On August 30 2026 02:39 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: Honestly guys, I just thought of something, I have this AOE clone trash in my steam library called "Warparty" I had fun on release, and it was much much worse game by far compare to Stormgate, obviously biggest issue I had was I don't have anyone to play Warparty with after 1 week, no one to queue in together at all. player base was as dead as it can be. Mean while, objectively is Stormgate a bad RTS?
Yes. The existence of worse RTS games does not change that fact.
Hardly can say for sure, but our expectation was like crazy high for the project. And I once posted a guy hacking vs me on reddit got mad down voted because I whined about how bad the antihack is , in my mind my problem was exactly it being advertised as a esport project. So you see............
Now let's rewind, and look at the game again............. There might be many thing that's actually interesting about the game itself, and it might not even be a trash as people say so at all, but many public opinion and the fact Stormgate had VC money, so it had to chase ARR and all that jazz, and a high maintenance salary for the crew..........
So can we really say that stormgate was a failure and pin it on the design of game itself???
Yes. Stormgate was a failure, and I pin the failure on the design of the game itself.
Frost Giant chose to make it a bizarre combination of Warcraft and Starcraft clones. No venture capital firm forced them to make trees and guys with swords a design priority in their space combat game. VC guys did not insist that they choose a "post-post-apocalyptic" setting that made no sense and was ultimately abandoned. They didn't decide that what Stormgate really needed was a thin, confusing, dumb, and poorly thought-out backstory.
None of them forced Frost Giant to make bland, mobile-like graphics, even when there was overwhelming opposition from their own audience.
Nobody insisted that Frost Giant put in boring creeps, twiddle with them uselessly for years, and then finally rip them out and put in nonsensical Stormgates.
These VC firms did not demand that Frost Giant waste tons of time and money on rollback netcode and triple tick rates that ultimately made no difference to the gameplay. They didn't direct Frost Giant to create a game with ridiculously high hardware requirements that ran poorly on the computers most people owned.
VCs care about one thing: return on investment. They don't care how you do it, just that you do it. Frost Giant made all their own terrible design decisions, refused to listen to feedback, then when they finally, desperately, tried to make changes based on the overwhelmingly negative feedback, it was too little and too late. By that point, they had already spent all the money they were ever going to get, and the result was a bland, boring, poorly-designed failure of a game.
On August 30 2026 02:39 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: Honestly guys, I just thought of something, I have this AOE clone trash in my steam library called "Warparty" I had fun on release, and it was much much worse game by far compare to Stormgate, obviously biggest issue I had was I don't have anyone to play Warparty with after 1 week, no one to queue in together at all. player base was as dead as it can be. Mean while, objectively is Stormgate a bad RTS? Hardly can say for sure, but our expectation was like crazy high for the project. And I once posted a guy hacking vs me on reddit got mad down voted because I whined about how bad the antihack is , in my mind my problem was exactly it being advertised as a esport project. So you see............
Now let's rewind, and look at the game again............. There might be many thing that's actually interesting about the game itself, and it might not even be a trash as people say so at all, but many public opinion and the fact Stormgate had VC money, so it had to chase ARR and all that jazz, and a high maintenance salary for the crew..........
So can we really say that stormgate was a failure and pin it on the design of game itself???
Maybe not so much..........
What if...... just let's exercise what are the assumptions, and what are the premises, and what are the actual fact, this might be fun as hell.
IMO, nothing was interesting in the game. At all. The game was as bland as possible by intent. It was made this way to capture the biggest player base possible.
There are a lot of janky/shitty/failed games. A lot of them had something going on. Even small things. I liked WAAGH! towers in DoW3. The idea of support buildings working as music transmitters is neat. Cossacks is one of my favorite series despite being jank as hell, but it has 10000 units on the map and giant WMD called XVIII century line ships. Yes, even Cossacks 2, it is buggy as fuck, but it has realistic line infantry warfare simulation.
SG had nothing like that. It is an inferior clone of a 15-year-old game. And there was not a single significant thing it does better than the game it tries to copy.
If it had a $100m budget, it would fail anyway, because the honeymoon phase would end eventually, and people would realize there's no reason to play it over SC2.
On August 30 2026 02:39 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: Honestly guys, I just thought of something, I have this AOE clone trash in my steam library called "Warparty" I had fun on release, and it was much much worse game by far compare to Stormgate, obviously biggest issue I had was I don't have anyone to play Warparty with after 1 week, no one to queue in together at all. player base was as dead as it can be. Mean while, objectively is Stormgate a bad RTS? Hardly can say for sure, but our expectation was like crazy high for the project. And I once posted a guy hacking vs me on reddit got mad down voted because I whined about how bad the antihack is , in my mind my problem was exactly it being advertised as a esport project. So you see............
Now let's rewind, and look at the game again............. There might be many thing that's actually interesting about the game itself, and it might not even be a trash as people say so at all, but many public opinion and the fact Stormgate had VC money, so it had to chase ARR and all that jazz, and a high maintenance salary for the crew..........
So can we really say that stormgate was a failure and pin it on the design of game itself???
Maybe not so much..........
What if...... just let's exercise what are the assumptions, and what are the premises, and what are the actual fact, this might be fun as hell.
IMO, nothing was interesting in the game. At all. The game was as bland as possible by intent. It was made this way to capture the biggest player base possible.
There are a lot of janky/shitty/failed games. A lot of them had something going on. Even small things. I liked WAAGH! towers in DoW3. The idea of support buildings working as music transmitters is neat. Cossacks is one of my favorite series despite being jank as hell, but it has 10000 units on the map and giant WMD called XVIII century line ships. Yes, even Cossacks 2, it is buggy as fuck, but it has realistic line infantry warfare simulation.
SG had nothing like that. It is an inferior clone of a 15-year-old game. And there was not a single significant thing it does better than the game it tries to copy.
If it had a $100m budget, it would fail anyway, because the honeymoon phase would end eventually, and people would realize there's no reason to play it over SC2.
OMG, I cannot disagree more, DoW3 , I genuinely logged 90 hours into it, loved it, had 3v3 ,4v4 funzies with friends, bought 5 or 6 copies for myself and friends. And went on to get top 4 finish in ESL beta tournament. And my fun trying to revenge this protosss GM that was my ladder nemesis who kept 8 gate zeal me vs my stupid terran, which I tried everything cannot win. And he was a big time streamer in Dow3. All that said, I barely touched stormgate, tried a few game and ran the other way. I still bitch about how my space marine clump of units get evaporated by eldar hero abiliities, imba! But that's another story, I still had fun doing my brand of shit build for funzies.
On August 30 2026 02:39 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote: Honestly guys, I just thought of something, I have this AOE clone trash in my steam library called "Warparty" I had fun on release, and it was much much worse game by far compare to Stormgate, obviously biggest issue I had was I don't have anyone to play Warparty with after 1 week, no one to queue in together at all. player base was as dead as it can be. Mean while, objectively is Stormgate a bad RTS? Hardly can say for sure, but our expectation was like crazy high for the project. And I once posted a guy hacking vs me on reddit got mad down voted because I whined about how bad the antihack is , in my mind my problem was exactly it being advertised as a esport project. So you see............
Now let's rewind, and look at the game again............. There might be many thing that's actually interesting about the game itself, and it might not even be a trash as people say so at all, but many public opinion and the fact Stormgate had VC money, so it had to chase ARR and all that jazz, and a high maintenance salary for the crew..........
So can we really say that stormgate was a failure and pin it on the design of game itself???
Maybe not so much..........
What if...... just let's exercise what are the assumptions, and what are the premises, and what are the actual fact, this might be fun as hell.
IMO, nothing was interesting in the game. At all. The game was as bland as possible by intent. It was made this way to capture the biggest player base possible.
There are a lot of janky/shitty/failed games. A lot of them had something going on. Even small things. I liked WAAGH! towers in DoW3. The idea of support buildings working as music transmitters is neat. Cossacks is one of my favorite series despite being jank as hell, but it has 10000 units on the map and giant WMD called XVIII century line ships. Yes, even Cossacks 2, it is buggy as fuck, but it has realistic line infantry warfare simulation.
SG had nothing like that. It is an inferior clone of a 15-year-old game. And there was not a single significant thing it does better than the game it tries to copy.
If it had a $100m budget, it would fail anyway, because the honeymoon phase would end eventually, and people would realize there's no reason to play it over SC2.
OMG, I cannot disagree more, DoW3 , I genuinely logged 90 hours into it, loved it, had 3v3 ,4v4 funzies with friends, bought 5 or 6 copies for myself and friends. And went on to get top 4 finish in ESL beta tournament. And my fun trying to revenge this protosss GM that was my ladder nemesis who kept 8 gate zeal me vs my stupid terran, which I tried everything cannot win. And he was a big time streamer in Dow3. All that said, I barely touched stormgate, tried a few game and ran the other way. I still bitch about how my space marine clump of units get evaporated by eldar hero abiliities, imba! But that's another story, I still had fun doing my brand of shit build for funzies.
Well, DoW 3 is considered one of the biggest RTS flops of all time. IMO, its second only to Homeworld 3. Maybe it's a 3-rd place after Homeworld 3 and SG. It's hard to argue with 50% review score. If you like it, it's fine, as I said I like jank games too. I like color palette, knights and WAAGH! towers. That's it :D. Well, there isn't a single thing I like about SG, so it's 3:0 for DoW 3. The knight model has more personality than all SG units combined.
EPT
