FGS_Gerald

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.

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

Not an April Fools joke and we agree--Sammy is awesome and we couldn't be happier about working together again.

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!

Thanks, man. Appreciate the support! 💙

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.

Hey, folks. Just in case it wasn’t clear—we’re not committed to doing this, it’s just an experiment. The work in putting this demo together came from Convai, not our devs. We didn’t spend any money on it or deplete dev resources in its creation.

Largely, we want to hear from players as to whether this tech looks interesting to see if it might be worth pursuing. We want to be able to share ideas like this with you, even when they may never see the light of day.

We are firm believers in the power of human storytelling, created by human writers and voice actors. We’d only consider doing this if it doesn’t suck and if it’s blessed by our voice actors’ union (SAG-AFTRA).

No, we won’t be revealing or teasing the third faction at GDC, but our presentation at the Epic booth will feature a little something we haven’t shown before. (I dropped a hint with the original post, let’s see if anyone spots it.)

Hi, everyone! I wanted to let you know that Frost Giant will have a small presence at GDC next week for those of you who are interested. We've been invited by our partners at Epic to present in their booth on Wednesday, March 20 at 5 pm PT. No spoilers just yet, but it'll be a fun reveal related to our work with Unreal Engine 5 and what we're delivering to players with Stormgate. We plan to share a recap of the presentation on PlayStormgate.com as a news blog later that evening to catch you up.

Separately, you may also see a fun Stormgate experiment from the team at Convai, who are working on integrating free-form conversation with AI into games. At the show, Convai will share a demo of their technology in Stormgate, with a (hypothetical) player interacting with one of our earliest NPC character...

That won’t change. The 1v1 leaderboard isn’t affected and will still be freely available to the public.