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After over 100 games of Stormgate I wanted to provide some useful constructive criticism and some praise for SG. I believe that I fit squarely in the demographic which SG can capture that SC2 hasn’t, people who are between 18-25 who play FPS or 4X/grand strategy games and who have heard of RTS giants like SC2 but found it almost impossible to get into or get their friends into. I am not a hardcore RTS guy, I do like watching esports but playing SC2 beyond the campaign or direct strike feels to frustrating for me or my friends to enjoy.
Thus, when I say that I have found the macro mechanics in SG to have solved my issues with accessibility I really mean it. I have never felt more like I am improving at a competitively focused game quite as well as I have here because I feel like my fingers actually work properly. Something which isn’t really thought about is how if you play a lot of fps games you naturally put your fingers over the wasd keys with your pinky over the shift or control key. Having the selection option for building units/upgrades be w or e was the best decision ever. Making things feels intuitive, something which I really didn’t find true in other games. I love that I don’t need to hotkey those barracks I qued up and that I can just set all my rally points instantly without having to fumble around. I’m not good at the game, I’m about 1550 MMR but I want to keep improving something which when I tried StarCraft I didn’t feel. With this said I want to encourage Frost Giant that they made the right choices about macro, and at the same time I hope that they continue to add more complexity to other buildings like they did with supply and turrets for vanguard. I want to learn how to hotkey things better and be rewarded for trying it so I hope that a core design principle is that buildings can and should be complex enough to warrant hotkeying or usage beyond mere production structures.
As for the art style, as someone who played overwatch (and yes, I do regret it) I find the art promising and good for the most part. Sure, some things look bad but that’s to be expected and the things which are representative of the final game’s style like the Vulkan are great. I really hope that they add more wacky and unorthodox models and skins for me to choose from in a manner similar to LOL or Dota2. I really hope that they will allow players to decide whether we want to see the skins we have selected for units or the skins our opponents have selected. I see this as the principal benefit of this art style, that you can have overwatch like skins for characters and I really look forward to making my armies look as stupid or awesome as possible. The maps on the other hand really need some love but I think that with time those will improve to SC2 levels of polish and complexity. I want to push FG in this kind of direction if they haven’t already gone that way; your art style gives you freedom, so play around with it and let the players choose what’s cool for them (while making sure that the core competitive guys get interesting clean models for the base units that they’ll never change anyway sticking to the lowest settings for max readability).
My biggest fundamental criticism with the game actually is that pathing and unit movement can be deeply annoying at times. If you have a group of dogs attacking a creep camp you can watch a dog walk past it and then circle around the fight for forever before it finds a place to attack. This is very annoying and is basically the only part of playing stormgate that felt terrible. BOBs do this all the time with building buildings where they get stuck on each other and won’t let all of them work for so long that some of them stop trying to work. That sucks and really needs improvement.
As for maps and creep camps, I really wish that you could attack click on the name plate of the creep camp and have your units go an attack it without having to manually select the unit standing at the camp once you have vision. I love what they are doing with them and I hope that they will keep the animals that they currently use for creeps but just turn them into mutated and corrupted giant versions of these animals. Maps feel too small and too choke-point heavy for late game armies, so I hope that we get bigger maps.
Now I want to turn to some faction specific changes that I really believe would improve the game. I play vanguard, infernals are cool but not quite for me yet and I want to explain why.
Shroud feels unimportant. I don’t consider whether stepping onto shroud is a good or bad thing I just ignore it. Animus is cool but not enough of a benefit for me to consider when stepping onto shroud. White health is a useful mechanic but feels unimpactful to me when stepping onto shroud. Therefore, I think infernals should get something else for being on shroud other than white health. Perhaps any unit that dies on shroud should spawn a fiend and make the infest mechanic do something different? Covering the whole map in shroud should be a lot more menacing than it precisely is because shroud is shroud and shroud is dangerous. Yet, currently, shroud just doesn’t feel dangerous (and yes I know that this runs the risk of becoming creep like in SC2 but I think that FG can balance this better than they could creep).
The brutes feel like they should be a lot more menacing and damaging than they are. They are cool enough to have this big hulking model but the way that they are balanced currently makes them into weak-fleshy-meat-sacks that are born to die and be split apart. I wish that there was another unit that was massed before them which would allow them to be more powerful. I want them to feel like ravagers or roaches in SC2, something which can be massed but doesn’t need to be. Gaunts are less cool as brutes and they are higher up on the tech tree simply because they cost therium and I feel like they aren’t really filling the role that they should as the early game unit to be massed. Similarly, I think about fiends as possibly filling this void but I can’t make them directly. Therefore, I ask why should I be forced to make a brute before getting fiends if I want fast weak massable units. I get that its because of the infest mechanic (and the comparison that it will draw to SC2 if there are a lot of Zergling like units) but with the top bar abilities I thought that it might be best to have an ability that kills the fellhogs in an area and spawns fiends directly or a building that can spawn fiends for luminite. I’m not sure what to change but brutes feel like they should occupy a more powerful role than they do and there should be another unit, or the fiends themselves, that are the tier one ground unit that only costs luminite.
And as for both factions’ third tier of units; for vanguard I really wish that they make an even bigger version of the Vulkan, and for the infernals give me bigger spider demons. Large robots are cool, give me more of them. Take a DND monster manual and choose some of the weirdest things you can find and make those be the tier three units.
Overall, I really loved playing Stormgate and I am deeply happy that I backed the game. Even so, I want to remind everyone that just because Frost Giant is a new team and that they are smaller with a smaller budget game compared to Blizzard or SC doesn't mean that we have to settle. Keep your standards high and expect the best from FG and I believe that they will meet our expectations as a community. Keep up the good work Frost Giant and I look forward to showing this game to my friends when it comes out in early access or when it is finally released.
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