Stormgate - RTS Spiritual Successor to StarCraft launches on Kickstarter

rattacko123 · December 6, 2023

Frost Giant Studios just launched their kickstarter today for their upcoming game Stormgate. The game has already far surpassed the pledge goal, nearing close to $1,000,000 as of writing this. They passed their $100,000 goal within 15 minutes of launching the kickstarter. The Kickstarter is live until February 2nd.

You may be wondering, what is Stormgate?

Stormgate is an upcoming Free to play RTS game from Starcraft II, Warcraft III, and Red Alert 2 developers. It was first announced last year. If you watched/listened to WAN Show around that time, you might have distant memories of Luke being fairly excited about Stormgate’s potential to be a good game in the current landscape of not-so-great RTS games.

Stormgate has already started closed Beta testing, and already had enough funding to release the game even before the Kickstarter launched. Why is Frost Giant Studios running a Kickstarter? Well, they want to offer extras to players including a unique Collector’s Edition with a really sick looking mech statue.

They also are selling “Founder’s Packs” with exclusive perks and Beta keys. Depending on the tier of founder pack, digital rewards will be included such as “heroes, story chapters, army accent cosmetics, pets, fog of war shader”. They're also offering stretch goals in kickstarter funding to add new features into the game, such as a $1.1mil USD goal to get expanded bot personalities.

Quotes from the Kickstarter page

Quote

Stormgate pays tribute to the classic Warcraft and StarCraft real-time strategy games that we loved working on. It should feel familiar, like a true spiritual successor to those games

Stormgate will be the most responsive RTS game yet. With 3X the responsiveness of StarCraft II

capable of rendering more than a thousand units in a game without sacrificing smooth and responsive gameplay

Frost Giant's writers and designers have created an all new sci-fi and fantasy game universe in partnership with New York Times bestselling author Micky Neilson and with the help of Blizzard Entertainment’s Chris Metzen (StarCraft, Warcraft, Diablo). We aim to deliver campaign missions and ongoing storylines to our players several times a year, beginning with a Year Zero campaign during Early Access.

In addition to a 1v1 head-to-head mode, Stormgate will have co-op modes including a 3P co-op vs. AI mode “played with powerful Heroes with unique abilities”. It will also include a 3v3 mode.

Stormgate will also allow players to compete with others. It will include advanced matchmaking including a competitive 1v1 ladder.

Don't be turned away by the Free to play aspect of the game, because Frost Giant Studios says that Stormgate is never pay to win. “Stormgate is free-to-play so that everyone can enjoy the fun of RTS. Support the development of additional optional content that you enjoy, without ever paying to remove nuisances or gain an advantage”.

My thoughts

One thing that really stands out to me about Stormgate is that it is marketed as “The first truly social RTS” on the Steam page. “Campaign missions can be played cooperatively, Stormgate’s open-ended co-op mode supports 3 players, and even 1v1 competitive players can make social connections through the built-in tournament system”. I wonder how they will improve the social experience from other RTS games such as StarCraft II; we will find out when the game finally releases I suppose. IMO, the fact that it’ll be on Steam already gives it an advantage; Steam is a lot better than Battle.net at its social features.

Based on the Kickstarter rewards, I think its pretty safe to say that the campaigns won’t be free to play (similar to StarCraft II). This is further evidenced by their FAQ "Going forward, we plan to sell new story missions in ‘chapter packs’ several times a year." Speaking of kickstarter rewards, I am surprised to hear they are locking a fog of war shader behind a kickstarter (it’s part of the $60 USD “Ultimate Founder” tier); I am curious as to what exactly this shader is (an alternative look to the fog of war?)

On their newsletter, Frost Giant Studios notes that “Valve is an important partner for us, and their policy for Early Access games only allows us to sell Founder’s Packs with a limited number of Steam beta keys as part of a crowdfunding campaign.”. Does that mean this kickstarter only has a limited amount of Beta keys? It looks like each kickstarter reward only has a limited quantity (most of the tiers have a max quantity of 10,000). It may be that Valve’s limitations on Steam keys, while good at limiting scams from sites like G2A, may be impacting developers.

Overall, I think Stormgate sounds very very promising. It has a really impressive team behind it. Their audio director has even worked on Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex. Given the fact that they already have enough money to finish the game and eventually launch it, and that the closed beta has already started, this is likely going to be a safe Kickstarter to back.

Source:

Stormgate newsletter (can’t find a URL to this sorry)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stormgate/stormgate/description

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2012510/Stormgate/

rattacko123 · December 7, 2023

This YouTube video by Frost Giant Studios summarises what Stormgate is about nicely

BrandonLatzig · December 8, 2023

On 12/5/2023 at 10:00 PM, rattacko123 said:

Free to play RTS game

this scares me
why. Why does it need to be free to play.

rattacko123 · December 10, 2023

On 12/9/2023 at 1:15 AM, BrandonLatzig said:

this scares me
why. Why does it need to be free to play.

I think they want to maximise the number of people playing their game to make matchmaking easier and faster. CSGO (now CS2) and Starcraft II both implemented a free to play model quite successfully, with a big raise in player count, so I think they want to replicate that. It does sound like they have a good way of monetizing the game (via campaign missions, commanders, and probably skins) so I'm not too worried about it; hopefully they don't put any atrocious forms of microtransactions such as loot boxes.