Frost Giant Dev AMA - December 20 - 10am PT / 1pm ET / 18:00 GMT

I can share my perspective in being part of the playtests and observing the playtester Discord. The Team Mayhem playtesters have provided us with a lot of helpful feedback and I’d say that testing has been proceeding smoothly and we are seeing meaningful progress. The testers are also producing some solid memes, like this tribute to Albino’s nerf-worthy Kastiel.

https://preview.redd.it/pjn1jyu4y18e1.png?width=1058&format=png&auto=webp&s=a2b68065d2c3dd18be008c090aea62a34864afc5

A bunch of the Frost Giant devs hopped in and played with our testers on patch day and we had a good time--even if it did feel like many of us were figuring things out considering how much has changed since we started playtesting the mode. One of the top Stormgate pros was on my team, for example, and he was hard carrying, but we still ended up losing to Monk’s squad.

I’d say that overall, the mode has made significant progress since our first tests and is getting to a good place, though it still needs work. One tester from our previous phase said we’re “70-90% there, as far as design.” Another tester said, “I’d give it at least 2 or 3 major patch updates of the same quality as 0.2 for Mayhem to be in a good state to show.” One first-time tester described it as “easily the most interesting and engaging part of Stormgate.” Some players also like the faster pace of the mode (Team Mayhem units move 20% faster than in our current 1v1 mode.)

We’re still testing with just three Heroes at this time, and our playtesters really want to see what the other Heroes will do for the mode, which feels like a good sign, indicating that the core experience is in a strong state.

That said, we are listening to critiques and words of caution as well. One sentiment we saw was that, while the mode is fun, it felt like a custom game that could be made in the SC2 editor, and that releasing it now wouldn’t be ideal as it doesn’t have the level of polish that you’d expect from a fully-featured core game mode. One playtester compared it to Direct Strike (a personal favorite) with Stormgate micro on top. What it lacks is a more complex progression or some other system to take it to the next level. Art matters a lot, and I saw some calls for another visual pass on the map, perhaps including the interesting landmarks that Allen mentioned in a recent interview. Another active playtester doesn’t want Hero ability upgrades in the quick macro panel at all–asking for us to instead give them talent choices on level up and keep the QMP for buildings, units, and upgrades only. It’s close to the direction we’re considering.

I’ll end by saying thank you to our amazing playtesters. Your time alone would have been plenty, but you’ve contributed to thoughtful discussion threads, proposed cool ideas, and even generated helpful unit tier lists and balance spreadsheets that arm our team with incredibly valuable data that they can then use to improve the game even further. Thank you!

Now, if only we could get some of you to queue up as someone other than Maloc…

My personal favorite memory was Simu Liu's visit to our studio. I was fully expecting to meet a Hollywood movie star who was just looking for a business opportunity, but I couldn't be more wrong. Simu is a genuine, earnest, and passionate fan of RTS who really wanted to just show his support for a team looking to revive his favorite game genre.

All of our voice actors, including some of the biggest names around, have been tremendously supportive of our game and in working with us in spite of our limited resources. You'll find that many of them have a past connection to RTS and we are lucky to have had their support.

Beyond being an RTS fan, Simu was super warm and kind, too. He brought a giant stack of books for our team, did individual meet-and-greets and took photos with the entire studio, and played an EPIC showmatch against his longtime StarCraft 2v2s partner on one of our earliest prototypes. His skills are legitimate, too--I'm pretty sure he's a masters-level player.

We're super grateful to him for being a part of Stormgate. (And I think he killed it as Warz!)

Pace is one the big areas we're focused on right now and it's the target of focus for an upcoming patch. Economy-wise, we feel that mid-game and late-game pace is near what we'd like it, but could use a slight bump. On the flip side, I feel that early-game economic pacing is currently the weakest part of the 1v1 game, and we're currently experimenting with combinations of changes that shore this up.

Something we're experimenting with in Team Mayhem is a blanket 20% movement speed for all units, and players have generally been enjoying that. That being said, Team Mayhem utilizes a much bigger map than traditional 1v1 maps. I think it's likely we'll either take the approach of slightly increasing movement speeds or decreasing map sizes, but not both.

Another aspect to pacing is the rate at which exciting events happen. Beyond economy or movement speeds, we feel that game-changing occurances don't happen enough currently. Things that fall into this category include harassment, units dying, or particularly compelling map objectives. We feel so strongly about this that one of our pillars for all changes leading up to 1.0 is "Make Things Happen."

Tim M commented on this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormgate/comments/1hhyi8p/comment/m30n85o/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

In the short term, we'll be looking to improve the pacing of the game by increase the economy with a focus towards early-game. Some things we've tried are starting players with "Rich" Luminite Mines that mine at a higher efficiency than regular mines. Though we liked this approach, it was slightly unintuitive for some playtesters, and we're leaning toward a more natural approach by strategically changing mining rates, starting conditions, and Celestial economy overall.

In the long term, we're looking at some major reworks regarding how the resources work. For example, while the scale of the game was lower (when 1-3 bases were more common), we felt Therium and mechanics around Therium were more interesting, but partially due to increased scale, I think it's since more evolved into Vespene Gas with extra complexity.

How Food works in the AoE franchise is one of my favorite parts of those games. Not only are there multiple ways to harvest food, it's possible to almost exclusively harvest Food in one of many ways. So while it's possible to obtain Therium in one of three ways in our game, harvesting it exclusively with anything but workers isn't possible.

I think AoE economy shines partially because it devotes a large part of its "complexity budget" towards economy. Where my head is at right now with this approach is that we're at a point in the project where we need to streamline mechanics to make them more understandable/cohesive. And adding greater complexity to the economy by adding additional "primary" ways to harvest resources would go against this philosophy.

This feedback resonates a lot with us, so much so that "Make Things Happen" is one of my two pillars in terms of future development. Some things we plan to do in service of this pillar include:

* Increasing the economic pacing of the game.

* Adjusting abilities to have more visible instant, and impactful effects.

* Reworking creeps to be more rare, more meaningful, more pointed, and more instantly gratifying effects.

* Reworking specific units to improve the potential for cool plays.

* Replacing Top-Bar abilities that shut down harassment.

* Reducing the strength of late-game turtling.

I had answered this in a different thread, but I'll repeat the relevant part of the answer here:

"In the short term, we'll be looking to improve the pacing of the game by increase the economy with a focus towards early-game. Some things we've tried are starting players with "Rich" Luminite Mines that mine at a higher efficiency than regular mines. Though we liked this approach, it was slightly unintuitive for some playtesters, and we're leaning toward a more natural approach by strategically changing mining rates, starting conditions, and Celestial economy overall.

In the long term, we're looking at some major reworks regarding how the resources work. For example, while the scale of the game was lower (when 1-3 bases were more common), we felt Therium and mechanics around Therium were more interesting, but partially due to increased scale, I think it's since more evolved into Vespene Gas with extra complexity."

I had that trophy made as a reference to this amazing SNL skit: https://youtu.be/3e0tszep890?si=QJrI-1UXjS61nFCu

Thanks for asking! First, it’s important to recognize the tremendous support we’ve received from RTS content creators. They’ve been amazing.

As for broadening into other “Blizzard game communities,” I feel like we’ve been taking steps in this direction already. MrLlama from the Diablo community (I remember him as MrLlamaSC) did a great interview with Ryan Schutter on our aspirations for the editor. Hearthstone’s Trump (also TrumpSC!) streamed our game during one of our beta reveals. And then of course, Asmongold and Esfand from the WoW community came together for their awesome reveal of our 3P co-op mode, which put our game in front of a big new audience outside of the RTS community. They were all amazing to work with and we’d love to do more.

We’ve had former League of Legends pros and top players from CS also express their support for what we’re building as you’ll find that pro players from many PC genres first fell in love with competitive gaming through RTS.

We plan to continue communicating our development progress, like with our most recent patch notes, the art reveal videos, and dev blog. That said, we are going to put a lot of effort into making our 1.0 launch moment as successful as possible.

Helpful steps the community could take include being an active contributor to our discussions here and on Discord, playing the game, submitting constructive feedback, inviting your friends to join you for our 1.0 release, and leaving a positive Steam review.

As for more direct contributions to the game, that gets complicated. I’ve personally received many offers from modders to help with our editor, for example, but we’re still a ways away from being ready to put those tools into players’ hands for testing.

Thanks so much for your support!