I believe that's a young Don Frye
I met Don Frye at a gaming event afterparty many years ago—I think he was promoting the Pride Fighting Championship game. He had some great stories to tell about getting into street fights as a bouncer in Japan, punching out car windows, etc.
Yes, you can still get in via Indiegogo. If you want to become a Founder, I recommend that you do that a few days before the 30th so that you're all set to go when the playtest begins. It may take a couple days for us to deliver your key, so you don't want to begin the process on the day we begin playtesting.
Welcome! Drop me a DM, I’d like to check out your videos. Lots of BAR fans at Frost Giant.
I’m really glad they took my YouTube comments to heart and completely rethought the entire way they do artwork to give me what I asked for!
Clearly this is because I mentioned their previous work looked unfinished, and isn’t because art is an iterative process that follows a pipeline or some nonsense a white knight/simp would say.
You’re welcome for telling them to work harder!
We couldn’t have done it without you.
I just looked at our most recent list of voice actors who are contributing to Stormgate and I was so hyped. We plan to announce our full cast (beyond those names we've already made public such as Simu Liu and Chris Metzen) a little later into development, likely sometime during Early Access as we begin preparing for the release of 1.0.
Our first third faction content will be released to our playtesters April 30 (barring any unforeseen delays) in our Frigate closed beta—which will be confidential/under NDA.
When we made the decision to push back the testing date to get more playable content into the next playtest, we also decided to move the public (non-playtester) reveal to the future—no date for that just yet.
If you’re a playtester, you’ll be able to discuss the third faction and provide your hands-on feedback on the private playtest Discord channels.
We’re looking forward to working with our players to make Faction #3 awesome and can’t wait to get what we’ve built so far into our testers’ hands at the end of the month.
We’re glad you enjoyed the video! The upcoming playtest will give you a first taste of our third faction. From my perspective, it’s quite different from anything we’ve ever done before. Hope you enjoy checking it out.
So, from what I understand, there will be no more "creeps" to kill, the camps will be purely captured by just standing with units there? I hope it is that way. Because even though I liked to go wander around the map killing creep units, it was really frustrating knowing that the best way to capture the creep camps were by cheesing the creeps AI, and just going for overall shennanngans to be able to kill them fast, earlier as possible, and spawn as many fiends (or get as many veterancy) as possible.
That is weird though, because from the last update, they said that they hired a new dude to make some art and he was doing the art for the new creeps for the creep camps. So I'm not sure now if the new creep/camp system will actually have creep units to be killed, or not.
I can confirm that in the current design, you have to clear the creep camp for the capture point to activate.
I’d recommend not giving up on the SC2 campaign and watching some RTS content creators who’ve made excellent educational video series. That said, you identify a common problem for the genre compared to others when it comes to welcoming new players. RTS can be really challenging. Tower defense games may be an easier starting point for becoming comfortable with RTS.
We’re aiming to make Stormgate more approachable to new players than the previous Blizzard RTS games members of our team worked on, without lowering the skill ceiling.
When our game is out, maybe try starting off with campaign, customs, and co-op vs AI—those modes are a much better starting point for learning than trying to dive directly into competitive play.
/picardfacepalm
Is this an April Fools joke or is Stormgate going to get a better art style?
Edit: Samwise is a treasure.
Not an April Fools joke and we agree--Sammy is awesome and we couldn't be happier about working together again.
There is no sugarcoating it: this is a mandate from investors, and it's objectively garbage here.
The "gameshow" that he mentions in the video? That sounds like a great use-case for AI. Canned responses, hedged in by a set of narrow parameters for tone and censorship, saves you the trouble of paying a voice actor to record 10,000 redundant lines of "Wow! Nice job!".
But hooking the fans of Warcraft and Starcraft with the promise of a true AAA RTS campaign with story, writing, and voice acting, only to blatantly try and fill it with AI sawdust filler? It's a slap in the face. I honestly want my money back.
Money is the problem, of course. Some investor somewhere wants to make another money printing machine and thinks AI will let them do it here. It's not going to work.
This is not true and couldn't be further from the truth. We agreed to allow Convai to create the demo because we thought the tech was interesting, but that decision was entirely our own.
Stormgate's storytelling (such as in our ongoing campaign) is 100% being written and voice acted by humans. We are open to exploring tech options such as with this experiment, but we are not committed to using this technology and don't plan to use it in Stormgate unless we feel it makes our game significantly better, while also being done in a way that's fair to the humans who will breathe life into our game universe.
AoE2 is a beautiful game. I expect people will be playing it forever.
Pass some of those nugs over here.
Same!
It took around 6 months per commander with the small team we had near the end of development. Of course, that was very loose. If we did literally nothing but make commanders, the team probably could have done it in 3 months.
Examples of other things we did included:
- PvP Balance changes
- Co-op Balance changes
- Supported esports in various ways from the dev side
- Warchests
- Large-scale updates, such as 5.0
- Prestige
- Supporting various side projects, such as Google Deep Mind
- Fixing issues with the game as they came up
- Helping other teams
Thanks, man. Appreciate the support! 💙
Hey Gerald! Any chance you've heard back yet on what's being planned to be reset/wiped? c:
Hi—from a very high level, we want to carry over progression from Early Access into 1.0. It may be expedient or make the most sense for us to “restart” progression in a specific area if we completely revamp a mechanic or system, but generally, we’re not planning to do a full reset for 1.0.
We do plan to reset the ranked ladder, though, from what I understand.
Our novella was written by Jack Bentele, a flesh and blood human who is also working on our game narrative.
Stormgate is being made by people. Humans. Is there a potential here for this sort of tech to make our game more immersive in an additive way, without sacrificing human storytelling and voice acting? That’s not a sacrifice we’re willing to make.
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