficient trades against them later even with pew pew pylons. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada17835 Posts
 what an unbelievable turn of events! like i've been saying for years... in this thread and elsewhere... making video games gets easier and easier every year as the software tools get better and better and more and more simplified. And like I've been saying for years... these game companies act like they're landing a man on the moon to justify sky high prices for something that can be done quickly by a small crew. anyhow, hopefully, the game is good now. It is way more satisfying//rewarding//fun building software within a small team. HOpefully, these guys are having some fun while they are "taking care of business". | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada1220 Posts
On December 20 2025 00:55 JimmyJRaynor wrote: wow, who could've predicted a super small team could take it over and crank out plenty of content. what an unbelievable turn of events! like i've been saying for years... in this thread and elsewhere... making video games gets easier and easier every year as the software tools get better and better and more and more simplified. And like I've been saying for years... these game companies act like they're landing a man on the moon to justify sky high prices for something that can be done quickly by a small crew. anyhow, hopefully, the game is good now. It is way more satisfying//rewarding//fun building software within a small team. HOpefully, these guys are having some fun while they are "taking care of business". At first glance it does seem like the sheer number of updates (even after waiting four months) is strangely higher now that Frost Giant is no more, compared to the update level they had when they were still a functioning company. But relying on volunteer community support has some downsides as well. Even though they had "over 100 testers", when you use volunteer testing you're not really going to get a lot of effort out of the majority of them. People will poke around and try stuff briefly and then bounce out. So you're going to get more bugs and rough edges than if you had a paid QA team. Some stuff just gets forgotten because there's nobody to do it. Like localization. The update is only in English, and so everyone else gets left out. Oh well. But don't get me wrong: it's very cool to have a community-based effort like this, rather than just letting the game die on the vine. I hope the people working on it are having fun. I do wonder about having community volunteers putting in all this time and effort for something that is still, technically, proprietary and owned by Frost Giant. Previous dead games (like Freespace 2, among many others) have seen revivals and have bloomed after being open-sourced. But all the Stormgate code is still locked up and all the servers are still being paid for by Tim. It's something to consider. | ||
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ChillFlame
327 Posts
When you have content made by the community in the game owned by a company (that's owned by investors), you have all the downsides of open source projects, like the lack of direction, poor quality control, etc. And all the downsides of the copro world. They can shut down the game at any moment, and all the work will vanish. They don't even have the source code or the capability to run their own servers. That's not community-driven or community-made. That's working for free for corpos. I'd never spend my time doing the work for free for a company's IP I don't have any control over. | ||
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CicadaSC
United States1990 Posts
I dont know if anyone here has played the old sc2 arcade game Battlecraft but it feels like that when you finally get a Leviathan out. Really hard to replicate that feeling in most rts games these days. Tons of light tiny units skirmishing is fun, but god do i love getting out a giga tier unit. | ||
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Jeremy Reimer
Canada1220 Posts
Mostly, I didn't see any visible difference in the game between the 0.6 "launch" and the community patch. Sure, a whole boatload of things were changed, but from a viewer's perspective, it didn't seem to change the way the game played all that much. I never saw any of the new Tier 3 units. Although maybe some of them were there and I just missed them? Because damn, it's so hard to see anything that's happening in this game. There are so many spell effects now, all layered on top of each other, and it just all ends up in a big visual muddle. At a glance, it's not even easy to figure out if someone's army is Vanguard, Infernal, or Celestial. I sometimes have to go look down at the faction icons at the bottom to check, and even then it's hard because the icons all look similar. The 2v2 mode seemed fun, though. Maybe because in 2v2 you sort of accept that it's hard to tell what's going on, so you just look for the player colors and look at the supply count a lot. There was more back and forth here, although in the end the one guy who made more units won for his team. Ultimately, I don't see this patch turning around Stormgate's fortunes. At the end of the day, it's still a worse version of Starcraft, and I don't see how that can change in any meaningful way. But if the tiny remaining community wants to keep updating it as a hobby for no money, I think it will at least survive as long as Tim is willing to pay the server costs out of pocket. | ||
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crablogic
29 Posts
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