Artosis + NonY talk STORMGATE!
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- Опубліковано 9 кві 2024
- 2 very old friends with a combined 50+ years of RTS experience chat about StormGate -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Agree? Disagree? Are we missing something? Let us know in the comments!
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Great discussion. We love the insights and the passion here. Yesterday, some of the devs were circulating this video internally and we're talking through these ideas.
This is SO cool you are doing an incredible job and thanks for listening to the community
I love Nony so much, I could listen to Artosis, Geoff, and Nony talk about anything.
RIP Geoff :(
God this made me think of and miss Geoff all over again. 😢 I still can’t believe that he is gone and so young. En Taro InControl. 😭
RIP Fat Matt Damon
Couldn't agree more.
o7
That one christmas podcast of the whole gang together taking a sip everytime day9 laughs was glorious, good times
Oh man, I'm getting State of the Game flashbacks seeing Nony as a talking head again.
Oh, those were the days. Love you guys so much and I miss InControl. He seemed like a really sweet and honest guy too. There are some videos where he reflects on his whole SC2 career and I loved his sincerity and all the things he revealed there. A gem of a person that will always be missed.
Imo they should make stormgate more different then sc2. Noone plays sc2 cause it's just too hard. This will be the same.
Haven’t seen NoNy is FOREVER. Good to see he’s doing well.
A lot of people seem to think strategy is synonymous with army composition and while the army comp is part of the strategy, strategy is more than that. So when they say that they want to reduce upgrades to increase strategical variety they actually want to increase comp variety, which in turn can reduce strategy in a long game if the players are constantly changing army units around. It might increase tactical skill though.
Broodwar is way better to watch than any other rts but playing it is such an investment and is so hard no normal gamer wants to do it. Making a new bw would only succeed if enough people watched but didnt play. Sc2 was a decent balance of this where most of the ppl who watched tournaments didnt play competitive 1v1 ladder.
This is a big tension at the heart of rts genre. Sc2s strategy of using campaign and coop to sell copies to normal people and accepting that ladder will be for the top 10% seems fine. Make the competitive mode BW and the rest of the game basically a moba tier casual experience/big wc3 style campaign/coop stuff/custom games/etc.
When I was a kid I put hundreds of hours into wc3 and I never played a single ladder match. Played customs games, tds, single player, etc. This is the way to succeed with RTS imo. Multiple game modes to serve the different types of players. If you're designing 1v1 ladder to appeal to the average player you're doing it wrong.
Theyre sortof doing that to some extent with 3v3
It's kinda sad that mobas managed to convince near everyone to play multiplayer but rts can't manage it. I feel the key might be putting more effort in coop and team matches. SC2 tried but it was too late and it was already defined by 1v1.
Stormgate battles are 95% of the time deathball vs deathball. Unit skills even incentivise deathballing. The unit upgrade system incentivise that too. Deathballing is what made me bored of SC2 and switch to BW so I'm not very confident about SG's direction.
Same. Half the time in BW I just watch the minimap. The unit movement is something else
Knowing the eternal rage that burns within Artosis you have to really acknowledge his patience when interviewing other people.
There's so many others that interrupt often and goes into long rant but Artosis will sit there most of the time and just let them speak
Despite the core adolescent gamer inside of him, he has fortunately also become an adult
There's no "eternal rage" for Arty. If there was, there wouldn't be three kids and a wife (in a reverse sequence probably). He's just openly pissed about some stuff going on in his own games - often understandably so, sometimes not. Just a human - that said, yes - there are people whose incontrollable and lose "boy level" anger attacks are making them unwatchable, but Arty is not one of them. He's a living legend of SC BW and if it's his "eternal rage" that keeps him at it - long live the eternal rage.
Games with a heavy map control emphasis like Dawn of War 1 & 2 and Company of Heroes, used Upkeep as a potential strategic decision. You could delay making units and go for tech instead, ceding some map control but benefiting from lower upkeep, and then you have enough to make make higher tier units. The Bloodcrusher rush strategy in Dawn of War 2 was one example of this, and you could scout it by noticing how many power generators your opponent has and the units + wargear they chose to make.
Dawn of War 1 didn't have upkeep. Upkeep is mostly a polygon count reduction mechanic that has gameplay implications.
@@pawelmurias You could argue the same for supply limit
The upkeep mechanic from wc3 is underrated in my opinion(havent played DOW2 so i dont know anything about it but i assume its a similiar mechanic) . It really adds a layer of complexity that is lacking in rts. Its boring to just be aiming to max out asap, and makes micro and small engagements less necessary. As for map control, starcraft doesn't really force you to fight for it, unless you are looking to expand. Its nice to have it, but you dont REALLY need it. if you dont have map control in wc3, CoH and DoW 1 you are eventually going to lose.
all of the dawn of war games are trash and boring. they are just risk with some pseudo real time elements, they arent classics for a reason they are trash and if they make it too much like dawn of war it will flop
@@MichiruPoster performance is the main reason for the supply limit too, and shit pathfinding was the reason for the 12 unit limit in broodwar
It's kind of crazy to me that there is so much mechanical overlap in stormgate with sc2 units. Also, I really love the idea of builds, like, picking a few specific units and upgrading those. Seems like this will be a very different game. But I'm open minded and still excited for what they will change. Great talk!
Edit: So well said @59:53 . That's the beauty of RTS or game design in general.
I think what both StarCrafts does best of all RTS is the rock-paper-scissors of offense-defense-economy.
If your opponent is going all out offense (rush/all-in), the best you can do is to defend and turtle up.
If your opponent is defending their base they have no map control, so you just expand to get a better economy and grind them out.
If your opponent is going economy, you attack them because they have too few combat units.
Balancing and timing when you are doing each of these are what makes the games so great. (among many other things)
Stormgate has basically the same armor system as wc3 and the upgrade system works completely fine there.
The one thing it misses out on from starcraft is having upgrades be better/worse based on the dmg/atk speed of units (like armor upgrades being better vs marines but not as good vs marauders), but i dont think thats necessarily a bad thing.
Easy compromise for the UPGRADE problem. Have one set of upgrades for all units. That way, you can swap to w/e tech you want and have the complexity of boosting your units.
What a lovely surprise video 🙂.
Awesome talk and super interesting hearing the perspectives of both of you! If the opportunity comes up, I'd love to hear a follow up video on Stormgate on a later stage. Or maybe both of you will have different / new things, which came up, to talk about.
Thank you Arty and NonY!
Greetings from Germany from an old fan!
BW battles are fun and exciting to watch because of the micro and because of the tension of what is on stake. If you lose your whole army, you lose. If you lose an expansion, you lose. StormGate's challenge is to find the sweet spot between having these kind of exciting battles AND giving the losing side some hope of a comeback. My take on this is to have INVESTING mechanics: upgrades, allowing for high risk-high reward moves, or literally having an investment resource (call it gold if you want) that you accumulate during the game.
I think what you're looking for is anti-snowball or defender's advantage? Defenders is when everything goes wrong, you can retreat to a safer position to force your opponent to back off or bleed supply. Like pulling Siege Tanks back to your base to force your opponent to have to go through a choke while the tank is being repaired, shorter resupply lines, bunkers, etc, something your opponent can't do without giving up all the map control.
My issue with your gold idea is it's not inherently something only the disadvantaged player gets. If you are allowed to "defensively camp" someone's front door, they're in deep trouble. BW's limited control size means bigger armies are way less competent than their numbers would suggest, creating a bit of anti-snowball, I'm not really seeing a similar system in place for SG. Until army groups become massive, units still attack pretty well, just with lower average TTK than SC2. I kinda wish unit collision was even bigger.
With ZS, their solution is giving you energy when you lose a fight, and an emergency go home button for retreat to keep what units you have left alive, or reduce the damage of a base raid. Your opponent won't have as much of the same energy, and going home does nothing for them.
Also, IMO the less early game defensive buildings/advantage there is, the more volatile the game becomes, because there isn't enough income or infrastructure to recover from a bad fight. BW ZvZ is a big example because their only defensive option early on is more units. You lose them, you're dead. Sunkens and Spores are too costly in comparison to how much damage they can do. PvP has a similar issue with Cannons being too weak against Gateway. You need a place to retreat to in order to buy time for transitioning into something else.
Nice to hear from NonY, insightful as always. Glad to see that he appears to be doing well.
I agree that there isn't much to micro in StormGate at the moment, coupled with the long time-to-kill it makes for a pretty boring experience.
I would add that stutter-stepping Exos isn't engaging micro, it's just tedious.
Also that thumbnails is giving me a massive dose a nostalgia! Good job :)
They could make it so that once you invested into a upgrade like +2 bio, an upgrade +2 to say mech would still cost you resources, but the speed is like 75% faster after the first upgrade is say 60s old or something
I just wish I could zoom out more when I'm playing
I could listen to Nony talk about games for hours. I wish he'd make a few videos just talking about games sometime.
But as for my own thoughts, I think I have broodwar brain too. I really dislike the casualization of gaming in general, it kinda feels like games are getting simpler and simpler. I want to leave a 40 minute game actually just sweating like I did in broodwar haha
+/+ upgrades are also a good balancing tool. In SC2 +3/+3 Carriers are devastating, but 0/0 Carriers are expensive slow flying meatballs so fast teching into Carriers is not that great, but upgraded Carriers can be really good, while being hard to get. Also I think that the classic example of Zealot attack vs Zergling armor is a great design.
Artosis talked to the devs who said no upgrades gives more strategic variation. I disagree. It gives less strategic variation, but it does give more strategic flexibility between the fewer options
When you try to use that as a balancing tool you place limits on your unit design. High tech units will have to rely on massed attacks(carriers, broodlords, battlecruisers) or high armour(ultralisks, battlecruisers) otherwise it wont work.
There has to be a difference how different tier units are affected by upgrades. Of course you could just hard code that but it isn't very elegant.
On the topic of upgrades, I would like there to be a visual indicator of 1/1 2/2 etc without having to check. Like the unit evolves like a pokemon. Doesn't have to be extreme but it looking larger or more mature in some way so that you can tell before a fight. Also nice for flavor
Very cozy gaming chat. I don't even care about stormgate, but it is so nice to hear you two talk it out. I will now use "power fantasy" as a more regular part of my vocabulary, thanks.
This NonY guy also was starring in tv show The Office
I haven’t played Stormgate so I could be totally off base. But I hope that it will still be a mechanical game and not just a strategic/tactical one. Where the very best can differentiate themselves from the masses.
I also hope that the mechanical won’t just be micro based but also macro mechanics.
Overall I don’t know where I lean exactly on the accessibility vs depth spectrum, I just know that too much accessibility is not only a good thing.
I just don't think making a game so similar to SC2 makes sense for today's gamers. I feel like that Era came and went and if you want to recapture that audience and moba players, it needs to be way way different.
So far, comparing Zerospace and Stormgate, I am way more attracted to Zerospace. But who knows, both games have like more then a year from somewhat complete state, who knows how will It turns out. and then there is temepest rising and others. what a time to be rts fan.
That Nony used Razer salmosa for very long time xD i still remembered. Was years ago also my favorite mouse. Used two in my life till i swapped to different one.
love this! bring back more discussion with the old school guys or any pro players really. Nony is amazing great to hear from him again after all this time.
For your point on trying to take Moba players back to RTS, I think one of the key problems is a lot of big important people giving feedback to the devs are pro players of RTS who want it to have that super high RTS skill ceiling over bringing in droves of players from Mobas that prefer something a little easier to wrap their head around.
I sunk thousands of hours into League and Dota after sinking thousands in SC2, but it's really hard to go back to SC or other RTS after playing mobas beyond campaigns where you know what a challenge is going to be and can plan in advance and play it out repeatedly until you beat it (Stormgate devs hit the nail on the head when they said campaigns are super important to appealing to casual fans).
I personally feel if they want Stormgate or really any RTS to appeal more to Moba fans, the most important thing they could do would be add some more automation in macro as I believe Moba players aren't afraid of multiple units like many RTS pros think, they just hate spending half the game on base management.
Something like being able to set up Builds in a test map and select them in pvp matches would do wonders. Selecting a build would fully automate the placement of buildings, upgrades, and units when you get the necessary resources for each, prioritizing the order you did it in the test map. You could even set the ratio of each unit to other units so your comp stays stable once you reach all your desired amount of production buildings and upgrades. This could also be switched mid-match so you can pivot strategies without needing to stare at your base.
I think something like that would retain the skill ceiling for high level players as all the buildings would be placed more idealistically and units / upgrades would be fine tuned to the exact things that are going on in the match, but it'd make the game far more appealing for the vast majority of players that make up Bronze - Plat and like to run around with their units attacking and don't care at all for base management.
This made me miss incontrol 😢
What if they made an alternate game mode that splits the map into two halves and you're given two bases to start from? That way you can have lots of smaller scale battles along with different micro battles rather than just big blobs mashing into each other. Gives opportunity for neutral camps to mean more. Perhaps the game is won by claiming both sides, OR if it goes 1 for 1, remaining armies clash so every unit and fight matters?
"Z to split" is literally a mechanic from 1996 in Command and Conquer...
Aoe 2 has this as well with formations
Holy shit. NonY.
Glad to see NonY again!
Awesome. Haven't seen him in a long time. Cool that he's in to stormgate too. I contributed to the kickstarter, so I'm pretty interested in the development.
I love how Nony is able to call out Artosis' "Broodwar Brain" and Artosis actually listens. 1:00:00
Nony was a god, and really smart, he gotta listen man
damn boys. seeing nony again, instantly transports me back to the scforall days :(
Liquid Tyler! Looking amazing
On the subject of upgrades, what about if there were addon type buildings like techlabs where you could research +1 attack, but it had to be linked with the building or units you wanted to buff. But then if you wanted to switch tech, there's a small fee or time period you'd have to go through to swap your upgrades to a different unit. So if you had +2 ground attack for your marines, but you wanted to swap into wraiths, you had to reattach your techlab to your starport and then you could jump straight to +2 without having to go through a long build up and resource dump of researching +1 and +2
on the other hand, you'd have to balance late game units around always being around +2 or above, because normal gameplay would mean +0 basically never happens. separate upgrades are also kinda a time gate between getting the units and being able to roll people over with them. Sure you could make the unlock process very slow, but it still feels different then?
It’s good to see NonY again! Would love to see him do some brood war content if he still plays
Nony looks so damn young, wtf.
stormgate just looks and plays so blend to me.
I haven't seen or played a game that made me think it has potential. I play a ton of early access titles and it's just a disappointment all around.
As for drawing the MOBA crowd, prepare for massive disappointment because MOBA players don't even try out other MOBA and there are tons of fun mode/side games in moba (replacing custom map scene in RTS)
This. I play primarily EA games and betas anymore. SG so far is a tech demo and not a game demo.
One thing that came immediately to my mind would be upgrades that could be activated and deactivated. For example, you could activate +1 for a unit, it takes X-seconds to activate, and as soon as you activate it, you get less income (basically some kind of upkeep). You could think of it as, for example, advanced shells for the guns of your bio or mech that cost upkeep. But, you can deactivate that support which would take also X-seconds, and after deactivation, the upkeep is freed. That would also be like a come back mechanic for a player which does not use upgrades and is behind, because there would be more ressources to invest in other things. So, for a tech switch, you would just switch between different techs or supports (activate / deactivate it). And the more "tech" or upgrades you use, the higher the upkeep would be. For example, you could activate a second level of "support" after you activated the first one. I am not a pro RTS player and I don´t know if there would be a flaw with this idea, but in the first glance, I would find that very interesting. Maybe someone also had similar thoughts about it - or you talk about it in the video, I just had time to watch the first 30 minutes.
I like the idea but probably has problems as everything and needs to be tested.
I'd argue the creepcamps can actually pull the map control race out of position. Map depending. Especially because you're notified on the minimap if a camp has been taken.
Bro i played starcraft 2 on acid with my buddie once and i swear i COULD perfectly place and control every single unit.
I would love to watch that replay
Can I recreate your performance or was it a 1 off?
I play sc2 on mushrooms all the time because it makes me feel the same way. I can keep track of all the information better
@@sylvariatzaka this was like 2012 or.something would have to dig out my old comp
@@speakertrees only done acid a few times
Good to hear your thoughts guys. I agree after playing the upgrade situation just felt like it's missing... Every decent RTS game had them. Broodwar, SC2, AoE2, AoM. Upgrades are just something that increases the skillcap in the game, and makes for situations that smart players can figure out. Hope to see it added back in for Stormgate
lol, it does not increase skillcap. Both players upgrades at the same time because you need to upgrade or other player has more damage, meaning you might as well remove the upgrades. It just adds pointless task to memorise.
NonY is my favorite foreigner...'have you ever looked in the eye of the horse''...
Awesome to hear from Nony again
Its really nice to see Nony here talking RTS. I was huuge into SCII in the 2010 - 2012 era and Tyler was my favorite NA player. Always loved following the tournaments and storylines of what felt like a golden age of Starcraft. I fell a bit out of love with the game after that point but it would make me so happy to see a big RTS bring back some of the old names.
Hard to use abilities are actually super fun in games, cause there's so much room for growth and improvement. It's just not for everyone I guess
I don't think trying to bring moba players into the RTS genre is a good idea.
The genres play so vastly different that you have a higher risk of alienating the existing RTS players by catering to mostly uninterested moba players.
Moba's complexity comes from the possible interactions between your one unit and the rest of the map and other players. There's no easy way to translate this to a blizzard RTS setting, especially if you decide to put tons of spells on different units.
Instead of having your one unit/hero where all your input in the game is channeled through, you now have hundreds of different buttons and dials. This is not to say that complexity is the problem, but making a comparison between a moba and RTS and simply saying that you can attract moba players by adding more spells/buttons to press seems like a large simplification of the differences that a moba player has to get accustomed to when entering an RTS game, or vice versa.
I feel like it's trying to appeal to pear enjoyers by adding some pear to your apple pie. The pear enjoyers probably still aren't attracted to your apple pie and meanwhile the apple enjoyers are horrified to see what you've done with their favorite pie.
Music nerd. Hell yea
Loved hearing this discussion! My friends have all mostly moved on from taking games seriously so I'm deprived of these conversations - glad to have my itch scratched with this wonderful conversation :D
While I agree with a lot of what you guys are saying, I feel like player numbers for Starcraft are telling us that these things (like having the low damage attack on high templar) are going to be required to try and get players back in RTS.
Stormgate issues are better than steppes of war.
nony has hair!
i missed listening to these sorts of conversations about a game i actually care about. Makes me think of early days of state of the game.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think Stormgate is going to be a bust.
its not impressing any existing RTS fans, and I don't think its going to attract any new players to the genre with this amount of polish. It looks like crap.
I think the only way to get new players to a niche genre is to make a great game, not attract them with 'similar' mechanics. I think there is space for another big RTS tho considering how popular strategy games are, but dont think this is it. Also seems like their priority is getting paid.
more of those pls!!!11oneone
NonY!
STATE OF THE GAME
I think it's very important to allow sneakyness. Things like upgrade timing attacks are very exciting because it puts a very clear clock on what is happening in games. One player has given up their short term army power and it is up to their opponent to sniff that out and act accordingly. This is a very simple but exciting situation for players and viewers to navigate.
I like factions that are setup and require less abilities. I am a moba player but I just find it too hard to use abilities on so many units. So let me just do the basics and im happy. For example I love Zerg, but in sc2 having to use infestors or vipers is just to taxing for me.
third faction is just around the corner can't wait!!!
I agree with RT
Wait is this LiquidTyler??
Yeah man.
On upgrades they’re doing interesting things, they have cumulative upgrades, like adept and master training for med techs, you need one to get the other, and then like arty said it makes tech switching easier. Obviously I’m a fan of how it works in SC2, TvT for example, I upgrade to 3/3 marines and +2 tanks and then go into 1/1 air and try and close the game out with full upgrades. Stormgate is trying to be a casual RTS right, their decisions make sense in that context.
Lots of interesting stuff about the idea of switching strategies during a match. I’ve seen it as less interesting than other parts of the genre, but I think Arty makes a strong case that it just isn’t feasible in general.
The design of the strategic systems in an RTS should probably lean more towards the game-planning side. Where players try to predict what their opponent will do and try to counter that.
Great discussion and I haven’t even followed stormgate that much. You guys are both super articulate and some of the points nony made i was like “YES!!”
Well the individual units gain xp, why not tie those to a global unit type xp and when it hits a threshold that unit type gets an upgrade.
He says like extremely often dude
The more I looked into the CnC series, the more I realised that many of Stormgate's "innovations" are just borrowed from there.
Still nice but not nearly as impressive as I first thought.
Interesting talk. I want to add some things. I'm an rts player since Dune 2. I played a lot of different famous rts like almost the whole C&C series, Warcraft series, Age of Empires series, Starcraft series, Earth series and some more.
In my opinion there are some really basic improvements to the rts genre that come over the years. Some developers are not able to see these improvements like Tempest Rising which go back to a construction menu instead of having worker units and structures that individually construct units and structures. In C&C Generals it was one of the most important improvements to remove the C&C construction menu and to add worker units. This is one thing that add so much possibilities for decisions, tactics and strategies. It is no accident that Age, Starcraft and Warcraft become so popular. To have worker units is one basic good thing that it is difficult to compensate for all the disadvantages that a construction menu brings, if you decided to use a construction menu in your rts.
On the same level is the discussion about walls. In an rts walls give you the possibility to buy time when you are attacked and to give you the feeling to be save to one or more directions. Additionally, it is very rewarding when you find narrow spaces that can be walled up inexpensively.
That kind of thing was cool in Warcraft 2, C&C 1-4, Age of Empires 1-4, There are billions and some other rts games. But in this case not the Tempest Rising developers do the fault here, but the ex Warcraft 3 and Starcraft developers. Because they don't think enough about the basic benefits of walls and we're sticking with an old rts model from the 90s. This model is called Starcraft:BroodWar ramps. SC:BW had a lot of cool things and is in sum of course one of the best rts ever made, but like Age or other games with walls can learn something from Starcraft, Starcraft can learn something from Age of Empires 2.
One thing that an open map offers is that there are a lot of angles from which to attack. That give players reasons and many different decision options to attack one side or the other. This pays towards the account to spread on the map and to have action on different positions. In Age 2 it works without any creep camps. You always try to find the weak point in the defense, so the hole in the wall or the place where you can make a hole in the wall in the easiest way. So this huge package of advantages that the walls bring to the gameplay cannot easily be compensated for if you forego them. I see in general no benefits for a ramp design in rts. It just limits the tactical and strategical decisions you can make. In addition it makes easier to turtle, because your walls are indestructable. It is much more fun when the angles from which an attack is most worthwhile change during a match. That is possible with walls and not possible with a map design like Starcraft or Warcraft. So the best rts will have such an mechanic. Destructable rocks (Starcraft 2) or trees (Stormgate) are just a bad band-aid for the underlying problem.
And to use other structures as walls is another bad band-aid solution for the underlying problem. Especially if you just do it because another game you have developed also did that. It is really important that developers rethink things which they thought was set in stone. It is necessary for things to be critically questioned, even in products that were successful overall. These products were very good, but we want games that are even better and to rethink those successful games is absolutely necessary for this.
Keep the good things of Starcraft and leave the bad things.
Good things:
Technical solutions to unit control and responsiveness.
Strong asymmetrical faction design.
Special design of some units like Stalkers.
Interesting abilities and upgrades like SC:BW Storm, Burrow etc.
Bad things:
Only hand-crafted maps (no auto generated maps)
Ramp map design
Boring resource system
No buildable walls
If it is too late for Stormgate to change this it will also be too late for Stormgate to be the best rts in the world.
NonY mic very quiet, on max volume can hardly hear them over low sound effects in my game
You can't make a better game than sc2/bw without copying it at least a bit, bw and sc2 are great games because their developpers implemented and discovered unique features, mechanisms and game design atmosphere that are and will have to be "universal" to make a good rts, in my opinion. After having played many games vanguard i don't really see the point and benefits in terms of fun, reactivity, choice of units and smoothness to play vanguard games instead of terran. Also i don't like at all the way ressources are collected, i may have ocds or somthing, but i really like how you can optimize your early openings (especially on bw) by spliting as much perfect as possible your drones/scv/probes on closestq minerals patches instead of just send em on that kind of "luminate ball".
Technically the Luminite node does have individual slots workers mine from, so if you really want, you could make sure workers go to the closest slots first. But it is a lot less visible, true.
Zerospace yo
As a casual RTS fan I gave Stormgate a go but unfortunately i found it to be very fast paced and too similar to starcraft for my taste. Not saying its bad for other people though.
Personally I prefer RTS like Forged Alliance which i find fun and complex yet slower and more strategic, with more options for engagement.
Also I dont find Stormgate/Starcraft base management satisfying, maps and base areas are very small there is very limited base design variance.
If we trying to get on the map then like vanguard is so fked. lol. I hope they fixed the infernal free unit and infinite chase speed.
Hot take; the reason why mobas are popular and rts are niche is not to do with balance, units or the genre in general.
It’s the fact that rts have this very outdated and archaic mindset of their game being essentially a live service but lacking any of the live service elements unlike league or dota.
When do you see any massive changes to an rts that add new units, economy changes and mechanics? Only when an expansion drops while dota 2 for example has new items, map change, hero reworks and new heroes stop after a certain period of time.
Not certain about how stormgate will go about their live service model but if they continue the standard expansion model it will go the way of every other rts which wallows due to the traditional way for handling rts games of your token balance changes by tweaking numbers ad infinitum
iirc campaign beyond the initial launch will all be paywalled. Heroes is also said to be paywalled, which I cannot see goes along with "no pay to win" and heroes being in 3v3.
You see, the funny thing is, no matter how much money you throw at youtubers and creators, if your actual product is not appealing, it won't make one bit of difference.
They should be spending that money making the game look crisper and better
The devs of this game simply don't understand RTS, why it would be fun to play it, or why one would want to play RTS in 2024. The upgrades example way at the start by Nony is a good example. You play to try to get ahead of your opponent. That's literally the point of the game. You either do this by getting more units than your opponent and ending the game then and there. Or by expanding and having a better economy. Or by getting tech and getting an advantage that way. Or by getting upgrades and making your army stronger. These ought to be like rock-paper-scissors. Now I get that in Warcraft and Starcraft, they just added upgrades just to add something to the game. And they had some nice lore reasons. But with so many things about Starcaft, they turned out to create good gameplay. One can argue that getting upgrades is just a thing you have to buy that just makes your units a tiny bit stronger. And that you can simply remove it. But that just denies that playing an RTS is playing a game with actual gameplay. You literally remove a facet of the game. Instead of making it more fun and more meaningful, they just gut it from the game. And without offering up anything else. It just doesn't make any sense. It is a complete lack of vision, creativity, and respect for why a 1vs1 RTS game has a fun gameplay mechanic.
The point of all RTS games is to give us a glimpse of real life war experience in an entertaining way, as a commander.
Starcraft is so good because it allows range of real-war aspects like economy, ambushes, formations, deception, rushes etc. Stormgate doesn't seem to have this depth.
Watching NONY GAMES I MISS THOSE DAYSSSSSS
NONY HAS HAIR NOW?!
Artosis can you record a video interview with idra pls?
Regarding spell casting, I definitely think they should add more abilities but also in my opinion if they are going the less apm intensive route then they should add things that are longer cooldown and more timing based. I doubt they will go in the blink stalker direction.
The whole chat about upgrades was super intereseting (duh, Nony was involved), but in a way I feel about something else "is there enough axises to get advantage strategically for tactics/execution part to not be predictable". The % armour is worrying to me cause upgrades or no, %based armour makes units dps just dps. And zerospace keybind budget for actives is a very nice UX solution - and you can still adjust how important and skill intensive they are for faction feel by skill design
Regarding:
- viewers focus on the Micro Intensive climax of the show, leaving behind game start to finish build strategy skills.
To open the eyes of viewers and intice players to invest in strategy:
I think there is a way for a recorded game to be summerized in multiple ways:
(taking your experice and not only the last game to be evaluated by a criteria)
- get feedback to the build strategy
- get feedback to the mechanics abilities
- get feedback to custom goals, such as "team/rival play communication"
Imagine loosing a game, and instead of getting "you lost" + "here is how",
you get: "you achieved these goals" + "would you like to collect info on a failed goal?"
A game CAN:
1. publish progress records and own goals of pro players as a "story unfolding" - that will provide the tension and context to the tournament.
2. make decision queues more visible in game, make them stand next to each other. Have the game provide a small skeleton of "what decisions are made on both sides", and have the player select possible decisions that his opponent is make during game play, these selections are promoted to units auto-reactions. So just by viewing unit reaction one may guess both players decisions.
to nony's point of wanting battles to be black and white but not decide the game. This is hard to do with the standard model of rts, because usually most of your army is in the battle, and if we want it to be black and white then one of the players should have almost no army after it. But if you don't want the game to be over then somehow the one with no army needs to be able to stay alive, but then what's the value for having an army if you can survive without it. These are tough design questions. Off the top it would probably be something to do with camps or zones around the map, so that if you win the battle you get that zone/benefit, but then the enemy base has super strong defenses somehow so you can't just take your winning army and end the game. Here you can start getting crazy with it and adding new things not seen before, like getting some form of buffs depending on the number of units lost recently or something. The question being: is this a path that can lead to a better rts experience? Unclear. That is part of the cool of going in a new direction, but also the risk.
Though FrostGiant has said they don't want fights to be too snowball-y, I'm not sure I've seen a focus on a mechanic that prevents snowballs. More stuff naturally kills less stuff, so you need a little something artificial to halt the bleeding. With BW, clunky unit movement meant attacking into a retreating or defensive position with a lot of units was difficult itself (negated with airborne fights). With ZS, there's the energy gained from losing units and recall home for everyone. SC2's a bit weaker, so losing fights is more costly.
I feel like the frost giant team would really benefit from a collaborating more with a group of people like Artosis, NonY, Day9, and maybe some AoE II folks. They maybe don't have experience designing games, but they have more experience than anyone dealing with (and falling in love with) the consequences of rts game design.
I actually like the hellborn being so different in attack timing to the rest of the army, it punishes you for all army attack move, if you just let them sit back and do their thing, while you micro the rest, it will work out better. But stutter stepping your gaunts with your hellborn on the same hotkey leads to disaster.
I beat Nony in Stormgate ladder because the tool tip said a unit attacked air and it didn't. The way he expanded based on every single mistake I made made me realize how bad I am even though I was masters every season of SC2.
I dont understand why they dont create limitations for the players to work around. That is what makes brood war so great and what I dislike about SC2. Working with limited control groups and the pathing being wonky actually makes the games better overall, even if came out of limitations with the technology at the time. If you do SC2 again where you can select as much as you want and everything goes so fast it kinda sucks. Be different, MAKE IT DIFFERENT
because people who want to deal with such stuff already play brood war which is a one of a kind masterpiece. A new game with broodwar controls would have a tiny marketshare.
I doubt lack of QoL should be a design pillar.
No one likes BW because it's clunky lol
A lot of Nony's arguments are basically the same RTS stuff. But the problem with that is the game will be super niche then. It sounds like they're trying to get millions of players to play Stormgate. So it can't be as complicated as SC/BW.
whenever the topic comes around to multi tasking, a common ideal seems to be multiple armies instead of hopping between base and army. So I guess Stormgate wants to encourage you to have a small squad running around grabbing creep camps? Whether this is worth in practice I dunno.
God damn, Nony aging like fine wine.
SC does soft lock you into a strat lets say you play Terran and you invested in E-bay bio tech but you want to transition to mech for lategame well now you are way behind in powerlevel making a swap an expensive and time demanding suicide. Having universal upgrades can alleviate that and promote swapping army comp without punishing you for it. Tho no upgrades could be boring and last thing we want is an oversimplified and brain dead game like 8bit armies that is just A-move blob vs blob.
Blizzard fans are not genre fans, once again proving to be true. Great chat but most people aren't going to care about all the fine details they are putting all their effort into. Game looks and feels flat from a strategy standpoint and this is a strategy genre. Period.
Could you please let me know if Nony streams?
Commitment is king. Comitting is strategy. Upgrades rule.
Love to watch these two talking shop. Cheers fellas.