EPTOn September 09 2024 08:32 NonY wrote:
alright nerds here you go
alright nerds here you go
Thanks bro, about to check this out now
Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread - Page 181
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TelecoM
United States10612 Posts
Thanks bro, about to check this out now | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland22729 Posts
A nerd? Moi? That unforgivable slight aside, bloody excellent job there. I appreciated the more measured/genuinely constructive criticism approach, as well as your own proposed alternatives in approaches. Kudos sir I think your point on them perhaps lacking real top tier RTS playing talent internally especially, while somewhat obvious also fills a lot of previous gaps in my perception, or a confusion in the direction up to now. How does EA end up looking like this when there was external playtesting talent giving feedback from such an early stage? I’m not privy to the internal stuff, but even based on content created for an open audience about the game and impressions/feedback/ideas Doesn’t matter how much feedback you get from people who know their stuff, if you can’t differentiate the good ideas from the bad you’re just left with a pile of ideas you aren’t sure what to do with. Not every excellent RTS player is a good game designer/critic. Some definitely are. Some are very good at giving you feedback at what’s there and how it’s balanced, but not necessarily at new ideas, or how to make it more fun and engaging for a wider cross-section. Some, consciously or otherwise are excited for a new possible professional opportunity and may lean towards a direction that suits their stylistic or skill proclivities. If you don’t have your own people at least in the ballpark skill wise on your team, how do you sift through and filter feedback properly? In addition I’m not super sure who was all in these closed tests, were there many WC3 guys? There’s some very obvious WC3 inspiration with creeps most notably, perhaps the higher TTK. But at least the names I’ve seen most notable names from these phases were from an SC background Which is perhaps why, to me anyway it feels like SC2 with a higher TTK and creeps, rather than some real synthesis of what made those two games two of my all-time favourites. Hey I’ll return too, give it another shot and I hope they knock it out of the park | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20262 Posts
There was a lot of the "we got feedback saying that players don't want X but we're doing it anyway because we know better". Most notably on the art style, that's the loudest and most unanimous feedback that i saw and they just refused to make or plan meaningful changes every step of the way - but also on things like the extreme focus on 1v1 competitive, and on doing round after round of testing and EA release without critical gameplay features like proper hotkey and camera controls. I am with you on the game performance being critical and i felt pretty crazy seeing them poll people on if they should have it as a priority or not given the amount of people who can't play the game or have a terrible experience because of it, and with it being an existential question on if 3-player co-op will work and if they can design 3v3 the way that they want. They're polling people who are actively playing the game which is a tiny slice of the actual playerbase and selection biased towards people who survived the performance check to begin with - people with high end CPU's who don't play co-op/3v3 and don't mind poor performance. Those who couldn't play the game because of it aren't hanging around every day on a discord server to answer the poll. Last time i played the game, i was testing stuff like fiend-based armies in co-op (Maloc has some pretty huge buffs for them) and i had a fight where i dropped to 17fps and a sim time of 180ms. Everybody in the game needs a sim time of <15ms to sustain 64 tick without rollback, so the game was more than 11x slower than the performance goal in that circumstance. I use an OC'd 7950x3d w/ 8000mt/s DDR5 and have everything tuned well enough to set ambient world records since that's my other hobby, so nobody was running the game better than i was. Allies complained sometimes that they got 0fps and the screen just froze during fights. I reported this and a lot more quite clearly with documentation and it just never got seen or cared about. | ||
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Fango
United Kingdom8967 Posts
On September 09 2024 20:24 Cyro wrote: There was a lot of the "we got feedback saying that players don't want X but we're doing it anyway because we know better". Most notably on the art style, that's the loudest and most unanimous feedback that i saw and they just refused to make or plan meaningful changes every step of the way - but also on things like the extreme focus on 1v1 competitive, and on doing round after round of testing and EA release without critical gameplay features like proper hotkey and camera controls. I am with you on the game performance being critical and i felt pretty crazy seeing them poll people on if they should have it as a priority or not given the amount of people who can't play the game or have a terrible experience because of it, and with it being an existential question on if 3-player co-op will work and if they can design 3v3 the way that they want. They're polling people who are actively playing the game which is a tiny slice of the actual playerbase and selection biased towards people who survived the performance check to begin with - people with high end CPU's who don't play co-op/3v3 and don't mind poor performance. Those who couldn't play the game because of it aren't hanging around every day on a discord server to answer the poll. Their comments of "we believe this art style to be best, sorry guys" can come across badly. But I do think there's some slack with regard to the fact the game is visually very unfinished. If all those shading/lighting/environments/terrain features they spoke about get added, the game would look so much better. Frost Giant are holding out on it. People don't have as big an issue with the art style as they think, it's just the visuals and especially cinematics are bad. As for performance, they did a poll during the beta and said optimisation was voted the number 1 priority by playtesters, they also said they're testing the game on low-end machines in studio, and JJason and HeroM both cited performance as reasons they're stepping away for now. There's no way they aren't aware of the problems. But so far, not much as actually come out of it? They haven't specified any goals with regards to fps, no comments on the minimum specs to play (the ones on steam are not accurate, they're just the specs for UE5). We hear things like "the technology is the future of rts" but no one is able to enjoy new technology at 10k sim and 10 fps. The entire vision of Stormgate is that it's f2p and fun for casuals as well as esports. In order to accomplish that it needs to run smoothly on lower end systems like every other f2p or esport title. | ||
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Harris1st
Germany6580 Posts
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WGT-Baal
France3282 Posts
On September 09 2024 22:41 Harris1st wrote: I'm sad to say I deleted the game and it is very questionable if I ever come back to it. I really wish they can turn things around but I honestly don't believe they can Same. This ship has sailed forever. Might try AoM it looks fun but otherwise it ll probably be civ 7 (not a rts but you know) Regarding feedback they had a lot from the alpha onward highlighting the same issues we see now and nothing got done at all, most were just waived away anyway. | ||
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gTank
Austria2536 Posts
It feels really great and at the same time I am sad that Warcraft 3 didnt get a remaster it deserved :/ | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20262 Posts
On September 09 2024 23:20 gTank wrote: I switched to AoM and its so much fun and content! It feels really great and at the same time I am sad that Warcraft 3 didnt get a remaster it deserved :/ Does AOM have good drag scroll controls? It's objectively the best way to move the camera IMO, and regardless of that debate the muscle memory goes so deep that it's hard to unlearn and relearn those kinds of RTS controls. I've tried to do it before, and it became pretty obvious that days of pain and sucking wasn't enough to get the job done; i'm also somewhat concerned that if i did trade drag scrolling for edge scrolling in my muscle memory that it would be difficult to unlearn it again and would make my mechanics in newer games worse  Very much this sort of issue Stormgate has major problems with drag scrolling and it's not present in WC3. | ||
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gTank
Austria2536 Posts
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Antithesis
Germany1054 Posts
Quick question: I read that it suffers from some issues in multiplayer connectivity, specifically desynchronization errors. Is this still the case? Competitive multiplayer is the only mode which interests me. | ||
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_Spartak_
Turkey346 Posts
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Fango
United Kingdom8967 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland22729 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland22729 Posts
The overlap is a problem for sure. TTK comes into it too, but all 3 factions have a unit that vaguely functions like Terran bio and micros similarly Lets look at WC3 for comparison Nelf - Archers are squishy, glass canons and not particularly fast. Huntresses are fast, relatively beefy and have a bouncing attack Orc - Grunts are very tanky indeed and Headhunters somewhere in the middle in terms of DPS/health Human - Footmen are quite cheap, numerous and lowish HP, rifles pack a decent punch but aren’t quite as squishy as archers Undead - Ghouls are speedy, low HP decent DPS. Fiends are beefy for a ranged unit but quite slow and don’t hit super hard When we hit tiers 2 and 3 we get upgrades and options. Importantly those options stem from the factions having quite different tier 1 units. Night Elf has a slow glass canon ranged unit, and a speedy pseudo-melee unit coming out of tier 1. You gain a speedy skirmishing anti-magic unit that slows, a caster that becomes a damage multiplier with its ability lowering armour, and has a disable, and a healing caster who becomes a high damage melee tank, as well as increasing DPS for your army. Plus a pure tank (as well as air units etc, I won’t be exhaustive) This all fits together and is fun, because it lets your do DIFFERENT things. 1. Take your glass canon high damage basic unit, and double down. Get dryads for slow and dispel, Druids of the Talon to reduce armour and increase your damage and for their disable, a Druid of the Claw for damage boost. The plan here is to hit hard, and not be hit. 2. Take your glass canon, and protect it. Keep it as a useful part of your composition for its damage output, but rather than going for a low-HP, fragile ranged army, have a mix of fragile ranged behind a line of bears who can tank and hit hard 3. Go huntress heavy, be speedy and annoying and hit and run. You have a unit faster than most in the game already, add some dryads for slow and poke and prod into hitting a big timing as that comp doesn’t scale too well. All of this stuff is enabled because the archer is high damage, but one of the squishiest units in the game, and quite slow. It also can’t stutter-step on a dime. Now, imagine instead the tier 1 units are more homogenised and let’s say instead, the archer still does decent damage, but is beefier and more microable. And in the SG engine instead of WC3’s If you gain a decent tempo advantage, why wouldn’t you just keep massing that unit? Melee doesn’t scale as well as ranged stuff when the numbers increased. AoE doesn’t hit as hard as in an SC2 You’ve touched on it already, the tier 1/1.5 ranged units are all reasonably similar. So you end up with argent/exo/gaunt balls and not a huge amount of compositional variety. The meta is, in quite a few matchups building the same tier 1/1.5 comp and either win outright, or staying on that comp until you get tier 3 force multipliers. I haven’t even mentioned heroes yet for WC3, they can also influence tier 1 choices a lot, and make an option available or not. Just mentioning but I won’t expand further as well, obviously SG didn’t have them in 1v1. Looking at some of the competition/inspiration and its tier 1. With the caveat that by saying ‘pure’ I don’t necessarily mean a mono composition, but something very dominant in a composition in a particular game. May also include tier 2/3 support Looking at WC3 and its tier 1 (not all matchups): 1. Nelf - Pure archer, pure huntress or a mix is viable 2. Undead - Pure ghoul, pure fiend or a mix is viable 3. Orc - Pure grunt, pure headhunter or a mix is viable 4. Human - Pure footmen, pure rifle or a mix is viable SC2: 1. Protoss - Pure zealot, pure stalker or a mix is viable 2. Zerg - Ling/bane, ling/roach or pure roach is viable 3. Terran - Pure marine, marine/marauder is viable. This isn’t to say those games are perfect either, no game is. But it’s certainly easier to have a varied mid thru late game if your core stock units are viable, or synergise well with some units and not others. There are tools for the job at hand, and what you started out with will influence the next thing you take out of the box. It has been done, even at a pro level, but there’s a reason you rarely see Stalker/Templar as a composition. You will maintain a core of them in many comps but you don’t really see Zealot/Collosus. Blink stalkers with heavy disruptors in PvP works much better than Zealot/disruptor. Etc etc I think Frost Giant have (so far) kinda missed the mark on their tier 1, and sorta by default the tier 2/3 too. In SC2 you’re building your composition to complement the next power spike. In Stormgate, it feels to me that you’re getting the power spike to complement your existing composition. I know it sounds like basically the same thing, but I do think it’s a different phenomenon. So in SC2, I’m thinking I need splash damage that hits hard, I gotta figure a way to survive and get that online and part of my army. What route do I go based on the game up until now? In Stormgate it feels more like ‘what can I add to make my exo ball better?’ Some may feel this is being pedantic, or it’s the same thing but in terms of game feel I really do think there’s a subtle difference. | ||
Waxangel
United States32906 Posts
On September 10 2024 02:22 _Spartak_ wrote: Upcoming visual changes: https://x.com/PlayStormgate/status/1833187843201442075 They've been made incremental environments improvements like this before, but I still have the same old questions about the unit/character design. Are they incapable of diagnosing the problem in their unit/character designs, or do they simply not have the practical capacity to fix it at this moment? If the reworked Amara ends up looking good, I feel like they should put reworking every unit's look on the table. | ||
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Agh
United States891 Posts
Add a lot more functionality and rules instead of the bland health/speed/vision etc that they currently give. Make level ones and initial camps give significantly lower resources, and make certain ones auto promote. Have in-base style camps like health ones only be able to applied to that player so it doesn't create stupid awkward interactions where you can have infinite offensive healing when attacking. These would also be good to leverage natural base defense. You can go even further and have out of combat units regenerate faster. Every camp doesn't need to give you some game altering incentive or drastic change or advantage. you can give a raiding style unit a purpose, maybe it can only attack very easy camps if the opponent is well defended, but this only works if you make the maps large enough so that there is always something you can do instead of idly jacking off your macro. Making the game akin to broodwar where you're allocating finite apm to infinite actions but have overarching strategic depth is the only way its going to succeed. The current game just feels like you're fighting inside of a phone booth, even on the 'biggest' map just because there either isn't much to do or the options and outcomes are polarizing to the point where you simply lose the game outright from either an error, miscalculation, or knowledge check. Sooooo many options and routes available to be explored but the reluctance to try and experiment with something that clearly isn't working where interest is waning is perplexing. Also the realization that zoomers don't even know what a phone booth is just hit me. | ||
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gingerfluffmuffnr2
102 Posts
On September 10 2024 20:35 Agh wrote: Money is running out, FGS can only tackle problems which are quick to solve like that lightening thing. No chance we will see new models outside of maybe Amara. The time for big changes is gone imo | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16111 Posts
True. I was thinking that's maybe why he called himself Maynard, from John Maynard Keynes. On September 10 2024 22:42 gingerfluffmuffnr2 wrote: Money is running out, FGS can only tackle problems which are quick to solve like that lightening thing. No chance we will see new models outside of maybe Amara. The time for big changes is gone imo John Maynard Keynes... money... economy theory in RTS... all in 1 thread.  "it gets late early around here". Damn, I just love that quote! On September 10 2024 12:29 Waxangel wrote: If the reworked Amara ends up looking good, I feel like they should put reworking every unit's look on the table. Here is an Amara that I like. I love the tension created before they show her face. Frost Giant needs to re introduce Amara in a suspenseful way just like in this short segment. This way people get surprised by her new look. | ||
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Fango
United Kingdom8967 Posts
On September 10 2024 12:29 Waxangel wrote: They've been made incremental environments improvements like this before, but I still have the same old questions about the unit/character design. Are they incapable of diagnosing the problem in their unit/character designs, or do they simply not have the practical capacity to fix it at this moment? If the reworked Amara ends up looking good, I feel like they should put reworking every unit's look on the table. Do people have an issue with the unit designs outside of the lore characters? At least personally, I think imps, weavers, magmadons, spriggans, kri, exos, and cabals look very cool. At least the in-game models that you actually play with, they'd likely look worse if zoomed in for a cinematic On September 10 2024 22:42 gingerfluffmuffnr2 wrote: Money is running out, FGS can only tackle problems which are quick to solve like that lightening thing. No chance we will see new models outside of maybe Amara. The time for big changes is gone imo I don't think so, their monetisation partly revolved around skins, so they should have multiple models of all the units on the go. Exos and cabals had huge reworks between patches if I remember correctly. But they'll likely touch up only the ones people complain about and save the rest for skins | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland22729 Posts
On September 11 2024 00:45 Fango wrote: Do people have an issue with the unit designs outside of the lore characters? At least personally, I think imps, weavers, magmadons, spriggans, kri, exos, and cabals look very cool. At least the in-game models that you actually play with, they'd likely look worse if zoomed in for a cinematic I don't think so, their monetisation partly revolved around skins, so they should have multiple models of all the units on the go. Exos and cabals had huge reworks between patches if I remember correctly. But they'll likely touch up only the ones people complain about and save the rest for skins Yeah a lot of people aren’t fans overall, or just hate the artstyle altogether. Least going off Reddit sentiment For me there’s inconsistency, in quality and factional tone. I think the better models, actually pretty good. Some are really solid indeed, my list is quite similar to yours. But some of the bad are well, kinda bad. For me the Celestials really work best when they’re leaning on the whole ethereal being vibe. But then you get Argents, it could be a bloke in a suit on the Vanguard faction. Also too pointy and, idk if it’s me being colourblind but their colouring is almost impossible to pick out in a CvC. It’s just not a great model, but it also doesn’t really fit the faction vibe either. Vectors are basically a triangle, I’m not vibing with that so much. For me Infernals work best when they’re going for somewhat horrific demon vibe. Can still be cartoony and stylised, but scary/creepy. Weavers may be my favourite model in the game, Hellborne are solid, quite like Hexen and Spriggens too in my non-exhaustive list. Whereas other models are either super bland, or a bit goofy and silly. I don’t mind goofy and silly, I actually think with the art style Frost Giant should have gone goofy and silly in terms of tone. Rather than aping some of Blizz’s more melodramatic tendencies, an irreverent campaign a la Borderlands or something. But for me it’s a bit jarring that you have things that look genuinely horrific beside units that are a bit silly, not just within the same game but within the same army. WC3 had serious and goofy units, but generally not within the same faction. The final issue is, of the good models and the bad ones (IMO) which tend to be made more often in games? Some of the worst models in the game are the units that are built en masse in most matchups, some of the best units are rarely seen until late game, if at all. So I think that’s definitely colouring perception too, and that is a bit unfortunate how that’s shaked out so far. I don’t think it’s nearly as bad looking a game as many do, but I think a fair bit of effort is still needed, some buildings too. I also think the environment is really detracting from the game’s vibe. You could take the same models and have them fighting in say, Celestial home turf, or a demon world and it would just look much better overall | ||
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Maynard
