NonY is probably my favorite Starcraft/RTS personality. His analysis is absolutely spot on. I hope FG listens in, they are incredibly privileged to get feedback from such badasses in the community. It is obvious they all want SG to succeed, it is just whether FG makes that happen.
Stormgate SCREAMS "Lack of Cohesive Vision." Like a lot of modern strategy games nowadays, both real-time and turn-based. If you want to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks in creativity, you have to allow things to be cool, epic and overpowered, at least for a bit. If you want things to be more controlled and dialed back, then you need all of your very basic interactions to find the balance of simplicity and depth to them in order to make mastery of the game feel masterful and interesting. What we have right now is a halfway house design room that seems to be full of a mix of creatives not allowed to fully express themselves, and would-be "balance experts" who have no real concept of how non-pro players play. As such, Stormgate feels: - Derivative where it needs to feel inspiring (unit and faction design), - Overly complicated where it needs to be straightforward and easy to understand (resource and construction design), and - Boring, grindy and unclear where it needs to feel insightful and inspiring to improve (build order optimizaiton & ladder grinding) As such it fails to be interesting to new and returning RTS players, and fails to hook long-term RTS players. I used to think all the anti-Stormgate was just SC:BW fanboys wanting everyone to stop playing other games and go back to brood war, which was probably true for some, but after getting a playable version with the EA release it's clear that the dev team is incredibly far from something that's going to be anywhere near the quality that the 10- and 20-year old RTS games had. It's not *impossible* for them to improve the game enough to be where it needs to be, but with a lack of clear focus and direction it's going to be HIGHLY unlikely.
"I used to think all anti-stormgate players were SCBW fan boys wanting everyone to stop playing other games and go back to broodwar" As a broodwar and SC2 fan, this makes no sense. Why would I be looking for new RTS games like Stormgate, Tempest Rising, and Zerospace if not to play them? I even paid the $25 to get into Stormgate early The bad sentiment was from the game feeling unfinished and the devs making promises too big for an indie studio. This isn't what SCBW fans thought, this is what all RTS fans thought across the board
@@ZverseZ this is exactly what everyone with more then 2 braincells knew ... and look newest patch the improvements on graphic already ... thats how it is if you develop a game with the community and not bring out a finished game where everyone is unhappy with like concord xD
I had a GG button signed by the original SotG crew when i was at MLG Dallas (Day9, Nony, JP and ofc the late great Incontrol). My most prized possession
Well said on many points. Playing Stormgate made me realize how good WC3 actually was. It's a slower TTK game with good creeping mechanics, counters, faction unit design, map pressure, etc. I never gave it a fair shot versus BW or SC2, but after playing Stormgate, I've been on a WC3 playing spree and I've been having a blast.
Same, although I played War3 back in the day I thought I remembered it with rose-colored glasses. But it's actually an amazing game and I've had a ton of fun coming back to it after many years of SC2.
Great feedback. To me it feels like the devs got very overconfident and thought they could just wing this, but the lack of vision of what the game should be, is not there.
That's a crazy thing to think about. 'Hey, we're going to take $20+ million and we'll just wing it.' That's obviously not true but that would be mythological levels of hubris.
I don't think it's overconfident. Rather, there seems to be a lack of confident leadership in a particular direction - evidenced by asking the community about things like creeps, heroes etc.
I think they are missing the point that RTS is supposed to be fun to play by yourself, then fun to play against friend, and lastly fun to watch. They skipped all the fun part and want to achieve the last part 1st....I think the weakness of technical analysis is that you can balance a lot of these things in an excel sheet, but is it fun, is a different question.
I'd be interested in an RTS where the resources are tight, the army sizes are smaller, and the engagements are scrappy, where micro matters a lot, defender advantage is real, units that gain value over time (like casters) are a real long-term investment... and no one can easily build a max population death ball. Killing units without losing units matters and keeping units alive while gaining value matters. Imagine SC2 with half as many resources in your main and expansions, one pocket expansion, a much harder to secure third, and literally no fourth, where a major engagement cripples both sides and micro battles ensue with a handful of units trying to scrape out a victory with the map mined out.
With regards to dota, Blizzard did run wc3 dota exhibitions in the early Blizzcons so at least some people there knew it was a big deal before lol came out and the genre took off. The Blizzard team even made their own official dota-like custom map called Candy War that was released in an update for TFT during 2004 and 2005. It's really baffling how they fumbled the ball.
literally wearing my TL shirt and drinking my coffee while listening to nony with a powerpoint. Ideal monday morning :) My first contact with esports was Artosis and Chill casting your games in the TSL (I think someone posted about it on shacknews). I think back then I had to torrent those AVIs to actually watch them. Too bad noone from the pro scene seems to like SG so far, I enjoy the campaign and the 3vE so far and look forward to what they do with it. I hope they can get the competetive part back on track. As far as I remember there was only one guy on OG SC dev team who actually was good on 1v1 and later was the design lead on Broodwar. So I don't think you have to start out with that focus from the get go for it to succeed at some point. Yeah it's a bit of straw grasping I know.
First of all, fantastic and insightful critique. You're dead on about FG not having a clear vision from the start. That was my first red flag as well. Another example of this was when they asked the community something like, "how do you guys feel about space cowboys?". Agreed re: early game imbalance, but an argument could be made that the game is still somewhat early on in development. EA should be "first draft of the final draft"...totally agree. A lot of these criticisms are very valid, but let's not forget that 90% of RTS players are dirty casuals. I think the main reason why Stormgate has failed so far is that they haven't appealed to that demo. Thats how you get players in the door and drive revenue to continue development. Thanks for giving your background btw. I've been in the RTS space for a while but this is the first I'm hearing of you.
I think it's important too, to remember that thousands of people played a much worse version of the game for long periods of time during testing, and it was the sudden complete change of direction in the first EA patch that also led to a wild amount of complaints that are still only hoping to *maybe* be addressed in the September 17th patch. People generally were willing to play quite a bit in spite of the february and other betas. This EA launch has been markedly different again, due to changes that seem to suggest they haven't agreed on what camps *should* be.
Their vision was make a proplay rts game, their result a proplay game. A proplay game is one that only people who are paid to play will play and is boring to watch.
This is by far the best critique of Stormgate I've heard. It's honestly insane to me that none of these "Starcraft successors" are taking the clear formula you laid out as what you would do for a Starcraft 3: Start with what we know works, make units feel good and fun to control (like you said, we know this from all the moba games), and then play with themes and details on top of that. Would love to hear you talk more about SC and RTS and everything else. Listened to SotG every episode back in the day.
Really liked this video mate and agree with all of the points you've made. 1. I especially agree that the lack of vision if a problem and very strongly shows throughout the entire development process. To me it's always felt like stormgate is just a game made for gaming, instead of a game that's made because someone had a great vision for a fun videogame that they wanted to implement, and their ideas are just all over the place, across the board, both in more tangible things like art/style direction and less tangible things like core design philosophy of Stormgate. 2. I don't really like how much they've focused on Rollback and emphasising these solutions that solve some imaginable problems that maybe a low single digit of the playerbase cared about, at best (playing in cross-region groups or participating in cross-region tournaments isn't something the average player does) -- especially considering not only the development/tech cost, but also the performance cost of having something like Rollback in an RTS game. 3. I think they've gone too hard on being too "soft" in a sense of counters, unit tiering, etc. In SG there's no real hard counters so the unit diversity in compositions is dead simply in favour of the strongest unit available in terms of raw power -- the exo, for example. In SG, the uptiering feels a lot weaker than SC2, WC3, or even BA that's been mentioned, and quite often you're just better off to keep amassing your T1 unit blob with only a few occasional T2 unit introductions.
As a dev myself (not a game dev), with stormgate I've always had the feeling that they don't have a concrete vision and a lot of the issues with the games stem from this fact. When you look at the competitors like zero space, you can tell that there is a clear set of game design goals that they're working towards but the same cannot be said for stormgate. It just feels like they put together a studio and said let's make a starcraft 2 style game with no further detail added to that plan. Some of the projects that I've worked on in the past have been plagued with this type of development cycle where no one person has a concrete vision on what the final product is supposed to look like. As a result, you get this kind of wishy-washy software that doesn't really satisfy any specific goal and ultimately the project fails. And it doesn't really matter how much experience you have, if you're working on a project like this, it's more or less doomed to fail unless you get really lucky. This type of development is what I like to call feature paralysis. Basically, no one is willing to commit to a specific feature or set of features and as a result everything just kind of falls apart.
Early access was released after a long period of tier 3 units not being in early early access and they still didn't have a well made early game. Maybe it has something to do with them not including meaningful and scoutable tech and economic choices. Monk said they don't want players to feel committed to a tech path. You don't have to choose whether you want to build a scout or not, same goes for taking a gas - it even compensates you if you don't mine it so the choice to mine early or later is minimised. I guess they can't just outright say their design philosophy is about taking away as much player choice as they can to reduce the skill gap.
Very well reasoned video. On the topic of tech, tiers and composition variety: the way they have designed therium to be rather scarce, forces everyone into pretty repetitive compositions. You can rarely make a pure T2 army simply because of the resource distribution, which make things a bit dull. Also, I just can't wrap my head around the decision to punish players for mining therium early on. It's so foolish. Early tech builds are one of the main pillars of RTS fun and interactivity. But in SG, early mining is not only inefficient, but pushes back the enrichment stage. It's incredibly punishing and dull.
The game's visual style in emblematic of the "openness"/"blank slate" of their approach. It feels like design-by-committee where they've put all the things they think will be popular together in a clump. That can probably apply to the game and its mechanics as a whole.
In addition to the lack of vision, I really think the MOBA/WC3 direction was just a poor choice. It feels just so outdated and slow today. I know so many love WC3, but I’ve always felt it was slow and clunky - and I came from WC2 and Red Alert.
WC2 is a very fast paced game, with unlimited use for APM. 350 apm and you're still not fast enough (and we're not even talking about playing on fastest speed, but on even faster speed). Edit: I say 350 apm because that's the APM range I usually get to when I'm half-decent.
This is the best deep dive I've ever seen, SG feels like they skipped any kind of in depth talks like this and instead spent time on... taking a nap? Idk it doesn't feel like 40 mil of content was produced even if some people were making bad design decision on the tech side it still doesn't live up to a 40 mil budget
I would say that the defenders advantage is actually fairly strong in this game. Turrets are generally pretty strong and I believe every race can go a fast expand pretty safely (except maybe on a couple of the more wide open maps vs dogs atm, but that's a balance issue). The problem is creeps are SO valuable, that the 1 base player that rushed army units literally stays ahead in economy off of taking those creeps. To me that's the fundamental problem and if they fixed it so that more bases is always more economy than creeps, the game would feel fine for this aspect. Just need to reduce the number of camps and/or the bounties. It's sad but I actually think patch 0.00 (the one during the first 1.5 weeks of the paid "early" early access, right before the 60% creep buff), would've been a better patch to release on. It had a much better balance for expands vs creeping and I think especially new players would've benefited a lot from a slower early game that gave them some time to breath and expand instead of DOG DOG DOG.
Frost Giant is composed of zeros that had eff all to do with actual Warcraft/Starcraft. They were interns fetching coffee for the real devs back whenever they say they were 'part of blizzard team'. It's just another Back4Blood situation all over agian.
I think this is all great feedback. Regarding rollback: Maybe my understanding of why it exists is fuzzy, but it feels like a really big missed opportunity. In fighting games, my understanding is that rollback exists so that it's possible to execute consistently in small frame windows without needing a LAN connection. I feel like at least a handful of units in Stormgate should've been designed with that in mind - maybe they could allow for some cool micro/optimization for players who are willing to spend time practicing 3-4 tick-window micro tricks. Instead, rollback and the 64hz tick rate are kind of touted as something that just generally makes the game "feel nicer" than SC2. But those features don't have a direct application to any gameplay mechanic.
on the whole "armchair game dev" discussion: your input is valuable. and you're right to notice that that input from an expert play tester may get lost or ignored. to me, the analysis, understanding, and breakdown capabilities you demonstrate in this video sound perfect for a PM (project manager) role at an RTS game studio. a PM role would not be a silver bullet for making your feedback heard. but you would have more influence.
Such a great video! I'm not sure there's enough time for SG dev team to right this ship. Most of their funding is probably behind them at this point and there are too many lessons from SC2 that have either been unlearned or willingly ignored - which is doubly painful considering they also had no shortage of players such as yourself providing them such high quality feedback along the way.
A 1 hour video? Awesome! Listening so far, and wanted to say I totally agree with all the red flags and stuff you mentioned, and it's nice to hear someone with as much relevance and history in the scene speak about it! Them being so open asking for community opinions on what the gameplay should be like, not even designing the 3rd race first before trying to balance the first 2 factions, the lack of quality in many aspects like the art and sound and overall lack of direction/vision, them marketing this as like a "we're releasing this to players so early to get your feedback unlike other companies that don't beta test until the game is near done, don't worry we'll keep developing it until it's good, but oh we're going to start taking money too", their general marketing that Stormgate is THE ex-blizzard dev company / the "same" creators that made your favorite games (which is pretty dishonest), all of these are big red flags! It really inspires a lack of confidence and indicates that they lack the direction and understanding needed to make a good RTS, and are also not in a good place financially to have the time and resources to achieve their goal. It's also just unrealistic for a brand new company to be able to make a triple A game right off the bat. It takes experience working as a team, figuring out their pipeline/workflow, figuring out who is a good lead/supervisor, learning many lessons, getting the network and connections and help needed to develop the game to finish. It's not impossible but very unrealistic! A game like Battle Aces has a good chance because the lead gameplay is handled by David Kim, but Stormgate doesn't have an equivalent. The gameplay is led by someone who only helped with SC2 co-op. Co-op is good but it's a very different thing from making a good multiplayer competitive game. And Zerospace has a good chance because it has a team of SC2 community semipros/pros/casters who already know and can well work together.
Nice ideas, thanks for sharing. The point about designing fun things that interact well seems pretty foundational. I genuinely feel we had more of this in October, and also that this game wanted to be a bit more Warcraft-style in its early days, with smaller armies skirmishing it out-but I digress. I guess we got what we got and can only hope that things are on the up.
When they first revealed the game they said that they wanted to make an RTS which is more appealing to the masses (=casuals which eventually buy the commanders and the campaign and basically pay for all the 1v1 players only which is fine)...well they made it more complicated with the creeps (debatable ok) and the topbar casts but somehow thought that leaving out upgrade levels is better. Plus the design language is making it very hard to distinguish the units and it is also not that appealing imho
I really do think creeps are far too contrived of a concept outside of the RPG hybridisation that existed in WC3. In general you want players to fight over map control not because of things you've put there that offer rewards, but because the fundamentals of the game drive it. In age-of games this is due to the way resources function, where wood and gold and food are going to be found in different places, you can't centralise everything, and sustainable, safe food is slower and more expensive than going out and hunting on the map, so the incentives naturally flow from the macro. This also makes raiding much more delocalised, and more natural. You can in principle attack or control different locations, different resources, depending on what you think your opponent is bottlenecked on, or specifically needs, or based on which you think is most vulnerable. And I think in general the goal should be to create fundamental mechanics where small advantages can be consistently fought over, without near-zero time-to-kill, where oracles or widow-mine drops or whatever the case may be dip in and vaporise things. You want push and pull, not to the point that decisive wins can't be had, but to the point that players are contending on a macro-scale, and not purely on the micro-scale. The question of how battles should work, of how micro should work, how units should feel and be designed, are really separate questions to that. Indeed the idea that units were designed around raiding in the context of map design and base concentration in sc2 was itself a problematic contrivance. I mean, stalkers harassing because of blink, that's fine because it's an extension of their general role. Units that existed just to kill workers, or with that as their primary focus, that was bad.
I would agree, I think creeps are an untenable idea. I wish they'd drop the idea. Positions and ground have innate usefulness, when you put creeps on them it's entirely artificial. And that artificialness fouls the design (map design, strategy and tactical design, economic), so now you have to design around it. The problem with SC2 wasn't the lack of creep camps forcing people out onto the map, it was the map design and unit design. Stormgate thinks they are offering a solution to a unique problem to SC2 but they fundamentally don't seem to understand what the problem is.
If you open the page debug (on firefox its ctrl+shift+i, idk chrome), go to the console, and type "document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 3.0;" or whatever, you can increase speed beyond 2.0x :P
Stormgate is reaching concord numbers on steam. FG is almost out of money based on their teport back in february. Early access release had what. 4k players at launch? Lets assume they each bought the 60 dollar edition. 240k dollars. Lets say everyome bought the pet and hero. 40k more dollars. So 280k dollars at most. Their operational costs yearly are about 11 million. Theyre sinking faster than the titanic would with 4 big holes in it.
99% of the problems with stormgate is that they themselves decided that they were the spiritual successor to starcraft. if this was "a new rts", people wouldn't be so invested in desperately wanting it to succeed. compare how much more people are dissappointed in stormgate vs other rts games that have released in the past decade and its clear that frost giant studios themselves set out not to create a great rts, but to show blizzard entertainment, their former employer, that they were the reason for why starcraft succeeded. thats why they are selling the spiritual successor to starcraft. and because people love starcraft, taking on that mantle means that people listen, a lot more than how little people cared about battles aces until that started to pop up (because it was good). frost giants set themselves up to fail. and, turns out, brood war was magic in a bottle, and starcraft 2 was a good game too. topping those two might not ever happen, and when you put that goal up, whether for your own pride or to increase funding or whatever it was, and then release something which shows that it was in fact blizzard that got the best performance out of you, and not holding you down, well, you have the backlash you've had from stormgate. im pretty sure that the vast majority of people who are still holding out for stormgate are themselves desperate to see rts succeed, and since frost giants themselves made it clear that they themselves will revive the rts genre, the death of stormgate will symbolically be the death of rts for another 5-10 years. so good job frost giant. rts will still survive. brood war is still an amazing game. but i think the entire stormgate experiment has done a lot of damage to rts. does anyone think that microsoft/activision/blizzard ceo's are looking at stormgate and thinking "wow, better take an extra look at that wc3 reforged!" nah. that's gone.
12:45 this whole analysis starting around here is why I loved listening to this guy in the past. Never realized that was a red flag at the time but now I'm for sure not giving them a dime. This explains so well the metric amount of nothingness that this game resonates with me 39:00 sums everything up
I just want Wacraft 4... Great video though Tyler. You put into words very precisely how I've been feeling after playing the SG EA. It just feels like nothing flows together in this game in a way that is enjoyable. I wasn't sure if maybe I'd just passed the point in my life where another RTS would be possible to grab me, but I'm feeling convinced that one can, but SG just missed the mark. I was so excited for some RTS magic with SG in the same way BW, WC3 and SC2 all had their own unique merits.. damn what a let-down so far. I honestly dont see it as being recoverable, they seem SO FAR off-base with everything they have done so far
I honestly think some of these criticisms are things Dawn of War 1 handled so well. Map objectives were everything, you HAD to send units out, you had to take actual territory and hold it, structures were extremely durable unless you specifically built units to kill buildings. It had its flaws, it was probably too complicated of an RTS, but god damn did I love the map control aspect.
very interesting to listen to, ecspecially the 2nd half. really love the top dog energy of ending the video by clicking "stop recording" LUL might have to check out that podcast
As a RTS veteran, loved RA3 and SC2 , and now enjoying watching DOTA and SC2, even SC BW and WC3 tournaments - i agree with the critique. The game feels dull - not spicy. It is like Stormgate created a new dish - it has some chinese flavour, some indian, some european - they serve beers and hotdogs but the "spice" is completely missing. Spice could also be the Vision of Love for a new exsciting RTS - they did not TAKE lots of exciting risk (maybe the angelic race ... but even that is not groundbreaking yet) I Loved how you expressed your concerns and feedback Tyler! Super well done and this shows how much RTS cares about the scene. I may not be optimistic with Stormgate.. BUT i am optimistic is they can and will listen to some of your feedback and others from the scene. If I look at games like No Mans Sky... a game that was horrible and now in the last years it got sooo good and sells amazingely. Not all hope is lost for the next great RTS - but, if Stormgate doesnt change massive direction in unit "excitement" it will not make it.
Thanks for sharing Nony The units are just weird... No one really wants to micro a lancer, dog, or argent but SC2 stalkers are actually fun to micro vs marines early game before stim then fun again with blink. Roaches have fun micro potential with burrow. Even zerglings feel good to micro when you get a surround. I don't know why all the units just feel so clunky and uninspired.
i think lancers can be really fun to micro. they should lower its tankiness a bit and then buff its line splash area a little to make it more noticeable. lining them up for good splash hits is whats fun but their power budget is so heavy on the tankiness right now instead.
It baffles my mind how game designers do not seem to understand the basic laws of RTS. Like the way Nony explains in from 45:00. The main challenge will be to put in core gameplay mechanics and an engine that leads to divergent play at high levels. And the way to do that is to have at least two strategies in each matchup. And compared to SC and SC2 some map control mechanic, for example creeping or capturing map points can be a great way to get something else besides attacking, expanding, or teching. And that tech units need to counter the base units. And that flying units need to be specialized, because their mobility means they need to be weaker than ground unit. It just baffles the mind. People are ablle to get 10 million from investors to make an RTS when they don't know the basic principles of RTS. And they don't have any new ideas of themselves either. You'd expect these people to understand all the things Nony said, but also have new ideas that would be similar to transporting units picking up a siege unit, invisible units, or spellcasters. But there is never any new ideas in new RTS games. All they do is simplify the game to appeal to non-RTS players while misunderstanding how RTS even works. I have proposed the same idea as Nony to first make sure you have a good and fun game in 1vs1 with tier one units only. To make sure the strategies in that segment of the game are naturally divergent. It is really not too much work to do that. People claim that an RTS is too expensive to make because you need a huge single player campaign, with tons of lore, tons of cinematics and dialogue. And then you also need a map editor that allows people to make all kinds of minigames. And then multipalyer, with several maps and a plan to balance the game. And then a ladder system and social enviroment. And then a way to run your own esports tournaments. And nice features like replays. And of course a third and fourth race. Which is nonsense. You would first make a simple 1vs1 tier 1 units only game between 2 races. On 1 standard map. With placeholder graphics. Without any single player. And if you can make that work and make a fun game, then you keep doing the project. If you fail at this stage, then you just quit the project because there's no point.
I think your analysis is spot-on, particularly your concern about the surveys. There's a real and fundamental danger to asking people what they want. Besides the fact that it's super easy to just get bad data ("do you support peace" gets very different answers than "what are you willing to sacrifice for peace"?) often people don't fully understand what they want, especially when it comes to art. The artist's job is to understand their audience. Outsourcing it to a survey is careless.
I agree with most of the things you said, nice video! Though, I'd like to comment that I think you're being a bit harsh on individual devs for someone who hasn't been in game development. Most productions of any kind have talented and well-meaning people. There are a million reasons things don't go as well as they could have. Mismanagement, budgetary limitations, creative difference, lack of team chemistry,... It's not hard to imagine people coming from the infinite resources and experienced team of Blizzard to misjudge starting a new company and a new franchise that's supposed to innovate on a genre all at the same time. In general, I feel like people still underestimate how complex making a game is. I've been in game development for a while and it's really difficult. I imagine getting a 1v1 RTS game with extremely asymmetric races is one of the toughest games to get right. I think you make great points, I agree that the game lacks vision and that the fundamentals of each race should be figured out first, I'm just writing this to defend the individual devs and to reiterate how hard it is to make a game like this. I guess looking back, we've just been insanely lucky with RTS games in the past, which like you said, the devs probably had no idea would be so deep and good in multiplayer.
who cares about being "kind"to devs, it has nothing to do with a truthful critique of the product. Doesnt make the game better cause "nice" people had "good" inentions. "Well meaning" is a pointless attribution. Games are hard to make, hire the right people or make a crap product that deserves no recognition.
If they didn't have any innovation to offer in the RTS genre, why break from Blizzard to start your own company to innovate on RTS? That argument would make no sense. It would mean they're stupid and Mismanagement or incompetent management is not something that should just be overlooked or easily forgiven as well, those people should be replaced or let go. This kind of problem causes cascade failures, it's not some one off learning opportunity here, it's a consistent failure at the top. If you haven't been in the industry long, I hope you'll see the wisdom of expecting higher standards from management as their incompetence rolls down hill all onto your plate. The game obviously lacks a design vision, agreed, and in light of the other problems we're talking about here, and some we're not, it's clear that management is the problem. Your message of taking it easy on the developers is fine and all, so long as we're looking at the rank and file, not the game designer and management.
@@devingaviria6389 Sure and I acknowledged the quality of the critique. But if it doesn't matter, then why should he mention their individual competence at all? My main point wasn't about them being nice anyway, it was about the fact that competent people can be involved in a mismanaged production and that they shouldn't be called out. And I stand by that.
@@mgs85 The devs themselves don't get to choose which games Blizzard develops... Blizzard has pretty much quit the RTS genre years ago. So that's the answer to question 1. Yes, of course I am looking at the rank and file. Which is the majority of people working there. Also, a game of this scope doesn't have a "the game designer". Usually there's a Design Director with a bunch of designers that do both abstract design and content creation. But even that director needs to answer to investors, the CEO and the other directors. It's really hard to have a coherent creative vision for a new IP. Why do you think big companies keep remaking the same game and using the same IPs? Because it's super hard to make something new at that scale and a very risky business move. And this is what I mean. Most people out here have no idea how a company like that operates. Even I barely do. So then don't go saying stuff that amounts to "They have ex Blizzard devs, but maybe none of the good ones" lol.
@@Muzlibuck Your answer has absolutely nothing to do with my first point. If FrostGiant founders had nothing to innovate on then why leave blizzard to found said company in the first place? Why make the company at all? Been a while since I was in the industry but I believe design directors were in charge of that cohesive vision, so… You also don’t get glaring huge tonal shifts in your game when in these situations. We’re talking about massive tonal clashes here between departments. Is it really hard to have cohesive vision? Why do several other small studio RTS’ currently showcase no trouble with it at all? Why do most games seem to have no problem with it? Hell, I don’t think you could even name more than a few out of the hundreds of products that hit the market every year. I don’t think I could either because these products flop hard and disappear, they don’t actually hit the market. They’re failures, and that’s not because they didn’t have competent, passionate people working on them, that’s because their management is incompetent. This actually isn’t a problem outside of mismanaged products like Stormgate. But I don’t see what AAA companies sticking with established IPs has to do with any of this. Again, if they have no innovation to offer on those established IPs and old products… why make the company centered around Stormgate in the first place? I think junior devs cannot answer that question, they just don’t have the years of experience or wisdom necessary to look at the big picture. They also aren’t the ones to found a new studio, but they are the ones being very charitable in YT comments. Very naively so.
Listening to this I wouldnt mind a whole new approach to defenders advantage and map objectives. And by new I really just mean blending it with mobas. What about putting really strong base defenses on the maps like the towers in moba games. Something that you can't really deal with with T1 units. This would force players to gain an advantage on the map throughout early and midgame rather than attacking the opponents bases directly. With T2 you could than maybe pull of dives under the towers for key snipes or harrassment and maybe chip away at the towers forcing the other player to defend them. And finally T3 will make armies more powerfull than the towers entirely. I would be really interested to see this dynamic play out in an RTS
you might be the only guy i know who sounds normal on 2x speed :D great vid, I do feel like they aren't making the game they want to make, they are making the game they think the "average" rts gamer wants, which means no one is getting what they want.
Hey Nony, did you get a chance to play Battle Aces? I'm really curious how you feel about it, and if you think it has the depth needed to be a competitive game for a long time. I enjoyed it much more than Stormgate, it really felt like what a "modern" RTS game should feel like.
Critique is always good, Optimization is one of those things that is hard to place, unless you have the core design REALLY nailed down, optimization can be difficult or rather time consuming. Once you have the gameplay and systems down you can really optimize the performance of the game. I think they are still in the finding the fun of the game part. I do think the weakness of Stormgate is the fact that it wants to be SC2-ish with warcraft elements. It doesn't make much thematic sense. why are you killing slugs to get money? Why 2 resources again? why not 3? I miss the strong sense of innovation, and also indie devs should be able to rapidly deploy balance fixes and they have not been. so its been a bit dissapointing.
Coming from a WC3 background the creeping gameplay in Stormgate is so poorly thought out. It worked in WC3 both for reasons you mentioned(strong base defense for all factions including town portals to recall your army) but also because creeping in WC3 is engaging gameplay on its own. Two beginners in WC3 can not even see each other and have fun microing vs camps and getting items. You cannot reduce this to bland map objectives with boring guardians - if you're going to make the players spend time creeping it has to be fun. This gets into personal preference maybe but I also think the push in many new RTS to add "control point" type objectives is deeply flawed. Control points work in small team games because dedicating a player to capture an unguarded control point is a big investment when you only have around 5 players - when a single unit from hundreds can take it it becomes a punishing test of multitasking just to hold the objectives that you already invested time and resources to acquire. Avoiding this is the whole reason bases have so much health in the genre - you can't have single t1 units running around causing big strategic shifts or the experience breaks down for anyone but pro players.
To me, Stormgate feels like someone tried to design a Starcraft expansion, not an original game. I don't see any unique idea or philosophy that they're building around. And the problem with that is that if you're not better than SC, you'll be dead on arrival. For instance, WC3 is what happens when the idea actually comes before the game. Some designer decided it would be cool to mix RPG and RTS mechanics. They then built the ENTIRE GAME around those mechanics. Creeps to level heroes, low TTK so that hero abilities could be more impactful, high defenders advantage to promote on the map objectives and skirmishes between heroes, an intricate campaign to capitalize on the heroes, etc. They had a central pillar to build around, and that's why it feels so different from SC/SC2. Not better, not worse, but unique. Stormgate just kinda, adds in a few mechanics here or there without any overarching guiding principle. Creeps are cool I guess, but I don't really think they know why they're in the game. There are several decisions that seem to come from competing gameplay visions. It really feels like the devs came into this project wanting to make an RTS game, rather than deciding to make a game because they had a really cool idea for an RTS, if that makes sense. Now, I don't think making an SC3 is a BAD idea per se. I mean, SC2 is a fantastic game and 14 years old, a new one would be great, it's just that they set themselves up with a monumental execution based task that I don't think they were prepared for.
also they need to just design more things that are fun, even if over the top and wonky. feels like they are hamstringing themselves trying to make things 'balanced' and tame rather than going for excitement. system shock on medtechs making units go 1000 mph is the funnest design I've seen and now it's t3 and hard to get to and there could be a lot more of this kind of wildness
They are trying to do everything at the same time. It wont work. I like the approach of having a strong foundation on two factions t1 units. You would be able to spend enough time on them to craft an iconic look & mechanical feel. That would be the foundation for what other T1s could exist, what upgrades could exist, what T2 could mean, and so on. THEN you are ready to add that 3rd faction.
on your "why are they not optimizing for frames per second" point: when you're as aimless as they've been so far, making the game run better is largely an effort that is going to be obsoleted when some major change or other happens. There *are* improvements that can be made to framerate etc are structural at a level that will last through patches, but it's reasonable to have poor performance before they have a beta ready. As you say later, they *do not have* a vertical slice of the game. Overall, great video. It's all good points. I'm just willing to let them set aside performance as long as it's "playable" while they're in a *closed* beta.
I think you hit the nail on the head that there isn't really a clear direction with Stormgate. Rather than definitively stating "This is the next RTS we want to make", they're asking "What RTS do you want us to make?" without any indication they know the answers themselves. They're supposed to sell the idea of Stormgate to people, so why is it they have no idea what Stormgate is?
Frost Giant Studios would benefit, greatly, from having high-level Starcraft competitors on their team. I want this game to succeed (I want FGS to succeed) - but I don't think it's possible without having knowledgeable SC players, in-house, testing and giving feedback.
This might be a bit cynical, but after watching a ton of opinions on SG I'm just getting scam vibes. They used a giant pile of money to settle in an extremely expensive location to just brainstorm for a year and this is what they came up with? If you are going for something that is super safe, you don't need to brainstorm for a year. I honestly can't believe that semicompetent people in either design, good rts players or market analysts went into an office 8 hours a day for an entire year, worked, and this is the result. And I kind of don't believe the devs are that incompetent either.
44:00 completely agree -- just make a FINAL draft of a short part of the game. if EA was their $40M goal they did it the worst way possible - POC of every aspect (campaign, art, etc)
Interesting video, from someone who doesn't really care about competitive 1v1. If the singleplayer and casual multiplayer was good, I wouldn't care. I can't get past Stormgates artstyle, and think the terrain is ugly even if you look past it, and everything I heard or saw from the game seems to be negative. Edit: I think doing factions thematically is the right way of doing it. Just don't make it terran, protoss, zerg ordered on wish. Do you think they had competitive games in mind when they came up with the SC races? If I recall correctly they just though Aliens is a neat movie and threw in some grey high-tech aliens to round it off. So why doesn't terran have a melee unit, if it's all about competitive balance? Well humans came up with guns and if you bring a sword to a gunfight, you tend to get shot dead before you get into range. But protoss are a proud warrior race who would never ditch their psi-blades and also they have developed plasma shields and cybernetic enhancements so they can get into melee range before dying.
For performance they said, that the game would be multi-threaded, so I don't think they're just throwing buzzwords around. Rollback is also a godsend in fighting games. But obviously something hasn't panned out yet and the game should definitely be running better than it currently is.
I think it is improving, but yeah it seems like a bit of a mess/things not properly prioritised. The scariest/most problematic thing for me is just... if the units don't feel good to control. This can be a complete killer.
NonY is probably my favorite Starcraft/RTS personality. His analysis is absolutely spot on. I hope FG listens in, they are incredibly privileged to get feedback from such badasses in the community. It is obvious they all want SG to succeed, it is just whether FG makes that happen.
Stormgate SCREAMS "Lack of Cohesive Vision." Like a lot of modern strategy games nowadays, both real-time and turn-based. If you want to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks in creativity, you have to allow things to be cool, epic and overpowered, at least for a bit. If you want things to be more controlled and dialed back, then you need all of your very basic interactions to find the balance of simplicity and depth to them in order to make mastery of the game feel masterful and interesting.
What we have right now is a halfway house design room that seems to be full of a mix of creatives not allowed to fully express themselves, and would-be "balance experts" who have no real concept of how non-pro players play. As such, Stormgate feels:
- Derivative where it needs to feel inspiring (unit and faction design),
- Overly complicated where it needs to be straightforward and easy to understand (resource and construction design), and
- Boring, grindy and unclear where it needs to feel insightful and inspiring to improve (build order optimizaiton & ladder grinding)
As such it fails to be interesting to new and returning RTS players, and fails to hook long-term RTS players. I used to think all the anti-Stormgate was just SC:BW fanboys wanting everyone to stop playing other games and go back to brood war, which was probably true for some, but after getting a playable version with the EA release it's clear that the dev team is incredibly far from something that's going to be anywhere near the quality that the 10- and 20-year old RTS games had. It's not *impossible* for them to improve the game enough to be where it needs to be, but with a lack of clear focus and direction it's going to be HIGHLY unlikely.
"I used to think all anti-stormgate players were SCBW fan boys wanting everyone to stop playing other games and go back to broodwar"
As a broodwar and SC2 fan, this makes no sense. Why would I be looking for new RTS games like Stormgate, Tempest Rising, and Zerospace if not to play them?
I even paid the $25 to get into Stormgate early
The bad sentiment was from the game feeling unfinished and the devs making promises too big for an indie studio. This isn't what SCBW fans thought, this is what all RTS fans thought across the board
@@ZverseZ this is exactly what everyone with more then 2 braincells knew ... and look newest patch the improvements on graphic already ... thats how it is if you develop a game with the community and not bring out a finished game where everyone is unhappy with like concord xD
State of the Game is still my favourite podcast ever. I had so much fun listening to you guys, it was pure joy for me. Thanks for that!
Those Christmas specials ❤
Best podcast ever for sure. Many hours of laughing hysterically ❤. Miss Geoff forever
I had a GG button signed by the original SotG crew when i was at MLG Dallas (Day9, Nony, JP and ofc the late great Incontrol). My most prized possession
I never missed an episode
@@TNMJAD Literally the best podcasting ever.
Well said on many points. Playing Stormgate made me realize how good WC3 actually was. It's a slower TTK game with good creeping mechanics, counters, faction unit design, map pressure, etc. I never gave it a fair shot versus BW or SC2, but after playing Stormgate, I've been on a WC3 playing spree and I've been having a blast.
Same, although I played War3 back in the day I thought I remembered it with rose-colored glasses. But it's actually an amazing game and I've had a ton of fun coming back to it after many years of SC2.
The most annoying thing about it is upkeep thought. They should remove it. And it would become a great game.
Great feedback. To me it feels like the devs got very overconfident and thought they could just wing this, but the lack of vision of what the game should be, is not there.
That's a crazy thing to think about. 'Hey, we're going to take $20+ million and we'll just wing it.' That's obviously not true but that would be mythological levels of hubris.
I don't think it's overconfident. Rather, there seems to be a lack of confident leadership in a particular direction - evidenced by asking the community about things like creeps, heroes etc.
Honestly to me it seems like a bunch of department heads that don't know what their teams did to get the results.
Im in the 0.5x Speed club. Dont wanna miss anything from this master.
Watching this on 0.5x to digest it better. Always a pleasure to hear you talk about RTS strategy Tyler. Hope to see more of it!
I haven't even played Stormgate I'm just enjoying this like a long podcast. Great to hear from you
same.
I think they are missing the point that RTS is supposed to be fun to play by yourself, then fun to play against friend, and lastly fun to watch. They skipped all the fun part and want to achieve the last part 1st....I think the weakness of technical analysis is that you can balance a lot of these things in an excel sheet, but is it fun, is a different question.
I'd be interested in an RTS where the resources are tight, the army sizes are smaller, and the engagements are scrappy, where micro matters a lot, defender advantage is real, units that gain value over time (like casters) are a real long-term investment... and no one can easily build a max population death ball. Killing units without losing units matters and keeping units alive while gaining value matters. Imagine SC2 with half as many resources in your main and expansions, one pocket expansion, a much harder to secure third, and literally no fourth, where a major engagement cripples both sides and micro battles ensue with a handful of units trying to scrape out a victory with the map mined out.
With regards to dota, Blizzard did run wc3 dota exhibitions in the early Blizzcons so at least some people there knew it was a big deal before lol came out and the genre took off. The Blizzard team even made their own official dota-like custom map called Candy War that was released in an update for TFT during 2004 and 2005. It's really baffling how they fumbled the ball.
literally wearing my TL shirt and drinking my coffee while listening to nony with a powerpoint. Ideal monday morning :)
My first contact with esports was Artosis and Chill casting your games in the TSL (I think someone posted about it on shacknews). I think back then I had to torrent those AVIs to actually watch them.
Too bad noone from the pro scene seems to like SG so far, I enjoy the campaign and the 3vE so far and look forward to what they do with it. I hope they can get the competetive part back on track. As far as I remember there was only one guy on OG SC dev team who actually was good on 1v1 and later was the design lead on Broodwar. So I don't think you have to start out with that focus from the get go for it to succeed at some point. Yeah it's a bit of straw grasping I know.
First of all, fantastic and insightful critique.
You're dead on about FG not having a clear vision from the start. That was my first red flag as well. Another example of this was when they asked the community something like, "how do you guys feel about space cowboys?".
Agreed re: early game imbalance, but an argument could be made that the game is still somewhat early on in development.
EA should be "first draft of the final draft"...totally agree.
A lot of these criticisms are very valid, but let's not forget that 90% of RTS players are dirty casuals. I think the main reason why Stormgate has failed so far is that they haven't appealed to that demo. Thats how you get players in the door and drive revenue to continue development.
Thanks for giving your background btw. I've been in the RTS space for a while but this is the first I'm hearing of you.
I think it's important too, to remember that thousands of people played a much worse version of the game for long periods of time during testing, and it was the sudden complete change of direction in the first EA patch that also led to a wild amount of complaints that are still only hoping to *maybe* be addressed in the September 17th patch.
People generally were willing to play quite a bit in spite of the february and other betas. This EA launch has been markedly different again, due to changes that seem to suggest they haven't agreed on what camps *should* be.
Their vision was make a proplay rts game, their result a proplay game. A proplay game is one that only people who are paid to play will play and is boring to watch.
This is by far the best critique of Stormgate I've heard. It's honestly insane to me that none of these "Starcraft successors" are taking the clear formula you laid out as what you would do for a Starcraft 3: Start with what we know works, make units feel good and fun to control (like you said, we know this from all the moba games), and then play with themes and details on top of that.
Would love to hear you talk more about SC and RTS and everything else. Listened to SotG every episode back in the day.
Really liked this video mate and agree with all of the points you've made.
1. I especially agree that the lack of vision if a problem and very strongly shows throughout the entire development process.
To me it's always felt like stormgate is just a game made for gaming, instead of a game that's made because someone had a great vision for a fun videogame that they wanted to implement, and their ideas are just all over the place, across the board, both in more tangible things like art/style direction and less tangible things like core design philosophy of Stormgate.
2. I don't really like how much they've focused on Rollback and emphasising these solutions that solve some imaginable problems that maybe a low single digit of the playerbase cared about, at best (playing in cross-region groups or participating in cross-region tournaments isn't something the average player does) -- especially considering not only the development/tech cost, but also the performance cost of having something like Rollback in an RTS game.
3. I think they've gone too hard on being too "soft" in a sense of counters, unit tiering, etc. In SG there's no real hard counters so the unit diversity in compositions is dead simply in favour of the strongest unit available in terms of raw power -- the exo, for example. In SG, the uptiering feels a lot weaker than SC2, WC3, or even BA that's been mentioned, and quite often you're just better off to keep amassing your T1 unit blob with only a few occasional T2 unit introductions.
Wife - “what are you watching?”
Me - “oh, just a work training I’ll see you later”
As a dev myself (not a game dev), with stormgate I've always had the feeling that they don't have a concrete vision and a lot of the issues with the games stem from this fact. When you look at the competitors like zero space, you can tell that there is a clear set of game design goals that they're working towards but the same cannot be said for stormgate. It just feels like they put together a studio and said let's make a starcraft 2 style game with no further detail added to that plan.
Some of the projects that I've worked on in the past have been plagued with this type of development cycle where no one person has a concrete vision on what the final product is supposed to look like. As a result, you get this kind of wishy-washy software that doesn't really satisfy any specific goal and ultimately the project fails. And it doesn't really matter how much experience you have, if you're working on a project like this, it's more or less doomed to fail unless you get really lucky. This type of development is what I like to call feature paralysis. Basically, no one is willing to commit to a specific feature or set of features and as a result everything just kind of falls apart.
ahhh miss you Tyler, hope you're doing good. Good to hear from you. Great analysis and you nailed a lot of the issues with SG
1x speed gang
lol.
1.5x speed gang
0.25x speed gang
I really like this! You clearly put a lot of effort into making specific critiques and providing your ideas of how to move forward.
Early access was released after a long period of tier 3 units not being in early early access and they still didn't have a well made early game. Maybe it has something to do with them not including meaningful and scoutable tech and economic choices. Monk said they don't want players to feel committed to a tech path. You don't have to choose whether you want to build a scout or not, same goes for taking a gas - it even compensates you if you don't mine it so the choice to mine early or later is minimised. I guess they can't just outright say their design philosophy is about taking away as much player choice as they can to reduce the skill gap.
Loved your video with artosis, and this one was just as good. Hope you post more longform content like this.
Very well reasoned video.
On the topic of tech, tiers and composition variety:
the way they have designed therium to be rather scarce, forces everyone into pretty repetitive compositions. You can rarely make a pure T2 army simply because of the resource distribution, which make things a bit dull.
Also, I just can't wrap my head around the decision to punish players for mining therium early on. It's so foolish. Early tech builds are one of the main pillars of RTS fun and interactivity. But in SG, early mining is not only inefficient, but pushes back the enrichment stage. It's incredibly punishing and dull.
I almost can't believe it. Yet another SG video that's only made me more hungry to hop back on SC2😭😭😭
The game's visual style in emblematic of the "openness"/"blank slate" of their approach. It feels like design-by-committee where they've put all the things they think will be popular together in a clump. That can probably apply to the game and its mechanics as a whole.
Dune 2000 shoutout let's goooooooo. Game that got me into RTS and I never escaped.
I like your take on playtesting and deving the factions. Very cool.
Always great to hear thoughts of a great RTS player on a new title. Cheers, man.
In addition to the lack of vision, I really think the MOBA/WC3 direction was just a poor choice. It feels just so outdated and slow today. I know so many love WC3, but I’ve always felt it was slow and clunky - and I came from WC2 and Red Alert.
WC2 is a very fast paced game, with unlimited use for APM. 350 apm and you're still not fast enough (and we're not even talking about playing on fastest speed, but on even faster speed). Edit: I say 350 apm because that's the APM range I usually get to when I'm half-decent.
This is the best deep dive I've ever seen, SG feels like they skipped any kind of in depth talks like this and instead spent time on... taking a nap? Idk it doesn't feel like 40 mil of content was produced even if some people were making bad design decision on the tech side it still doesn't live up to a 40 mil budget
I would say that the defenders advantage is actually fairly strong in this game. Turrets are generally pretty strong and I believe every race can go a fast expand pretty safely (except maybe on a couple of the more wide open maps vs dogs atm, but that's a balance issue). The problem is creeps are SO valuable, that the 1 base player that rushed army units literally stays ahead in economy off of taking those creeps. To me that's the fundamental problem and if they fixed it so that more bases is always more economy than creeps, the game would feel fine for this aspect. Just need to reduce the number of camps and/or the bounties.
It's sad but I actually think patch 0.00 (the one during the first 1.5 weeks of the paid "early" early access, right before the 60% creep buff), would've been a better patch to release on. It had a much better balance for expands vs creeping and I think especially new players would've benefited a lot from a slower early game that gave them some time to breath and expand instead of DOG DOG DOG.
Awesome to see you making a video! Would love to see you play Battle Aces
Frost Giant is composed of zeros that had eff all to do with actual Warcraft/Starcraft. They were interns fetching coffee for the real devs back whenever they say they were 'part of blizzard team'. It's just another Back4Blood situation all over agian.
I think this is all great feedback.
Regarding rollback: Maybe my understanding of why it exists is fuzzy, but it feels like a really big missed opportunity. In fighting games, my understanding is that rollback exists so that it's possible to execute consistently in small frame windows without needing a LAN connection. I feel like at least a handful of units in Stormgate should've been designed with that in mind - maybe they could allow for some cool micro/optimization for players who are willing to spend time practicing 3-4 tick-window micro tricks. Instead, rollback and the 64hz tick rate are kind of touted as something that just generally makes the game "feel nicer" than SC2. But those features don't have a direct application to any gameplay mechanic.
tyler! it's great to hear from you.
"watch on 2x speed?" lol. looks like you went into a ton of detail, will do.
on the whole "armchair game dev" discussion: your input is valuable. and you're right to notice that that input from an expert play tester may get lost or ignored.
to me, the analysis, understanding, and breakdown capabilities you demonstrate in this video sound perfect for a PM (project manager) role at an RTS game studio. a PM role would not be a silver bullet for making your feedback heard. but you would have more influence.
Holy nostalgia batman! Missed you
Haven't heard from NonY for 20 years!
But I have heard from Destiny every year :). The superior debater taking the world on :D
Such a great video! I'm not sure there's enough time for SG dev team to right this ship. Most of their funding is probably behind them at this point and there are too many lessons from SC2 that have either been unlearned or willingly ignored - which is doubly painful considering they also had no shortage of players such as yourself providing them such high quality feedback along the way.
A 1 hour video? Awesome!
Listening so far, and wanted to say I totally agree with all the red flags and stuff you mentioned, and it's nice to hear someone with as much relevance and history in the scene speak about it!
Them being so open asking for community opinions on what the gameplay should be like, not even designing the 3rd race first before trying to balance the first 2 factions, the lack of quality in many aspects like the art and sound and overall lack of direction/vision, them marketing this as like a "we're releasing this to players so early to get your feedback unlike other companies that don't beta test until the game is near done, don't worry we'll keep developing it until it's good, but oh we're going to start taking money too", their general marketing that Stormgate is THE ex-blizzard dev company / the "same" creators that made your favorite games (which is pretty dishonest), all of these are big red flags!
It really inspires a lack of confidence and indicates that they lack the direction and understanding needed to make a good RTS, and are also not in a good place financially to have the time and resources to achieve their goal.
It's also just unrealistic for a brand new company to be able to make a triple A game right off the bat. It takes experience working as a team, figuring out their pipeline/workflow, figuring out who is a good lead/supervisor, learning many lessons, getting the network and connections and help needed to develop the game to finish. It's not impossible but very unrealistic!
A game like Battle Aces has a good chance because the lead gameplay is handled by David Kim, but Stormgate doesn't have an equivalent. The gameplay is led by someone who only helped with SC2 co-op. Co-op is good but it's a very different thing from making a good multiplayer competitive game.
And Zerospace has a good chance because it has a team of SC2 community semipros/pros/casters who already know and can well work together.
Nice ideas, thanks for sharing. The point about designing fun things that interact well seems pretty foundational. I genuinely feel we had more of this in October, and also that this game wanted to be a bit more Warcraft-style in its early days, with smaller armies skirmishing it out-but I digress. I guess we got what we got and can only hope that things are on the up.
When they first revealed the game they said that they wanted to make an RTS which is more appealing to the masses (=casuals which eventually buy the commanders and the campaign and basically pay for all the 1v1 players only which is fine)...well they made it more complicated with the creeps (debatable ok) and the topbar casts but somehow thought that leaving out upgrade levels is better. Plus the design language is making it very hard to distinguish the units and it is also not that appealing imho
Lots of good points, this guy sounds really smart.
Not as smart as Destiny :D
@@radscorpion8 ??? that's a really weird and random thing to say.
I really do think creeps are far too contrived of a concept outside of the RPG hybridisation that existed in WC3. In general you want players to fight over map control not because of things you've put there that offer rewards, but because the fundamentals of the game drive it. In age-of games this is due to the way resources function, where wood and gold and food are going to be found in different places, you can't centralise everything, and sustainable, safe food is slower and more expensive than going out and hunting on the map, so the incentives naturally flow from the macro.
This also makes raiding much more delocalised, and more natural. You can in principle attack or control different locations, different resources, depending on what you think your opponent is bottlenecked on, or specifically needs, or based on which you think is most vulnerable.
And I think in general the goal should be to create fundamental mechanics where small advantages can be consistently fought over, without near-zero time-to-kill, where oracles or widow-mine drops or whatever the case may be dip in and vaporise things. You want push and pull, not to the point that decisive wins can't be had, but to the point that players are contending on a macro-scale, and not purely on the micro-scale.
The question of how battles should work, of how micro should work, how units should feel and be designed, are really separate questions to that. Indeed the idea that units were designed around raiding in the context of map design and base concentration in sc2 was itself a problematic contrivance. I mean, stalkers harassing because of blink, that's fine because it's an extension of their general role. Units that existed just to kill workers, or with that as their primary focus, that was bad.
I would agree, I think creeps are an untenable idea. I wish they'd drop the idea. Positions and ground have innate usefulness, when you put creeps on them it's entirely artificial. And that artificialness fouls the design (map design, strategy and tactical design, economic), so now you have to design around it. The problem with SC2 wasn't the lack of creep camps forcing people out onto the map, it was the map design and unit design.
Stormgate thinks they are offering a solution to a unique problem to SC2 but they fundamentally don't seem to understand what the problem is.
Yes. Hate the idea of creeps.
If you open the page debug (on firefox its ctrl+shift+i, idk chrome), go to the console, and type "document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 3.0;" or whatever, you can increase speed beyond 2.0x :P
There are plugins as well. I use Video Speed Controller on Chrome. You can increase to any speed you want.
This is good listening to while playing Deadlock, 1.5 speed is the sweet spot, thanks for your thoughts
Stormgate is reaching concord numbers on steam. FG is almost out of money based on their teport back in february. Early access release had what. 4k players at launch? Lets assume they each bought the 60 dollar edition. 240k dollars. Lets say everyome bought the pet and hero. 40k more dollars. So 280k dollars at most. Their operational costs yearly are about 11 million. Theyre sinking faster than the titanic would with 4 big holes in it.
99% of the problems with stormgate is that they themselves decided that they were the spiritual successor to starcraft. if this was "a new rts", people wouldn't be so invested in desperately wanting it to succeed. compare how much more people are dissappointed in stormgate vs other rts games that have released in the past decade and its clear that frost giant studios themselves set out not to create a great rts, but to show blizzard entertainment, their former employer, that they were the reason for why starcraft succeeded. thats why they are selling the spiritual successor to starcraft. and because people love starcraft, taking on that mantle means that people listen, a lot more than how little people cared about battles aces until that started to pop up (because it was good).
frost giants set themselves up to fail. and, turns out, brood war was magic in a bottle, and starcraft 2 was a good game too. topping those two might not ever happen, and when you put that goal up, whether for your own pride or to increase funding or whatever it was, and then release something which shows that it was in fact blizzard that got the best performance out of you, and not holding you down, well, you have the backlash you've had from stormgate.
im pretty sure that the vast majority of people who are still holding out for stormgate are themselves desperate to see rts succeed, and since frost giants themselves made it clear that they themselves will revive the rts genre, the death of stormgate will symbolically be the death of rts for another 5-10 years. so good job frost giant.
rts will still survive. brood war is still an amazing game. but i think the entire stormgate experiment has done a lot of damage to rts. does anyone think that microsoft/activision/blizzard ceo's are looking at stormgate and thinking "wow, better take an extra look at that wc3 reforged!" nah. that's gone.
Really solid playtest plan. Excellent points from you.
Thank you, Harry Kane, u r a legend at Tottenham, and this video was v good analysis thank u
12:45 this whole analysis
starting around here is why I loved listening to this guy in the past. Never realized that was a red flag at the time but now I'm for sure not giving them a dime. This explains so well the metric amount of nothingness that this game resonates with me
39:00 sums everything up
I just want Wacraft 4...
Great video though Tyler. You put into words very precisely how I've been feeling after playing the SG EA. It just feels like nothing flows together in this game in a way that is enjoyable. I wasn't sure if maybe I'd just passed the point in my life where another RTS would be possible to grab me, but I'm feeling convinced that one can, but SG just missed the mark.
I was so excited for some RTS magic with SG in the same way BW, WC3 and SC2 all had their own unique merits.. damn what a let-down so far. I honestly dont see it as being recoverable, they seem SO FAR off-base with everything they have done so far
Wc3 dota 1 was huge and literally at its peak during sc2s development. And heroes of newerth was massive as well before sc2 ever came out.
I honestly think some of these criticisms are things Dawn of War 1 handled so well. Map objectives were everything, you HAD to send units out, you had to take actual territory and hold it, structures were extremely durable unless you specifically built units to kill buildings. It had its flaws, it was probably too complicated of an RTS, but god damn did I love the map control aspect.
very interesting to listen to, ecspecially the 2nd half.
really love the top dog energy of ending the video by clicking "stop recording" LUL
might have to check out that podcast
Very thoughtful, I agree with your points. I wonder what your opinion is on games like Age of Mythology Retold?
Always great to hear from you man.
As a RTS veteran, loved RA3 and SC2 , and now enjoying watching DOTA and SC2, even SC BW and WC3 tournaments - i agree with the critique. The game feels dull - not spicy. It is like Stormgate created a new dish - it has some chinese flavour, some indian, some european - they serve beers and hotdogs but the "spice" is completely missing. Spice could also be the Vision of Love for a new exsciting RTS - they did not TAKE lots of exciting risk (maybe the angelic race ... but even that is not groundbreaking yet) I Loved how you expressed your concerns and feedback Tyler! Super well done and this shows how much RTS cares about the scene. I may not be optimistic with Stormgate.. BUT i am optimistic is they can and will listen to some of your feedback and others from the scene. If I look at games like No Mans Sky... a game that was horrible and now in the last years it got sooo good and sells amazingely. Not all hope is lost for the next great RTS - but, if Stormgate doesnt change massive direction in unit "excitement" it will not make it.
Crazy that nony knows more about making an rts than frostgiant :(
teeler droppin the brain nuke, gigachad.
Thanks for sharing Nony
The units are just weird... No one really wants to micro a lancer, dog, or argent but SC2 stalkers are actually fun to micro vs marines early game before stim then fun again with blink. Roaches have fun micro potential with burrow. Even zerglings feel good to micro when you get a surround.
I don't know why all the units just feel so clunky and uninspired.
i think lancers can be really fun to micro. they should lower its tankiness a bit and then buff its line splash area a little to make it more noticeable. lining them up for good splash hits is whats fun but their power budget is so heavy on the tankiness right now instead.
It sounds like you just like SC2. None of those units sound fun to play in SC2 for me.
bruh you're alive, nice to see you. Also please title your presentation.
Really enjoyed this, very insightful.
Out of nowhere he returns!
He's like the Diaphone of Starcraft
It baffles my mind how game designers do not seem to understand the basic laws of RTS. Like the way Nony explains in from 45:00. The main challenge will be to put in core gameplay mechanics and an engine that leads to divergent play at high levels. And the way to do that is to have at least two strategies in each matchup. And compared to SC and SC2 some map control mechanic, for example creeping or capturing map points can be a great way to get something else besides attacking, expanding, or teching. And that tech units need to counter the base units. And that flying units need to be specialized, because their mobility means they need to be weaker than ground unit. It just baffles the mind. People are ablle to get 10 million from investors to make an RTS when they don't know the basic principles of RTS. And they don't have any new ideas of themselves either. You'd expect these people to understand all the things Nony said, but also have new ideas that would be similar to transporting units picking up a siege unit, invisible units, or spellcasters. But there is never any new ideas in new RTS games. All they do is simplify the game to appeal to non-RTS players while misunderstanding how RTS even works. I have proposed the same idea as Nony to first make sure you have a good and fun game in 1vs1 with tier one units only. To make sure the strategies in that segment of the game are naturally divergent. It is really not too much work to do that. People claim that an RTS is too expensive to make because you need a huge single player campaign, with tons of lore, tons of cinematics and dialogue. And then you also need a map editor that allows people to make all kinds of minigames. And then multipalyer, with several maps and a plan to balance the game. And then a ladder system and social enviroment. And then a way to run your own esports tournaments. And nice features like replays. And of course a third and fourth race. Which is nonsense. You would first make a simple 1vs1 tier 1 units only game between 2 races. On 1 standard map. With placeholder graphics. Without any single player. And if you can make that work and make a fun game, then you keep doing the project. If you fail at this stage, then you just quit the project because there's no point.
Hope youre well man, good to see a video from you.
I think your analysis is spot-on, particularly your concern about the surveys. There's a real and fundamental danger to asking people what they want. Besides the fact that it's super easy to just get bad data ("do you support peace" gets very different answers than "what are you willing to sacrifice for peace"?) often people don't fully understand what they want, especially when it comes to art. The artist's job is to understand their audience. Outsourcing it to a survey is careless.
NONY! THE LEGENDARY TYLER WASIELSKI!!!
I agree with most of the things you said, nice video! Though, I'd like to comment that I think you're being a bit harsh on individual devs for someone who hasn't been in game development. Most productions of any kind have talented and well-meaning people. There are a million reasons things don't go as well as they could have. Mismanagement, budgetary limitations, creative difference, lack of team chemistry,... It's not hard to imagine people coming from the infinite resources and experienced team of Blizzard to misjudge starting a new company and a new franchise that's supposed to innovate on a genre all at the same time. In general, I feel like people still underestimate how complex making a game is. I've been in game development for a while and it's really difficult. I imagine getting a 1v1 RTS game with extremely asymmetric races is one of the toughest games to get right. I think you make great points, I agree that the game lacks vision and that the fundamentals of each race should be figured out first, I'm just writing this to defend the individual devs and to reiterate how hard it is to make a game like this. I guess looking back, we've just been insanely lucky with RTS games in the past, which like you said, the devs probably had no idea would be so deep and good in multiplayer.
who cares about being "kind"to devs, it has nothing to do with a truthful critique of the product. Doesnt make the game better cause "nice" people had "good" inentions. "Well meaning" is a pointless attribution. Games are hard to make, hire the right people or make a crap product that deserves no recognition.
If they didn't have any innovation to offer in the RTS genre, why break from Blizzard to start your own company to innovate on RTS? That argument would make no sense. It would mean they're stupid and Mismanagement or incompetent management is not something that should just be overlooked or easily forgiven as well, those people should be replaced or let go. This kind of problem causes cascade failures, it's not some one off learning opportunity here, it's a consistent failure at the top. If you haven't been in the industry long, I hope you'll see the wisdom of expecting higher standards from management as their incompetence rolls down hill all onto your plate.
The game obviously lacks a design vision, agreed, and in light of the other problems we're talking about here, and some we're not, it's clear that management is the problem. Your message of taking it easy on the developers is fine and all, so long as we're looking at the rank and file, not the game designer and management.
@@devingaviria6389 Sure and I acknowledged the quality of the critique. But if it doesn't matter, then why should he mention their individual competence at all? My main point wasn't about them being nice anyway, it was about the fact that competent people can be involved in a mismanaged production and that they shouldn't be called out. And I stand by that.
@@mgs85 The devs themselves don't get to choose which games Blizzard develops... Blizzard has pretty much quit the RTS genre years ago. So that's the answer to question 1.
Yes, of course I am looking at the rank and file. Which is the majority of people working there. Also, a game of this scope doesn't have a "the game designer". Usually there's a Design Director with a bunch of designers that do both abstract design and content creation. But even that director needs to answer to investors, the CEO and the other directors. It's really hard to have a coherent creative vision for a new IP. Why do you think big companies keep remaking the same game and using the same IPs? Because it's super hard to make something new at that scale and a very risky business move. And this is what I mean. Most people out here have no idea how a company like that operates. Even I barely do. So then don't go saying stuff that amounts to "They have ex Blizzard devs, but maybe none of the good ones" lol.
@@Muzlibuck Your answer has absolutely nothing to do with my first point. If FrostGiant founders had nothing to innovate on then why leave blizzard to found said company in the first place? Why make the company at all?
Been a while since I was in the industry but I believe design directors were in charge of that cohesive vision, so… You also don’t get glaring huge tonal shifts in your game when in these situations. We’re talking about massive tonal clashes here between departments.
Is it really hard to have cohesive vision? Why do several other small studio RTS’ currently showcase no trouble with it at all? Why do most games seem to have no problem with it? Hell, I don’t think you could even name more than a few out of the hundreds of products that hit the market every year. I don’t think I could either because these products flop hard and disappear, they don’t actually hit the market. They’re failures, and that’s not because they didn’t have competent, passionate people working on them, that’s because their management is incompetent.
This actually isn’t a problem outside of mismanaged products like Stormgate. But I don’t see what AAA companies sticking with established IPs has to do with any of this. Again, if they have no innovation to offer on those established IPs and old products… why make the company centered around Stormgate in the first place? I think junior devs cannot answer that question, they just don’t have the years of experience or wisdom necessary to look at the big picture. They also aren’t the ones to found a new studio, but they are the ones being very charitable in YT comments. Very naively so.
Listening to this I wouldnt mind a whole new approach to defenders advantage and map objectives. And by new I really just mean blending it with mobas. What about putting really strong base defenses on the maps like the towers in moba games. Something that you can't really deal with with T1 units.
This would force players to gain an advantage on the map throughout early and midgame rather than attacking the opponents bases directly. With T2 you could than maybe pull of dives under the towers for key snipes or harrassment and maybe chip away at the towers forcing the other player to defend them. And finally T3 will make armies more powerfull than the towers entirely.
I would be really interested to see this dynamic play out in an RTS
Loved the insights, thanks for sharing!
I can't wait for Immortal Gates of Pyre!
you might be the only guy i know who sounds normal on 2x speed :D great vid, I do feel like they aren't making the game they want to make, they are making the game they think the "average" rts gamer wants, which means no one is getting what they want.
He sounds normal in 1.25x too
This has strong apology video or something horrible happened vibes
I watched your "could care less couldn't care less" video back in the day I can watch this on 1x
Liked, lets get nony a good mic
A wild NonY appears!
My favourite type of content, I love the hour and a half take down this other guy made.
Hey Nony, did you get a chance to play Battle Aces? I'm really curious how you feel about it, and if you think it has the depth needed to be a competitive game for a long time. I enjoyed it much more than Stormgate, it really felt like what a "modern" RTS game should feel like.
The perfect RTS would be midway between SC1 and SC2. Fix the glitches of BW and dial down the automation and death ball lethality of SC2.
Critique is always good, Optimization is one of those things that is hard to place, unless you have the core design REALLY nailed down, optimization can be difficult or rather time consuming.
Once you have the gameplay and systems down you can really optimize the performance of the game.
I think they are still in the finding the fun of the game part.
I do think the weakness of Stormgate is the fact that it wants to be SC2-ish with warcraft elements.
It doesn't make much thematic sense. why are you killing slugs to get money?
Why 2 resources again? why not 3?
I miss the strong sense of innovation, and also indie devs should be able to rapidly deploy balance fixes and they have not been. so its been a bit dissapointing.
More of a 1.5x type of guy myself
Coming from a WC3 background the creeping gameplay in Stormgate is so poorly thought out. It worked in WC3 both for reasons you mentioned(strong base defense for all factions including town portals to recall your army) but also because creeping in WC3 is engaging gameplay on its own. Two beginners in WC3 can not even see each other and have fun microing vs camps and getting items. You cannot reduce this to bland map objectives with boring guardians - if you're going to make the players spend time creeping it has to be fun.
This gets into personal preference maybe but I also think the push in many new RTS to add "control point" type objectives is deeply flawed. Control points work in small team games because dedicating a player to capture an unguarded control point is a big investment when you only have around 5 players - when a single unit from hundreds can take it it becomes a punishing test of multitasking just to hold the objectives that you already invested time and resources to acquire. Avoiding this is the whole reason bases have so much health in the genre - you can't have single t1 units running around causing big strategic shifts or the experience breaks down for anyone but pro players.
To me, Stormgate feels like someone tried to design a Starcraft expansion, not an original game. I don't see any unique idea or philosophy that they're building around. And the problem with that is that if you're not better than SC, you'll be dead on arrival.
For instance, WC3 is what happens when the idea actually comes before the game. Some designer decided it would be cool to mix RPG and RTS mechanics. They then built the ENTIRE GAME around those mechanics. Creeps to level heroes, low TTK so that hero abilities could be more impactful, high defenders advantage to promote on the map objectives and skirmishes between heroes, an intricate campaign to capitalize on the heroes, etc. They had a central pillar to build around, and that's why it feels so different from SC/SC2. Not better, not worse, but unique.
Stormgate just kinda, adds in a few mechanics here or there without any overarching guiding principle. Creeps are cool I guess, but I don't really think they know why they're in the game. There are several decisions that seem to come from competing gameplay visions. It really feels like the devs came into this project wanting to make an RTS game, rather than deciding to make a game because they had a really cool idea for an RTS, if that makes sense.
Now, I don't think making an SC3 is a BAD idea per se. I mean, SC2 is a fantastic game and 14 years old, a new one would be great, it's just that they set themselves up with a monumental execution based task that I don't think they were prepared for.
What about the pathfinding? It looks wonky at best imo.
also they need to just design more things that are fun, even if over the top and wonky. feels like they are hamstringing themselves trying to make things 'balanced' and tame rather than going for excitement. system shock on medtechs making units go 1000 mph is the funnest design I've seen and now it's t3 and hard to get to and there could be a lot more of this kind of wildness
Great analysis
They are trying to do everything at the same time. It wont work. I like the approach of having a strong foundation on two factions t1 units. You would be able to spend enough time on them to craft an iconic look & mechanical feel. That would be the foundation for what other T1s could exist, what upgrades could exist, what T2 could mean, and so on. THEN you are ready to add that 3rd faction.
on your "why are they not optimizing for frames per second" point: when you're as aimless as they've been so far, making the game run better is largely an effort that is going to be obsoleted when some major change or other happens. There *are* improvements that can be made to framerate etc are structural at a level that will last through patches, but it's reasonable to have poor performance before they have a beta ready. As you say later, they *do not have* a vertical slice of the game.
Overall, great video. It's all good points. I'm just willing to let them set aside performance as long as it's "playable" while they're in a *closed* beta.
honestly, just gonna save this video in case I ever decide to develop any kind of game with asymmetry for players
I think you hit the nail on the head that there isn't really a clear direction with Stormgate. Rather than definitively stating "This is the next RTS we want to make", they're asking "What RTS do you want us to make?" without any indication they know the answers themselves.
They're supposed to sell the idea of Stormgate to people, so why is it they have no idea what Stormgate is?
Frost Giant Studios would benefit, greatly, from having high-level Starcraft competitors on their team. I want this game to succeed (I want FGS to succeed) - but I don't think it's possible without having knowledgeable SC players, in-house, testing and giving feedback.
This might be a bit cynical, but after watching a ton of opinions on SG I'm just getting scam vibes. They used a giant pile of money to settle in an extremely expensive location to just brainstorm for a year and this is what they came up with? If you are going for something that is super safe, you don't need to brainstorm for a year. I honestly can't believe that semicompetent people in either design, good rts players or market analysts went into an office 8 hours a day for an entire year, worked, and this is the result. And I kind of don't believe the devs are that incompetent either.
.5x speed chads unite
44:00 completely agree -- just make a FINAL draft of a short part of the game. if EA was their $40M goal they did it the worst way possible - POC of every aspect (campaign, art, etc)
Interesting video, from someone who doesn't really care about competitive 1v1. If the singleplayer and casual multiplayer was good, I wouldn't care. I can't get past Stormgates artstyle, and think the terrain is ugly even if you look past it, and everything I heard or saw from the game seems to be negative.
Edit: I think doing factions thematically is the right way of doing it. Just don't make it terran, protoss, zerg ordered on wish. Do you think they had competitive games in mind when they came up with the SC races? If I recall correctly they just though Aliens is a neat movie and threw in some grey high-tech aliens to round it off. So why doesn't terran have a melee unit, if it's all about competitive balance? Well humans came up with guns and if you bring a sword to a gunfight, you tend to get shot dead before you get into range. But protoss are a proud warrior race who would never ditch their psi-blades and also they have developed plasma shields and cybernetic enhancements so they can get into melee range before dying.
For performance they said, that the game would be multi-threaded, so I don't think they're just throwing buzzwords around. Rollback is also a godsend in fighting games. But obviously something hasn't panned out yet and the game should definitely be running better than it currently is.
welcome back nony
I think it is improving, but yeah it seems like a bit of a mess/things not properly prioritised. The scariest/most problematic thing for me is just... if the units don't feel good to control. This can be a complete killer.
What unit did Flash make useful that no one used before? Was it valks? Cuz I know they were terrible before remastered.
Valks didnt work properly pre remastered because of a bug/game feature that made many valkshots disappear. They fixed that with remastered