Stormgate - sci-fi/fantasy RTS from ex-Blizzard devs

[ArchAngel]

SC2's campaigns had brain-melting writing anyway. If these guys worked on that, then I'm not spending money on their campaign DLC without knowing in advance whether the story is worth investing in. I can turn my brain off, I guess, but I'd rather not resort to that just to enjoy a game. I get the sinking feeling that the Infernals are gonna go the Zerg route of initially appearing to be villains before being revealed as misunderstood good guys and losing their villain credentials. I hated when the Zerg underwent villain decay and I would hate to see that repeated. So I'm gonna stay with my current investment in Immortal: Gates of Pyre because most of the factions revealed so far are unapologetically imperialistic or genocidal and we need more of that in RTS imo. It's not what I actually wanted, but beggars can't be choosers.

Well this business model is even better for you. I had to buy Sc2 WoL campaign at full price to play skirmish or MP. Now we can all get skirmish and MP for free and only buy the campaign if we like what we see from people that played it.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

SC2's campaigns had brain-melting writing anyway. If these guys worked on that, then I'm not spending money on their campaign DLC without knowing in advance whether the story is worth investing in. I can turn my brain off, I guess, but I'd rather not resort to that just to enjoy a game. I get the sinking feeling that the Infernals are gonna go the Zerg route of initially appearing to be villains before being revealed as misunderstood good guys and losing their villain credentials. I hated when the Zerg underwent villain decay and I would hate to see that repeated. So I'm gonna stay with my current investment in Immortal: Gates of Pyre because most of the factions revealed so far are unapologetically imperialistic or genocidal and we need more of that in RTS imo. It's not what I actually wanted, but beggars can't be choosers.

Well this business model is even better for you. I had to buy Sc2 WoL campaign at full price to play skirmish or MP. Now we can all get skirmish and MP for free and only buy the campaign if we like what we see from people that played it.

I guess, but it's still disappointing. When I first played RTS as a kid I enjoyed the little stories that came along with the campaigns and I'm disappointed the genre's writing didn't grow up with me. Indeed, nowadays everything is all bland and sterile. You can't give the civs any kind of coherent values or else that might get in the way of them teaming up against the space devil, can't give them any villainous traits or that might make them seem unheroic and unlikeable, can't give them societies and goals because that might interfere with the hero's personal vendetta. They're surface-level aesthetics now and I hate that. Back in the golden age of RTS we had groups like Harkonnen, Ordos, Nod, Scrin, GLA, Soviets, and so on, who were quite comfortable committing war crimes to achieve their goals and showcase the horrors of war rather than presenting it as a heroic spectacle like certain other games I can name. They didn't have a lot of depth at the time, I admit, but that's more depth than what came after.

 

[-M-]

SC2's campaigns had brain-melting writing anyway. If these guys worked on that, then I'm not spending money on their campaign DLC without knowing in advance whether the story is worth investing in.

You can safely save your money. They're advertising Chris Metzen on the kickstarter as if that's a good thing. Blizzard writing has been incredibly dumb since Brood War and he's largely responsible.

 

[Dayyālu]

Back in the golden age of RTS we had groups like Harkonnen, Ordos, Nod, Scrin, GLA, Soviets, and so on, who were quite comfortable committing war crimes to achieve their goals and showcase the horrors of war rather than presenting it as a heroic spectacle like certain other games I can name. They didn't have a lot of depth at the time, I admit, but that's more depth than what came after.

The fun fact is that Blizzard pretty much solved the eternal problem of "canon endings" with the concept of villain campaigns starting with Starcraft, where you have the good guys campaigns (Terran, Protoss) and the evil campaign (Zerg) that shows how the problems were created. Warcraft 3 perfected the concept with the Late Human/Undead/Blood Elf campaigns, giving you at the same time more leeway for fun missions and a better narrative, the bad guys could win and be characters too.

For some unfathomable reason it all gets thrown out in Starcraft 2 where all "evil guys" are redeemable or something, several times in a row even. And you end up with the enemy being The Generic Force of the Evil Void of Evil that barely has any motivation or character because you barely saw them.

They're advertising Chris Metzen on the kickstarter as if that's a good thing.

Fuck

 

[RaggleFraggle]

SC2's campaigns had brain-melting writing anyway. If these guys worked on that, then I'm not spending money on their campaign DLC without knowing in advance whether the story is worth investing in.

You can safely save your money. They're advertising Chris Metzen on the kickstarter as if that's a good thing. Blizzard writing has been incredibly dumb since Brood War and he's largely responsible.

Oh God. Glad I know that now. Definitely not spending money on this crap.

Also, I don't think the writing in SC1 OG was great either. I didn't like how it made the war revolve around the personal vendettas of the main characters. It might be less obvious than BW since Metzen was co-writing with James Phinney (although in interviews he claims full credit for all the writing, so I can't be sure who wrote what), but it's still there. The Confederacy is a faceless generic evil while the Raynor/Kerry/Mengsk drama takes up the foreground, the Zerg god personally obsesses over Kerry when their shtick is overwhelming numbers, and the judicators are clownish strawmen that have to be put in their place even though the manual that came with the game explains that the dark templar nearly blew up their home planet by accident (so imagine what they could do if they were acting deliberately!). It's all very shallow and frustrates me immensely.

The fun fact is that Blizzard pretty much solved the eternal problem of "canon endings" with the concept of villain campaigns starting with Starcraft, where you have the good guys campaigns (Terran, Protoss) and the evil campaign (Zerg) that shows how the problems were created. Warcraft 3 perfected the concept with the Late Human/Undead/Blood Elf campaigns, giving you at the same time more leeway for fun missions and a better narrative, the bad guys could win and be characters too.

Blizzard didn't solve the "problem" of canon and non-canon endings. They sidestepped it by adopting a linear campaign structure in which each campaign took place in the same timeline. Westwood would later do the same, except that their campaigns occurred concurrently rather than in sequential order: the GDI and Nod campaigns in Firestorm took place at the same time and showed different sides of the same events. I think Westwood did a better job by using concurrent order instead of sequential, as Blizzard's campaigns left tons of vital information occurring offscreen and then explained to us via exposition rather than showing us.

Also, I hate how we can even divide multiple sides into "good" guys. That sucks out all the potential for them to fight each other and defaults them to allies. The manual made a big deal about how the Protoss thought terrans were destructive and warlike, but this never comes up in the actual games. I don't want good guys and bad guys, I want every side to have justifications for fighting each other. Otherwise making the game an RTS is pointless, because in an RTS the sides are supposed to be fighting each other.

Immortal: Gates of Pyre does this so much better. Their protoss equivalent, the angels, are imperialistic conquerors who think they know better than everyone else and have the moral right to conquer the world and enlighten their new citizens. They're basically fantasy Romans and I am totally on board with that. We need more imperialistic conquerors in RTS, preferably everywhere.

For some unfathomable reason it all gets thrown out in Starcraft 2 where all "evil guys" are redeemable or something, several times in a row even. And you end up with the enemy being The Generic Force of the Evil Void of Evil that barely has any motivation or character because you barely saw them.

The zerg's original motivation to "become perfect" (this is the same as the Borg btw) wasn't elaborated upon either, but it's definitely a lot cooler than either Kerry's or Amon's idiotic childish motives to get revenge or whatever they wanted. Overmind was cool and I'm so annoyed Blizz decided to kill it off and replace it with those two idiot clowns. There is so much you could have done with the Zerg while retaining their alien motives, but instead we got a bunch of one-note morons who obey a pathetic human with stupid human desires like love and revenge. I feel similarly about the Terrans and Protoss since they're all one-note caricatures, honestly, but the Zerg were my favorite so I complain about them more.

 

[Venser]

Crank is streaming the game on Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/tvcrank


Can't tell 100% what happened here. Did he accidentally wall himself in or is the unit unit pathfinding bad?


Also it would be cool if the units walked out of buildings instead of just spawning next to them.



This units are basically SC2 hellions with nerfed damage output

 

[Cyberarmy]

A true successor to Starcraft, following he foot steps of Dragoons

 

[Venser]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[BlackAdderBG]

This looks terrible, why would anybody would want to play scuffed SC2?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

This looks terrible, why would anybody would want to play scuffed SC2?

Because ActiBlizz put it in legacy mode? Because this is new and trendy? Because they’re desperate for new content?

 

[-M-]

I love how they hire a Hollywood actor to do a voice and then put it through a dozen filters so it's unrecognizable. They did the same thing in SC2 with Protoss voices.





Voice actors are different between games, but they feel so much more artificial in SC2.

 

[El Presidente]

Game looks awful, is full of strong independent womyn of color and is made from the get go to cater to soulless korean 67452176124 APM pros. They even proudly said there's a Starcraft 2 bug replicated in this game as well because they want to keep it faithful and it allows for pro players' "skill expression" and all that bullshit. Last but not least, it's a free game.

 

[Venser]

 

[Lyric Suite]

I love how they hire a Hollywood actor to do a voice and then put it through a dozen filters so it's unrecognizable. They did the same thing in SC2 with Protoss voices.





Voice actors are different between games, but they feel so much more artificial in SC2.

God damn the writing in SC2 is soooooo fucking boring lmao.

I only played Wings of Liberty so this is the first time i've seen that clip.

 

[Lyric Suite]

So it's basically Starcraft 2, but worse.

Brilliant.

 

[markec]

It looks horrible both the visually and gameplay wise. The vehicles especially look bad, like cheap kids toys.

 

[ArchAngel]

It looks horrible both the visually and gameplay wise. The vehicles especially look bad, like cheap kids toys.

I've watched some pro game of sc2 2 days ago and this looks worse. Worse graphics, worse control, too many units.
Co-op mode might be fun but I do not see this going into e-sports.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The cartoon Jim Raynor made me lol in real life btw. I mean, fucking hell.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

God damn the writing in SC2 is soooooo fucking boring lmao.

The problem is that they're hiring mediocre writers trying to tell the same generic heroic fantasy story that you would find in every other fantasy crpg/novel/anime. They could easily have told a story about politics, resource management, the dangers of fanaticism, how power attracts the corruptible, and other subjects that made Dune and Game of Thrones so enduringly popular.

The Terrans, Zerg and Protoss could've been given distinct cultures and physiologies that tackled this in different ways. The terrans are human, greedy, short-lived, environmentally destructive, prone to infighting, etc. The zerg have a gestalt conscious that allows them to coordinate on a scale undreamt by humans, which they have used to systematically destroy and devour countless worlds and civilizations over countless millennia to become the most vicious warmachine the galaxy has ever known, all in the pursuit of becoming the ultimate lifeforms. The protoss have a psychic gestalt that allows them to build a species-wide peace undreamt by humans, which they have used to build a galactic peace that may not be sunshine and roses for all their clients even if they think they're the good guys.

Instead, we got a space cowboy and his bug girlfriend fighting the space devil. And the protoss are there too, I guess.

How difficult is it to give each race their own cultures and quirks to set them apart? To write the races as characters in their own right rather than accessories to space cowboy? 40k does it fairly well, at least compared to the average, even if 99% of it is sucking ultrasmurf dick.

So I don't expect anything remotely interesting from Stormgate if these devs still think SC2 had good enough writing to hire back Chris Metzen. They had a clean slate to work with, to worldbuild cultures and potentially rival 40k, but instead they decided to make the exact same mistakes again. I predict that the demon storyline will involve the human heroine killing and replacing the demon leader, then the demons fighting a civil war, then the demons turning good and joining the humans to help fight the subsequent villain. Just like the orcs and zerg before them. Because god forbid we have any faction that is fundamentally incompatible with human values (or at least what our obviously sheltered writers think are human values).

I am so glad that the rumored early 90s deal between Blizzard and Games Workshop never came to fruition, because it would've been beyond horrifying to see Chris Metzen write Warhammer video games. He would've written orcs, tyranids, chaos demons and dark eldar turning good, teaming up with the imperium, and building galactic peace.

 

[ArchAngel]

God damn the writing in SC2 is soooooo fucking boring lmao.

The problem is that they're hiring mediocre writers trying to tell the same generic heroic fantasy story that you would find in every other fantasy crpg/novel/anime. They could easily have told a story about politics, resource management, the dangers of fanaticism, how power attracts the corruptible, and other subjects that made Dune and Game of Thrones so enduringly popular.

The Terrans, Zerg and Protoss could've been given distinct cultures and physiologies that tackled this in different ways. The terrans are human, greedy, short-lived, environmentally destructive, prone to infighting, etc. The zerg have a gestalt conscious that allows them to coordinate on a scale undreamt by humans, which they have used to systematically destroy and devour countless worlds and civilizations over countless millennia to become the most vicious warmachine the galaxy has ever known, all in the pursuit of becoming the ultimate lifeforms. The protoss have a psychic gestalt that allows them to build a species-wide peace undreamt by humans, which they have used to build a galactic peace that may not be sunshine and roses for all their clients even if they think they're the good guys.

Instead, we got a space cowboy and his bug girlfriend fighting the space devil. And the protoss are there too, I guess.

How difficult is it to give each race their own cultures and quirks to set them apart? To write the races as characters in their own right rather than accessories to space cowboy? 40k does it fairly well, at least compared to the average, even if 99% of it is sucking ultrasmurf dick.

So I don't expect anything remotely interesting from Stormgate if these devs still think SC2 had good enough writing to hire back Chris Metzen. They had a clean slate to work with, to worldbuild cultures and potentially rival 40k, but instead they decided to make the exact same mistakes again. I predict that the demon storyline will involve the human heroine killing and replacing the demon leader, then the demons fighting a civil war, then the demons turning good and joining the humans to help fight the subsequent villain. Just like the orcs and zerg before them. Because god forbid we have any faction that is fundamentally incompatible with human values (or at least what our obviously sheltered writers think are human values).

I am so glad that the rumored early 90s deal between Blizzard and Games Workshop never came to fruition, because it would've been beyond horrifying to see Chris Metzen write Warhammer video games. He would've written orcs, tyranids, chaos demons and dark eldar turning good, teaming up with the imperium, and building galactic peace.

Hopefully story is more Sc1 and less Sc2..

 

[Venser]

I have like 26K matches played in SC2, countless hours spent and I never even touched a single player campaign.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I have like 26K matches played in SC2, countless hours spent and I never even touched a single player campaign.

I have a friend who has that same mentality. In fact, he never even played the Warcraft 3 campaign when the game came out, he jumped straight into the multiplayer.

I understand that point of view, but i think single player campagins can be fun in their own right if done well, and mechanically, Blizzard was pretty good, both in Warcraft 3 and even Starcraft 2. In fact, when it comes to Starcraft 2 the most tragic aspect of the writing being so shit is that the maps themselves are actually well done. Normally, i would WANT to play the campaign, but i just can't. The writing is just so abysmal it really makes it impossible to enjoy all the hard work they put into designing the maps themselves.

BTW, if the argument is that Starcraft 2 is fine as long as you play multiplayer, i would say yes and no. It's fine as long as you don't mind the other flaws that are in there, like the new units (i disliked them), or the sounds being a direct downgrade from the original (the Zerg in particular). There's also that massive, colossal disaster that was Battle.net 2.0. That may not be an issue now (i would assume) but i just can't forgive them for that shit. In fact it pisses me off that Starcraft 2 was allowed to survive as a multiplayer game. I think the multiplayer community were cucks for that. They should have boycotted the game and let it turn into a desert purely out of spite, but Blizzcucks gonna Blizzcuck. They still do today.

 

[Desman]

SC2 writing is pretty bad but the campaign missions are way more fun and interesting than in the original starcraft 1 and broodwar. I had a lot of fun playing the campaign at max difficulty whereas i always prefered to play multi or deathmatches in broodwar.
For sure the old starcraft had a better story, characters and cinematics (for the time) but there are many very boring missions.
People who actually played broodwar know that you could do some really cool stuff like the UMS "impossible scenarios" but the vanilla campaign mission design is outdated.
Meanwhile in SC2 they tried some new stuff, some missions with very light infiltration, some customization of your army and made good use of scripting. Even the missions without base building are better and you can easily realize that twelve years after starcraft release and after making War3 campaign they just got better at mission design and the pace is on point.

I was a lot into the broodwar competitive scene in the 2000's (discussing pro matches on TL.net and arguing that multiple building selection should be haram for SC2 lol) and i used to think that making an hard game designed towards Esport was the future for RTS but i just think the ship has sailed.
The RTS genre will always remain a niche and the fans of competitive RTS have this sad delusion that making games more "hardcore" and "Esport ready" would revive their beloved genre.
Actual pros don't fucking care. Sure some of them have their favourite games and will still play broodwar on their deathbed but the vast majority are just in for the money and if you don't bring the casuals there will be none.
If you want your game to not be a complete failure you should actually make an effort to design a decent campaign with cool new ideas (coop ? larger scale ? more customization ? etc... tons of things to experiment) because that's what most of the casual will play before trying the multi, slowly getting destroyed worse and worse by the competitive guys and then leaving the game for the new cool thing.

What Esport revisionists think: Make the most hardcore Esport™ game -> Everyone want to play this game it will be succesful !
What actually happen: The casuals are repelled by the difficulty, the more courageous try the multi get destroyed and realize they are too old/bad for this shit and leave. The pro scene max out at 500$ community tournaments and quickly die.

That being said Stormgate looks worse than SC2 which is utterly pathetic 14 years later.

 

[Desman]

Now that i think about it when your competition is AoE4 and a dead game the bar is so low that they could still be somewhat successful within the niche lol.