Simplifying the factors as a way to speed up the gathering of more scientific information and hasten iteration by finding basic truths about the identity of Stormgate.
I feel that an important aspect of Starcraft and Starcraft 2 are that not only do you have the balance that the developers put in such as unit attack and HP, but also the balance that the community provides through the maps. Allowing the community to make maps seems mandatory to me in an RTS. I do worry that Stormgate is falling into the same problem that a lot of games made by professional players do. It focuses too much on things like balance instead of things like fun, creativity, audio, visuals etc... Essentially no one (especially no one that is around my or Artys age) started playing RTS in order to be a pro player, they started playing it because it looked cool and continued playing it because it was fun.
I was excited for StormGate but it fell off hard when I realized that it was just uninteresting to play as a casual. StarCraft and StarCraft 2 will always be interesting in comparison.
I totally agree with this. I don't think playing with the maps will fix anything. Since Stormgate was first announced, I felt like I didn't see or they didn't express a vision of what game they wanted to make. It feels like they are constantly getting feedback from many people and trying to create a compromise of that feedback rather than creating a fun game and then tinkering with the balance for competitive play. I think the critical things are having a creative vision, audio, visuals, story, making something fun to play. Things like performance and competitive balance and map design can be worked on later. You need to know how you are engaging players and viewers into the world of your video game and how gameplay feels and then later you can figure out how to make it work in competition. The story of Starcraft may be full of cliches and stolen ideas, but it creates an engaging and interesting world.
This. It’s the reason why people are still competitively playing super unbalanced RTS games like command and conquer generals. The game is just FUN, awesome and looks cool. There is nothing cool about stormgate, the factions and units are all extremely lame.
Yeah, Creep camps are kind of boring, in WC3 you get both money, experience and items to progress your strongest unit, in stormgate you get a buff and some money, much more boring.
But this is the entire point of creeps in Wc3, they give multiple sources of permanent benefits in xp, stat tomes and items that you can not get in any other way and warps every game to be slightly different. They enable multiple styles of play as their value is high enough where it is generally better to creep than to attack your opponent but at the same time you are also heavily encouraged to steal away and/or disrupt your opponents creeping. without Heroes and as a consequence no xp no items the inherent value of the camps needs to really be thought through. They need to give things you can not get with normal economy, they need to be worth more than the investment to get them and placed in a manner encouring interaction like trying to steal or deny them. The creeps themselves are a huge design issue aswell as with only normal units the wc3 dmg spreading and unit retention aspect of creeping is kinda missing. As such I think the danger of camps in stormgate need to be more about aoe debuffs they inflict while fighting them instead of raw dmg output making the danger more about the other player than the camp itself should also promote more positional warfare and player interaction.
SC2 map maker and leveldesigner of zerospace here, i agree with basically all points made, especially the maps being too big and too complicated. in zerospace we tested different map sizes and the smaller ones fit the game much better, more activity, more engagements, easier to navigate and easier to learn as new players. however you can overshoot, i made a map which is basically just a wide pathway and it was horrible camping all the time. testing (yourself) and talking to playtesters is crucial to make good maps
Have you played Black Forest in AoE4? Stupid maps can make stupid (and fun) games possible which require very unorthodox strategies (including hardcore camping). Not saying these should be ladder maps but I think there is a place for them. Dry Arabia is a stupid map in essence with zero features that ended up being the most popular map.
@@Taunt61AoE has the benefit of not caring so much about balance. Yes, they try to keep civs relatively balanced, but when you have 16 civs (AoE4) or even 45 civs (AoE2) mixed in with procedural map generation, there's just no way to give every civ equal chances of winning versus every other civ. That's not a bad thing by any means. The variety keeps the community engaged. Unfortunately, games like Stormgate start with balance as one of their top prerogatives, when the majority of players just want a game that's fun and has a captivating story.
I do think crazy maps have a place in BW / SC2 as well. The crazier you go with maps, the faster you can triangulate what can work and what can't work / where the balance is. If you stay super safe (which is a major problem SC2 mapping in particular has had for years and years, the powers that be are unwilling to experiment to any extreme degree) then you never really find out what all you can get away with.
@@EB-bl6cc As far as SC2 maps go, the problem with making really diverse maps is that it's just really hard to make the map balanced for every possible matchup. When you make a really unusual map, usually it will heavily favour 1 race or another - if you were just playing mirror matches, or if you only had 2 different races it would be easy to make diverse maps while keeping it mostly fair.. but when you have 3 or more races, it just gets really hard to balance it because every balance change you make for 1 matchup will unbalance the other matchups.
@@Agagdhshh artosis is over-rated, anyone who hasto go from being a pro gamer that won no tournaments to a shout caster is a failure. hes a failure, plain and simple, couldn't cut it in the pro scene, became a shoutcaster, idk why people act like hes some type of god, hadto play over 800 games to get to top elo lmfao something that took me less then 100 games to achieve. stop LISTENING TO STREAMERS WHO ARE BAD AT GAMING. Its literally whats wrong with modern gaming. devs having to cater to streamers cause you tards listen to them and nod your heads is whats wrong with gaming.
One of the most important lessons I've had to learn as a game designer, is to never expect too much from a single aspect of the game. All the mechanics and content need to work together to produce a result that's more than the sum of its parts, and that requires they each give each other room to breathe. Their map design sounds like they're afraid their game isn't interesting enough and are trying to compensate with a more complex map, but that kind of compensation doesn't work and just prevents other aspects from being impactful.
"they are afraid the game isn't interesting enough and they are compensating...." ?? This sounds like complete armchair psychology BS. They had a problem "people don't go out on map" and a solution "let's slap in creep camps" without understanding to what gameplay this would lead in a non-hero game. Honestly whether or not tertiary creep camps can only fit small units or not is completely irrelevant to this games failure. You honestly sound more like a business person throwing around buzzwords than someone who understands the interaction between game elements.
@@renzuki5830 The OP is completely right. Making part of the game more complex because another part feels weak is one of the most common mistakes game designers make. Pretty much every game designer I've talked to, including me, runs into this problem all the time.
I think the idea behind creeps - that they encourage activity on the map in traditionally passive phases of the game - is good, but as you've called out the reality of it actually increases passivity. I wonder if the team has experimented with creeps being more of a take and hold style mechanic. Fewers camps, and you have to hold the area for a longer period of time to get the benefits from it might make for more tension.
I like this idea. To reference another competitive genre, Arena Shooters and controlling power-up spawns may be a better jumping-off point rather than creeps from Warcraft 3. So the rewards would come into discrete chunks, rather than +income per second or a Buff that applies only when you hold it or whatever. That adds texture and dynamics to the game (as the cadence of the timers interacts in ways that can generate conflicts of priorities and interesting decision-making throughout the game), while also allowing for an early game exploration phase that's a little more active.
Hard disagree, its forced activity and they will always be too op or too weak or too easy to clear or too difficult to clear. I'd rather passivity be countered by smart plays, movement on the map, good engagements or worst case harassment and counter attacks
I think that they tried to combine WC III and SC II together, sort of... However, I feel like the day and night cycle and a weather system would bring some fun into tactics such as: sandstorms, ice storms, foggy weather, and rain.
Them being useful makes map control a very, VERY important thing. This also means you cannot have matchups like PvT in sc2, where terran for long periods of time get map control, or from what I get of PvT in broodwar(VERY LITTLE mind you) you cant have protoss have map control. You NEED both sides to be evenly matched on the map, or else the creep camps give a major boost to the opponent. Unless, ofcourse, you have a short period where one side is more potent, then the opponent gets control through tech, then it evens out. Which was almost the case in vanguard vs infernal last patch, it wad the case in the first celestial beta, and made for incredibly fun gameplay. However, as artosis points out, maps with incredible complexity are hard to balance and adjust to.
Zero Space seems to be adopting this idea. I look forward to its release. Stormgate always felt like "lets make a game like Starcraft" and not its own thing.
I know Arty pretends that aesthetics don't matter when talking about Stormgate, yet played a song from an RTS at his wedding. 25 years after Broodwar came out we're still enjoying the detail of the characters they created and the quirks and detail. Stormgate just doesn't care about art or if they do care have no taste. The level of cringe I feel look at that game is off the charts. There is no saving this game but it's pretty chill to try.
made by blizzard fans that previously worked at blizzard instead of heavy metal fans that worked at blizzard, yup. it reflects the ultra-safe design philosophies of overwatch to me. zerg are weird and gross, infernals don't really have that and it feels like it was an unwillingness to have a race that people potentially dislike visually
@@machinatingminotaur6285 Reminds me of the difference between the original style of GW art by people like John Blanche verses the 3d "modern" style of artwork that GW was publishing in the mid 2010s. Thankfully they seem to be pivoting back towards the style that actually made them popular in the first place, (but it's still not quite the same)
100% agree. It lacks a proper vision and look, it almost looks a bit like an asset flip if I'm completely honest. I think something like Battle Aces looks so much better and coherent.
Neat that you're still trying to help this game become something. I have not followed closely but the impression I had is that it was basically dead. Hope it works out.
As an outsider that's only seen Stormgate though the view of a couple of Sc2 players and casters, I can say that there's nothing that draws mi into this game. Games that are popular in multi-player always had the lore and following brought by a thrilling campaign. Maybe even they only had a campaign in the first Game that came out, but that acts as a base for the entirety of the franchise and creates a bond between the player and the factions. Very few games can launch and JUST be a multi-player and survive. Because why would I play a game of funky looking robots and humans when I can fall back on established franchises that I have a bond with because I played the campaign as a kid? I.e. Starcraft, aoe2, halo, cod, etc. People play the multi-player and are loyal to the game because they loved the campaigns.
Yes I definitely feel like this game is overcomplicated and creeps are significant part of that. Pretty sure I would prefer them being outright removed.
Yeah ‘cause I think it’s way too late to save Stormgate at this point… I don’t think they made any money from going into EA in its’ current state and I haven’t heard any news of them securing any more funding. Last news article from the devs was how they were pursuing a MOBA mode or some shit, but is there any chance they could even finish that to attract players? Last I looked the game had less than 100 people playing it, worldwide. That’s a dead game.
I think the ideal should be: 1 speed camp sortof near each player's natural, allowing them to take it as a small initial economy boost and to get speed boost to get out on the map better 1 resource and 2 vision camps along the middle of the map. These are the "big" camps to be fought over. Stop putting camps on the edges of the map and stop having so many camps overall because it's impossible to contest so many so that leads to solo creeping.
Another aspect is the fact infernal can get a lot of units out quickly as they insta-build like protoss warpgate, but celestial and van units take a long time to build
I think it's fair to give them a pass on this since I'm sure it's simply unfinished at the moment. remember that warcraft 3's map editor wasn't done until the game was about to launch
They should look at Dota - Roshan is a mechanic that forces engagement and battles, and is always exciting when a team decides it's time to kill Rosh. The benefit for doing so is that one player gets an "extra life" - but it doesn't last forever, so they're incentivized to push for an attack because it's like they have a man-advantage. Or if you want to introduce RNG - the creep camps can give a random buff instead, and harder creeps will give a higher tier version of it.
In HoN they found that the extra life actually reduced action because the other team would avoid combat until it wore off. It was replaced with a permanent stats boost. But yes, mid map objectives are fun.
2:42 I'm currently reading the Jason Schreier book on blizzard called "Play Nice", and it sounds like they haven't considered the casual audience (the outer circle of the donut) when developing this game, and only focused on the inner circle of the donut hole (the hardcore base, that is much smaller) and thus will turn away a large portion of players because their game isn't considering the whole donut (both casual and hardcore) and is not easy to enter but hard to master.
It's insane how Artosis really gets it, really understands what the problem is and what is the core fun of RTS. I can't even talk to Stormgate people in the chat who are fans of such solo-creeping, no interactions, low time to kill, no worker management. 1v1 should be focused on "us" and not "them", there's plenty of other modes and games immo. :)
I totally agree about your last point that "This game is absolute garbage". This is a pretty accurate analysis and I do believe that most people would share your view.
Just awesome. They need to be daring and test out new things, nothing needs to be set in stone here. Thanks for talking to the team and helping the game move forward Arty
Really cool that there willing to get such direct feedback and let Arty into the development process. Also very interesting reasoning. Hes actually putting into words a feeling that I had. Eespecially on that desert island map. Its insanely huge. I felt like I have no idea whats going on because there is sooo much hidden aswell.
Smaller maps is a great point. Steppes of War from SC2 is considered one of the worst maps for its short rush distance, but as a player it was so much fun to play because you got to rush (or be rushed) and the games were super action packed. RTS games should focus on being simple and exciting in the beginning, where depth can be added over time, including in maps.
I agree to everything you have said. I want to add some more. Greater Picture (Variety) If we take a step back and look at Starcraft 2 or Stormgate and ask what makes a good RTS, we come across much larger and more fundamental issues that would need to be addressed. I believe the variety is one of the biggest factors. This is why SC2 Co-op commanders and fun maps are more successful than the ranked mode. Even in Warcraft 3, fun maps were much more popular than ranked modes. In fact, some games like Dota and League of Legends have emerged from these maps and have overtaken RTS games in terms of player and viewer numbers. Maps (more map types needed) One of the biggest and most fundamental problem is the maps. All Starcraft 2 and Stormgate maps are structurally the same type. There is almost only one map type. In contrast, Age of Empires has dozens of map types. To name a few: Arabia, Island, Black Forest, Arena, Nomad, Rivers, Gold Rush. All these maps require completely different strategies. In Starcraft 2 or Stormgate, that's not the case. You can play any strategy on every map. There are maybe a few rare exceptions with very minor differences. The fact that SC2 and SG has only one map type compared to dozens in Age of Empires shows that SC2 and SG offers significantly less variety in this regard. (That's a problem) There’s a reason for this: if SC2 had open maps like Arabia in Age of Empires 2, the game would be completely unbalanced. It’s essential to block narrow choke points with buildings and units because otherwise, it would lead to an automatic loss in most cases. This in itself is a problem. In SG it is maybe not as big, but could still be better. Designing SC2 or SG from the ground up for more open maps would be the better approach to balancing the game, and as a positive side effect, this would allow for a greater variety of map types. If the balance works on completely open maps, then one can consider other, more complex map types, because all maps have open spaces where bases and armies meet and fight. The balance must work there. Open maps reveal the real balance problems with more clarity. So they should add a map completely without cliffs and trees. So they can see more clearly how much fun SG makes. Scouting (procedural generated maps needed) In SC2 and SG, you only have to scout enemy buildings and units. In Age of Empires, you also have to scout resources, the exact position of your opponent, paths to the enemy, choke points, potential expansion spots, etc. This means there’s more variety. It's often said that SC2 is harder and they will say it about SG, but that only applies to the mechanical aspect and not to the strategic one. Scouting an unknown map and using that information requires more strategic decisions. In SC2 and SG, you know everything in advance and have done it a thousand times before. It becomes more about execution and less about spontaneous decision-making. If SC2 or SG had procedural generated and unknown maps like Age of Empires 2, players would have more opportunities to show how well they can adapt to different situations. This would give them more room to demonstrate their skill. The skill ceiling would increase, which ties back into variety-something all RTS players crave. The crave for variety is the reason why there are different maps, factions, units, abilities, game modes, etc. This is one of the reasons why MOBAs and SC2 Co-op Commanders have become more successful than ranked in SC2 or Warcraft 3 or SG will be. There are more, but that would require much more text. Solutions are often a combination of many changes. 2 second fights (/ massive massive damage / too low HP / and many more describe all the same problem in SC 2) Frost Giant at least recognized this problem I have told them 14 years ago and in SG they have finally solved it. In SC the problem is the high damage or the low health of units, which makes it difficult for casual players to keep up with the mechanical challenges of certain units and easy-to-execute rush strategies. This is why very few casual players participate in 1v1 ranked games. (By the way you can try my mod sc2youwant on EU and US servers, where I changed that and it makes much more fun for casual players) In standard SC2 you can have fun as a casual player in 1v1 ranked through executing a hard to defend rush faster than the opponent. This is fun that can be easily obtained, but on the other hand, it can also feel very frustrating, because there is no feel of a match with a story and chances for a comeback. Combacks are mostly seen by pro players, but these comebacks are hard to reach and therefore seldom in comparison to the number of matches. The tools for comebacks are missing and the strategic room SC2 offers is very limited (No buildable and destroyable walls, simplified economy, well-known maps, indestructable walls from the beginning of each map --> cliffs etc.) And StormGate has the same problem. I tell them now, but they will recognize it in 14 years like the other problem I told them 14 years ago. Economy (a bit more complex economy needed) All units need the same type of resources. So in the end everything is about to just get more resources, but there is no decision about on which resource I can or should focus on for my current strategy. Also the way how to get the resource is the same structure wise. Both resources are on fixed positions on the map. You can't choose the place like farms from Age or Landing Zones from C&C Generals, which makes it impossible to turn every position on the map into an interesting attack point. Wood is also more spread out on the map in Age, providing many different possible positions for the economy. Because of that there are much more possible places for expansions that increase the variety. Not just the number of resources are important, but also the ways how to get them which can also open up new strategic decisions. Also power plants from C&C that maybe work a bit like Pylons from SC can be seen as a resource. So you don't need farms or lumber camps, but the fundamental way a resource works has to be different to open up more strategies. As it currently stands in SG, you could make everything cost just one resource and replace Luminite with Therium (or vice versa) on any map, and there would be no gameplay or strategic difference. They have a different look and a different name, but almost no different gameplay mechanic. Walls (cheap, fast buildable and high HP walls needed) Cheap and fast buildable walls give players a tool to manipulate the map situation like no other tool can't. The reason why there are destructable rocks or in SG trees is that developers and players want to change the map situation. To open up new paths reach this. Walls that can be destroyed (not like cliffs) also open up this option, but it also makes it possible to close paths. So it will add even more variety and the situation on the map can change more often than ones, because destructable rocks or trees can't be build. Walls dramatically change the front lines, leading to more variety and diversity in a match. Players in SC, WC3 and SG uses structures as a wall and that shows the need of the players to have walls. Every SC2 and SG match feels like a bad version of Age of Empires arena map. General In general rts needs a lot of different challenges so each player can show their strength in different areas. Challenges in map scouting is reduced because of no procedural generated maps, the challenge in the eco is reduced because of a too simplified economy, the challenge to change the situation on the map is reduced because of no walls. Walls challenge the opponent to make a decision. To find different path, to build certain units to destroy the wall fast or to prevent walling. It also challenges the player that build walls because he has to protect the wall so the invest was worth it and he also have to find good positions for walls so the invest is not too big and cannot be easily stopped. If Frost Giant really implement all of this Age of Empires will have no chance anymore. Because all good things really come together in one game. The question is not if you make a game of type A (Age like rts) or B (Blizzard like rts). The target group of rts players is too small to think in this way. The question is do you have a good rts that fulfill all needs or not. The ongoing changes are only a drop in the ocean and don’t significantly change the fundamental situation. They won't believe it or won't even hear about it, because they don't read my texts and think in too narrow tracks. In Blizzard RTS tracks. The typical misunderstanding is that I want SC or SG to be Age 2. But that is not the case, because Age 2 has a lot of more differences like less different cultures, less good unit controls, less good recognizability of units and abilities, mostly no active abilities, less replay features etc. So there are many things that are not good in Age 2. And I would also really enjoy playing in a futuristic setting as a change. But Age 2 has in sum much more good things for the gameplay and variety and that is what I love. I love not Age, I love the better rts mechanics, possibilties and variety. And these good things in SG would create the best rts ever made like it would improve every other rts. So we need more map types, procedural generated maps, walls and a bit more complex economy.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance had variable map sizes. Maps ranged from 5km*5km, to 80km*80km! This allowed players (and the community as a whole) to figure out what was their preferred map size was. For Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, this happened to be 20km*20km, the predominantly popular map size. But this was only possible because players could experiment what map size suited the game the most. TL;DR - Stormgate needs a variety of map sizes in the map pool.
regarding creep camps. one of the RTS games ive been looking at is Immortal: Gates of Pyre and it has a pretty interesting take on them. your commander has global ability spells that cost a resource that can only be found in creep camps which are always placed in the middle areas between you and your opponent, incentivizing the players to go meet each other in the field. havent heard much on the game lately but i loved that concept. also your supply buildings were also your unit production buildings, which helped streamline people into building more production buildings and macroing more in a way that felt pretty natural
Love it, you articulated the issues in a way that makes so much intuitive sense once you said it. I appreciate you bringing this to Frost Giant and Frost Giant actually acting on it. I think you've hit the nail on the head in that Creeps with Heroes is a winning formula, creeps without heroes feels really weird and unnecessary. I don't know what they should do, but because you have heroes in single player and it has a very Warcraft 3 vibe to it more so than SC I would like to see porting the heroes over. I also think it helps with monetization so theirs that.
I have no idea why they changed the original creep mechanics, in the original broken crown the creep camps were in the direct center, which meant about every 3 minutes there was a huge fight over who got them (either creep jacking or just a battle). The other 2 resource camps were right in front of your and their natural, which again meant way more fighting and trying to steal camps, and if you try to avoid fighting you just flat out lose.
One negative to this approach is that if you fail the first creepcamp pvp engagement, you're strictly behind and it becomes hard to both come back as the behind player and also to design a reasonable "comeback mechanic" on the design side to account for the advantage that exists in every game using such a camp location model. One way to get around this negative is to make such advantage less permanent (think like roshan or a positional advantage of winning a hockey faceoff vs a "claws of attack" that permanently exists as a buff forever)
Great initiative! I'm reminded of the early days of Starcraft 2 and Quake 3 at launch, where players were learning the game on maps quite different from those played today.
Spot on analysis and suggestions, I endend up not playing that much partly because of the size of the maps. I remember learning sc2 on super small 2 player maps, much more digestible for me personally.
It makes sense when you think about the simplicity of all the original and best brood war maps - bloodbath, lost temple. These were super simple and yet never got boring since the steadiness of the map encouraged creativity in builds, micro, etc. Even 15 years into BW the most popular maps (fighting spirit , eclipse, python) tended to still be the most boring and formulaic maps where the center is either open or has one base in it.
Even BGH, it’s also so dead simple. 8 bases all with one main and one natural. Then an open center . Some variation in the paths but that’s it. And millions of games played right to this day!!
@@franz009franzthe idea is always the same and pretty simple : trying to force players outside of the map to create action during the game. Now it's not really working but not understanding what their goal is even though they said it time and time again is kinda weird
The most important thing to keep in mind when designing the maps is "will this encourage people to watch", "will it make people want to interact with this game". This goes for things like balance as well, where changes need to made such that the game will have a bigger audience. Generally that means changes should only be implemented if it will make games more interesting. A bigger audience/community will lead to more investors since they can now reach enough people to make it worth thier while. In Stormgate's case, they want to be an Esport with tournments with big prize pools. Therefore they need to make changes that make the game attractive to lots of people, which will encourage companies like ESL to fund tournaments.
Yea I definitely feel this. A lot of Stormgate for me right now feels much more complicated than it needs to be and some of these simpler designs and maps make even just looking at the smaller map easier to digest design wise.
I love the simplification you've done here, because earnest simplification leads to truth. Here's my take. I think the crux of the issue here is "what is the point of the match?" I think it's easy to get bogged down in unimportant details like, "what's the level of build variety," and "how many different mechanics does this map have?" Those don't matter. So what do I think the point of the match is? To engage with and defeat the other player. That's it. Each player should be doing that, resulting in natural resistance and conflict as they try to outwit each other. How do we make that more interesting? Give them things to fight over. You already have units farming resources. Resources can be spent on units to help you fight the other player. Unless you use those units to... farm more resources and not fight the other player, and Broken Crown actually puts you behind if you try and do that. It's a design that gets in the way of both players engaging in the entertaining part of the game, both for them and the audience.
What if the creep camps were in the center of the map? Then both players could contest over them. That way there's an incentive for both player to be near the center of the map, slightly on the opponent's side.
Provides a meaningful PvP decision each game: do I go for xyz camp/buff for my build? Do I contest their camp attempt to hopefully gain a strict advantage? Do I avoid them altogether and attempt to creep a different camp than what they chose? Can I let them get xyz camp/buff in the first place?
One of the best RTS i've played in recent years was made by a Russian studio (and it does become quite P2W throught the necessary timed consumables, but i mention it because the game design is solid.) called Art Of War 3. And the reason I mention it is because they understood how to lay out a map and make the units for different factions function. And due to this it has a lot of objective based gameplay like takign nodes and fighting over initial resource crates. There aren't creeps because they're not needed; you're contesting resources early on instead,and it's done in such a way that you *will* be forced into early fights. It's not like Halo Wars where you just run around and grab the crates, most of them need to be contested (and if you just grab them you'll likely lose units). Creeps by comparion don't serve a purpose in Stormgate. It's not like WC3 where it's a vital/mandatory source of XP, Gold, and Items. They don't serve to force fights between players or provide an advantage. Everything included an RTS should be there to further the conflict, and if it's included then it has to be meaningful and mandatory. Random creeps forrandom creeps sake are the kind of thign you'd include in a single-player campaign, not a PvP experience. If creeps and resources are disgned to just kind of let each player do their own thing with no real/forced counterplay then it's bad design.
Here's a solution to the creeps issue: put the creeps on the players' teams! On my side of the map, the creeps are on my team; on your side of the map, the creeps are on your team. That means if I go around killing the creeps on my side of the map I'm not getting any benefit or resources at all and I'm losing bits of vision on the map. So in order to benefit I need to go to my opponent's side of the map and start killing his creeps. But then he can see me doing that (since his creeps give him some vision) so he can try to defend the creeps by engaging me! This means that at the beginning of the game each player has a bunch of vision of their side of the map from their creeps but at the end of the game all the creeps are cleared out so the players need to use their own units for vision. Of course, this idea can only work if the maps are designed well and the creep camps are not so closely packed that I can't sneak a bunch of units into my opponent's main and harass his economy. This idea actually matches with real life Medieval warfare, where a kingdom is going to have a bunch of peasant villages all over the place. Small groups of enemies might be able to sneak past the villages and into the castle but a large army moving through is going to be spotted long before it reaches the castle
I think this is a solid first step into figuring out why this game lacks retention and engagement. It seems overly complex to just be overly complex. It seems like they have the backend personal from the old blizzard team and that they are implementing these through and robust systems but without a clear gameplay objective and goal. Somewhat how I feel about the race design and lore so far. It feels all very centered around fitting into their preconceived tech stack they want to make for an RTS and less around a game they want to make systems for that bring something new or refreshed to the genre.
I think this is a great idea 'tosis. Reminds me of early SC2 when most maps were pretty simple with one main feature you have to know about. It kept the focus on unit interactions.
My only thought with the creep camps and them being more central on the map is you now have the option to have them semi randomized if you wanted. If one of the camps is better for your faction or build you can create a competition or force conflict over that camp.
As critical as it is, I'm just not convinced that the stormgate devs have it in them to pull this off. It seems like it's just a bunch of programmers and project managers giving it their best shot, but in terms of design, they are completely lacking. Everything they've shown so far shows that. Props to them for taking community feedback but at the end of the day you really need to have devs that know what they want to make and can design and execute systems that push it towards that conceptual goal. If every design decision is a community referendum, then it's hopeless. Stormgate is simply unfocused and directionless. " We're doing 1v1, oh wait no... monetizing coop is the focus! WAIT....we are switching gears to 3v3!." It's just not a good look on top of all the other issues with the gameplay, maps, and the presentation.
Creeps are terrible idea. They are bad in WarCraft III too. You need to memorize the latest tricks for effective creeping, which is essentially single player
Couldn't agree more. If you're trying to understand a game, the last thing you want to do is introduce a ton of variables that ruin the clarity. If it was like LoL where the map design was a static, fundamental part of the game it'd be one thing - but this is a game that is blindly following an RTS trend of "oh have a lot of maps" In general Stormgate lacks a spine. It's trying to be an amalgam of features in SC / WC without thinking about their place in the game. If creeps never existed in Stormgate and someone suggested adding them as they exist rn, I don't think Frostgiant would have a single argument for it. The way the Devs try to justify creep's place in the game by talking about encouraging activity on the map sounds more like team objectives in Heroes of the Storm, which would honestly probably be a way better way of handling it. As of right now it's essentially just 3rd resource that you mine with units. Luminite, therium, creeps - which makes the RTS pillar of being 'greedy' way, way too complex for a game that wants you to find it's identity for it.
Starting off super super simple is the way to go. The first map needs the be the most basic one you can ever go for. So the game can be played without any gimmicks, for other maps, the gimmicks add some spice and change the basic dynamics.
empires of steel is a simple version of a CIV game that plays out better overall. they don't have bunkers but it has an idle unit graphic where the units start building up a sandbag defensive position when stationed in one position. perhaps for starcraft/sg if units are idle for 80 seconds they could start digging in or setting up defensive positions that could grant unit in this area a +1 armor bonus but at the cost of reduced movement speed for 5 or 10 seconds after they leave the area and when empty the area goes back to normal
You see a plethora of games imitating older games ending up over-designed. A lot of platform fighters imitate smash melee, and a lot of MOBAs have bit these pitfalls, hoping to see some games willing to dedicate to an experience that may be slightly unbalanced in ways that bring out something interesting (like Starcraft and smash melee and other old classics that did the same thing). People forget these games were accidents in ways.
It feels like they wanted to have SC style micro/macro with WC3 style complex maps with a lot going on and it's gonna be interesting to see if they manage to make it work well together
What about making creeps into control points which you should conquer and constantly control to gain some bonuses? Those points could be protected with creeps at the beginning so that you have to gather some army and cannot take points from the very start. This way there will be some strategic points which both players might be eager to fight for. Much like bases but in a slightly different way.
these are honestly good criticism of the game. I like the game, but the maps feel hard to wrap my head around (unlike SC2 where I immediately go "oh here's the pervert pillar" "here's a safe expand. this one is risky"). and the creeps feel weird coming from WC3 where creeps can be interacted with in deep, interesting ways ("do I creep jack? Do I go hard on creeps and get 2 leveled heros? Do I fast clear my expo and expand?"). In Stormgate they feel really flat by comparison "I take this creep camp and get a little gold and speed" or something. They feel more like a regular part of macroing, rather than a high varience tool to decide what degree to use, and a way to interact with opponents.
I think it’s possible you could just remove creeps but have some interesting ideas with the node on the map. Dawn of War II had some interesting aspects with that. Not sure how well it directly translates, though, as in that game your requisition and power nodes were your only way to get resources. No equivalent of workers getting minerals or gas. Personally I think nodes are more interesting that mining. That said, if they made nodes more interesting maybe some hybrid approach could work.
I agree the map being so complicated makes it impossible for me to make my own ideas for how a match is going. I love pretending I know how to play the game and making my own calls on what they should or shouldn’t so because that gets me invested.
Nony's vid did the best job at describing creep camps. In WC3 they feed your heroes early, right? There aren't heroes in 1v1. Ok, well they force players on to the map early. But only like 2 maps have a defensible natural and everything else is super open. And because every unit is so damn slow, it's actually not great to go out and creep right. It's this very weird design where they wanted camps but didn't design the game so everything fits together. They have 50 years of game dev experience. You're telling me with that many employees, that much money, and that much dev time, they couldn't come up with a good camp implementation???
That fact maps still have "Naturals" still hasn't struck enough people as odd. "Yeah, every round you expand here as soon as you can. Its Natural." They want people to get on the ap to battle but then lock both players in their bases with plenty of cash and wonder why no one left.
Creeps probably work better if they are huge monsters that require some actual investment to get rewarded. Kinda like League of Legends does the dragon, so your opponent even has a real incentive to catch you and steal it from you. Basic creeps for the early game is not interesting and adds nothing.
i was in on the closed "Beta". piece of shit was still in alpha stage and had missing units, animations, textures, etc. played for about 20 mins before never touching it again. this game was deadass made by people that never really enjoyed an RTS btw, it's just a startup scam and whoever gave these people money will never get their moneys worth. also worth noting the factions are so incredibly uninspired, just a mishmash of factions from other games
Love this take! I’ve played a few hundred hours and I agree that the fundamental structure of the game is still missing. In early beta I felt there was more clarity around basic economy, map control, etc. There’s simply too much “innovation” happening in the game design imo. As someone who LOVES the idea of celestials, I think they’re the worst culprit of this. Something as simple as making workers and organizing bases feels completely unintuitive and unrewarding. There needs to be more fundamental iteration for 1v1 to be successful. Maybe 3v3 will succeed in this area with simplified unit sets 🙏
Aesthetics might not matter to Arty but the very first promotional image I saw of this game made me realise I won't like it and nothing I have seen from it has changed my mind since. The art style is too late to change or fix, but I'm not going to be staring at this on the daily. SC2 came out 14 years ago, sc1 came out 26 years ago, AoE2 came out around the same time and they are all beautiful to this day. This game is not.
Feels like Artosis (and other youtubers) just doing the FG's job for them. Like iterating on the actual game and figuring out what's wrong with it. Things that should be done somewhere BEFORE early access.
I completely disagree, the maps are the least of the problems in my opinion. Smaller simpler maps just turn the game into a cheese fest, and i understand for people from starcraft 1 thats what theyre familiar with and would like to see. I personally dont enjoy seeing hardcore pros cheese eachother out because its made viable in the highest leagues. (i HATE gambling) It removes the RTS aspect from the game and turns it more into a moba where you only have a set number of options, cuz u only have low tech and few units. In my opinion the reall problem is its unit design. The unit design was meant to look fun, but the gameplay isnt fun. Blinking a stalker is fun, interactive micro. its fun gameplay, where you can actually dictate wether your winning or losing with micro skills. You feel accomplished if YOU microd like a god. If blink stalkers would auto blink, the game would be allot less fun, because it doesnt feel like you are doing anything impactfull besides just amoving them. There is no sense of accomplishment. In regards to stormgate we see a big dude split into two, doesnt really do anything. You press a button and it might look fun to see, but in reality, If the big dude is strong in a certain scenario, nobody will split, if its too weak in certain scenarios itll always happen. It doesnt feel interactive. Most units dont in stormgate. They are kind of bland uninspired linear unit interactions. For me i stopped playing when everyone was rushing dogs, Where the only micro is mobility/retarget micro. warcraft 2 was really enjoyable for me because of the lategame potential. when i was a kid seeing a mage destroy an entire army, that was literally all i wanted to do. Or a cool ass dragon army, awesome. What do we get in this game? Pretty bland mediocre lategame units that dont feel impactfull or strong at all. There is no reall incentive to macro up beyond your 'strong' timing. The time to kill, in stormgate is just, wait an eternity for something to die. Micro definatly is required, but doesnt feel impactfull at all. There are no proper big spells and hardcounter units, wich only turns the game into more of a snooze fest. If i wanted a slower time to kill in starcraft 2 i would just play custom games with slower speeds. Because thats in its essence what stormgate is doing with HP sponge units. (and yes playing sc2 in custom games on slowest settings is also boring af.) Warcraft 3 had its moments with heros, because of the impact they bring to the game. how strong a level 10 hero can basically turn the tide as a lategame force and item management wich allowed you to play a specific style, and tweak your own playstyles. Choices in heros also strengthened diversity in playstyles. And that made it a great game, strategically, but also interactively. (no wonder dota was a success) Stormgate doesnt have this at all. Instead they have an entire race based on seemingly unhinged gambling a bunch(celestials), also not fun in my books at all. Not to play or play against. If the gameplay was actually fun and felt interactive and reactive, because unit interactions where good, i couldnt give 2 hoots about map design or the artstyle. This is also the reason why currently battle aces really feels allot more fun then stormgate in my opinion. Fast paced high octane battles where every slip up or pro micro can make you win or lose games. there is no 'on the edge of your seat' gameplay happening in stormgate. There is no ultra higher skillcap ceiling (like forcefield donuts into a big distuptor hit timing) wich noone is even able to do at the highest level. Just my opinion and my 2 cents.
I think small map with center creeps and hero’s are a decent idea for this game style. I think they need more abilities that do stuff. I think part of this issue is you can’t style on people. They don’t want you to be able to win fast or out class people like you can in sc2
Starcraft captured me because of the universe and the idea of different factions interacting with each other. Stormgate doesnt seem to have that magic.
Yes! Maps are complex! I couldn't understand what was wrong when I was playing Stormgate. They are not just complext, but also hard to read. You can't even tell what is a highground or a wall. SC2 maps are so contrast compared to this, they play themselves. Also, most people are vetoing non-default maps in SC2 ladder, bc it's annoying to play. Stormgate wanted to simplify sc, but added creep camps... They will be 100% ignored at low and mid -level play, bc it's one more annoying thing to deal with. At high level, yes, but... it's not interesting to play and watch.
Simplifying the factors as a way to speed up the gathering of more scientific information and hasten iteration by finding basic truths about the identity of Stormgate.
100% exactly.
lmao that was a wild sentence that somehow made perfect sense!
@@fotgaxton Yeah, for the amount of bullshit bingo buzzwords the above statement has, it's really not bad. :D
Really well said 😅
Say what now.
I feel that an important aspect of Starcraft and Starcraft 2 are that not only do you have the balance that the developers put in such as unit attack and HP, but also the balance that the community provides through the maps. Allowing the community to make maps seems mandatory to me in an RTS.
I do worry that Stormgate is falling into the same problem that a lot of games made by professional players do. It focuses too much on things like balance instead of things like fun, creativity, audio, visuals etc... Essentially no one (especially no one that is around my or Artys age) started playing RTS in order to be a pro player, they started playing it because it looked cool and continued playing it because it was fun.
I was excited for StormGate but it fell off hard when I realized that it was just uninteresting to play as a casual. StarCraft and StarCraft 2 will always be interesting in comparison.
brood war is basically balanced around maps they are what keep the game balanced.
I totally agree with this. I don't think playing with the maps will fix anything. Since Stormgate was first announced, I felt like I didn't see or they didn't express a vision of what game they wanted to make. It feels like they are constantly getting feedback from many people and trying to create a compromise of that feedback rather than creating a fun game and then tinkering with the balance for competitive play.
I think the critical things are having a creative vision, audio, visuals, story, making something fun to play. Things like performance and competitive balance and map design can be worked on later. You need to know how you are engaging players and viewers into the world of your video game and how gameplay feels and then later you can figure out how to make it work in competition. The story of Starcraft may be full of cliches and stolen ideas, but it creates an engaging and interesting world.
Naah. Creating an original RTS game is just really fucking hard.
This. It’s the reason why people are still competitively playing super unbalanced RTS games like command and conquer generals. The game is just FUN, awesome and looks cool. There is nothing cool about stormgate, the factions and units are all extremely lame.
" 'Oh my god it's the attack claws!' or whatever Warcraft 3 players get excited about"
Never change Arty
This coming from the man that gets chills whenever a building is placed in a slightly weird way
Yeah, Creep camps are kind of boring, in WC3 you get both money, experience and items to progress your strongest unit, in stormgate you get a buff and some money, much more boring.
wc3 catching strays
But this is the entire point of creeps in Wc3, they give multiple sources of permanent benefits in xp, stat tomes and items that you can not get in any other way and warps every game to be slightly different. They enable multiple styles of play as their value is high enough where it is generally better to creep than to attack your opponent but at the same time you are also heavily encouraged to steal away and/or disrupt your opponents creeping. without Heroes and as a consequence no xp no items the inherent value of the camps needs to really be thought through. They need to give things you can not get with normal economy, they need to be worth more than the investment to get them and placed in a manner encouring interaction like trying to steal or deny them. The creeps themselves are a huge design issue aswell as with only normal units the wc3 dmg spreading and unit retention aspect of creeping is kinda missing. As such I think the danger of camps in stormgate need to be more about aoe debuffs they inflict while fighting them instead of raw dmg output making the danger more about the other player than the camp itself should also promote more positional warfare and player interaction.
Whatever those SIMPLETONS playing warcraft get happy about
SC2 map maker and leveldesigner of zerospace here,
i agree with basically all points made, especially the maps being too big and too complicated. in zerospace we tested different map sizes and the smaller ones fit the game much better, more activity, more engagements, easier to navigate and easier to learn as new players.
however you can overshoot, i made a map which is basically just a wide pathway and it was horrible camping all the time. testing (yourself) and talking to playtesters is crucial to make good maps
Have you played Black Forest in AoE4? Stupid maps can make stupid (and fun) games possible which require very unorthodox strategies (including hardcore camping). Not saying these should be ladder maps but I think there is a place for them. Dry Arabia is a stupid map in essence with zero features that ended up being the most popular map.
@@Taunt61AoE has the benefit of not caring so much about balance. Yes, they try to keep civs relatively balanced, but when you have 16 civs (AoE4) or even 45 civs (AoE2) mixed in with procedural map generation, there's just no way to give every civ equal chances of winning versus every other civ.
That's not a bad thing by any means. The variety keeps the community engaged. Unfortunately, games like Stormgate start with balance as one of their top prerogatives, when the majority of players just want a game that's fun and has a captivating story.
I do think crazy maps have a place in BW / SC2 as well. The crazier you go with maps, the faster you can triangulate what can work and what can't work / where the balance is. If you stay super safe (which is a major problem SC2 mapping in particular has had for years and years, the powers that be are unwilling to experiment to any extreme degree) then you never really find out what all you can get away with.
@@EB-bl6cc As far as SC2 maps go, the problem with making really diverse maps is that it's just really hard to make the map balanced for every possible matchup. When you make a really unusual map, usually it will heavily favour 1 race or another - if you were just playing mirror matches, or if you only had 2 different races it would be easy to make diverse maps while keeping it mostly fair.. but when you have 3 or more races, it just gets really hard to balance it because every balance change you make for 1 matchup will unbalance the other matchups.
@@Taunt61 have played both AoE is what get me into RTS in my childhood. i think the credo is never stop experimenting.
big props to artosis for not jusrt making a complaint video and making a contribution to this RTS community
Yeah and props to the developers as well for listejing to him and providing new map variants.
Artosis could work on this game with them for 60 years and guess what? It still blows.
@@Agagdhshh artosis is over-rated, anyone who hasto go from being a pro gamer that won no tournaments to a shout caster is a failure.
hes a failure, plain and simple, couldn't cut it in the pro scene, became a shoutcaster, idk why people act like hes some type of god, hadto play over 800 games to get to top elo lmfao something that took me less then 100 games to achieve.
stop LISTENING TO STREAMERS WHO ARE BAD AT GAMING. Its literally whats wrong with modern gaming.
devs having to cater to streamers cause you tards listen to them and nod your heads is whats wrong with gaming.
I was about to say this but you said it, so have a thumb.
One of the most important lessons I've had to learn as a game designer, is to never expect too much from a single aspect of the game. All the mechanics and content need to work together to produce a result that's more than the sum of its parts, and that requires they each give each other room to breathe. Their map design sounds like they're afraid their game isn't interesting enough and are trying to compensate with a more complex map, but that kind of compensation doesn't work and just prevents other aspects from being impactful.
"they are afraid the game isn't interesting enough and they are compensating...." ?? This sounds like complete armchair psychology BS. They had a problem "people don't go out on map" and a solution "let's slap in creep camps" without understanding to what gameplay this would lead in a non-hero game. Honestly whether or not tertiary creep camps can only fit small units or not is completely irrelevant to this games failure. You honestly sound more like a business person throwing around buzzwords than someone who understands the interaction between game elements.
@@renzuki5830 The OP is completely right. Making part of the game more complex because another part feels weak is one of the most common mistakes game designers make. Pretty much every game designer I've talked to, including me, runs into this problem all the time.
Artosis, the inventor of CRAZY zerg, takes a stab at CRAZY map design. Wow.
Gone wild
my chills are off the chart
Remember when Artosis invented the Tasteless build? Crazy!
I think the idea behind creeps - that they encourage activity on the map in traditionally passive phases of the game - is good, but as you've called out the reality of it actually increases passivity. I wonder if the team has experimented with creeps being more of a take and hold style mechanic. Fewers camps, and you have to hold the area for a longer period of time to get the benefits from it might make for more tension.
I like this idea. To reference another competitive genre, Arena Shooters and controlling power-up spawns may be a better jumping-off point rather than creeps from Warcraft 3. So the rewards would come into discrete chunks, rather than +income per second or a Buff that applies only when you hold it or whatever. That adds texture and dynamics to the game (as the cadence of the timers interacts in ways that can generate conflicts of priorities and interesting decision-making throughout the game), while also allowing for an early game exploration phase that's a little more active.
Hard disagree, its forced activity and they will always be too op or too weak or too easy to clear or too difficult to clear. I'd rather passivity be countered by smart plays, movement on the map, good engagements or worst case harassment and counter attacks
I think that they tried to combine WC III and SC II together, sort of...
However, I feel like the day and night cycle and a weather system would bring some fun into tactics such as: sandstorms, ice storms, foggy weather, and rain.
Them being useful makes map control a very, VERY important thing. This also means you cannot have matchups like PvT in sc2, where terran for long periods of time get map control, or from what I get of PvT in broodwar(VERY LITTLE mind you) you cant have protoss have map control. You NEED both sides to be evenly matched on the map, or else the creep camps give a major boost to the opponent. Unless, ofcourse, you have a short period where one side is more potent, then the opponent gets control through tech, then it evens out. Which was almost the case in vanguard vs infernal last patch, it wad the case in the first celestial beta, and made for incredibly fun gameplay. However, as artosis points out, maps with incredible complexity are hard to balance and adjust to.
Zero Space seems to be adopting this idea. I look forward to its release. Stormgate always felt like "lets make a game like Starcraft" and not its own thing.
15 seconds in "Stormgate wasn't that entertaining." Yup.
DOA
I know Arty pretends that aesthetics don't matter when talking about Stormgate, yet played a song from an RTS at his wedding. 25 years after Broodwar came out we're still enjoying the detail of the characters they created and the quirks and detail. Stormgate just doesn't care about art or if they do care have no taste. The level of cringe I feel look at that game is off the charts. There is no saving this game but it's pretty chill to try.
made by blizzard fans that previously worked at blizzard instead of heavy metal fans that worked at blizzard, yup. it reflects the ultra-safe design philosophies of overwatch to me. zerg are weird and gross, infernals don't really have that and it feels like it was an unwillingness to have a race that people potentially dislike visually
blizzard made arts right for sure
@@machinatingminotaur6285 Reminds me of the difference between the original style of GW art by people like John Blanche verses the 3d "modern" style of artwork that GW was publishing in the mid 2010s.
Thankfully they seem to be pivoting back towards the style that actually made them popular in the first place, (but it's still not quite the same)
Heavy metal the music genre, or Heavy Metal the magazine?
100% agree. It lacks a proper vision and look, it almost looks a bit like an asset flip if I'm completely honest. I think something like Battle Aces looks so much better and coherent.
This seems a lot more engaging to me to play. Thanks Arty. Thanks for being involved in the community and having ideas.
Neat that you're still trying to help this game become something. I have not followed closely but the impression I had is that it was basically dead. Hope it works out.
The whole genre is basically dead. So you can either watch every new RTS die or try to help them secure a nice cult following with good design.
It will be DOA
As an outsider that's only seen Stormgate though the view of a couple of Sc2 players and casters, I can say that there's nothing that draws mi into this game. Games that are popular in multi-player always had the lore and following brought by a thrilling campaign. Maybe even they only had a campaign in the first Game that came out, but that acts as a base for the entirety of the franchise and creates a bond between the player and the factions. Very few games can launch and JUST be a multi-player and survive. Because why would I play a game of funky looking robots and humans when I can fall back on established franchises that I have a bond with because I played the campaign as a kid? I.e. Starcraft, aoe2, halo, cod, etc. People play the multi-player and are loyal to the game because they loved the campaigns.
Meh. i never touched an rts campaign in my life, except when my internet went down.
Yes I definitely feel like this game is overcomplicated and creeps are significant part of that. Pretty sure I would prefer them being outright removed.
Personally I enjoy the complexity. Figuring stuff out is half the fun in a new RTS.
Arty saving stormgate with Starcraft Blood Bath map, nice. I like the aged map(wine) here.
I am glad you made this brudda. It's good to air out the problems so that others who are considering making an RTS can learn.
Yeah ‘cause I think it’s way too late to save Stormgate at this point… I don’t think they made any money from going into EA in its’ current state and I haven’t heard any news of them securing any more funding. Last news article from the devs was how they were pursuing a MOBA mode or some shit, but is there any chance they could even finish that to attract players?
Last I looked the game had less than 100 people playing it, worldwide. That’s a dead game.
IMO the biggest problem is that they have 5 unfinished game modes instead of 1 finished one
I think the ideal should be:
1 speed camp sortof near each player's natural, allowing them to take it as a small initial economy boost and to get speed boost to get out on the map better
1 resource and 2 vision camps along the middle of the map. These are the "big" camps to be fought over.
Stop putting camps on the edges of the map and stop having so many camps overall because it's impossible to contest so many so that leads to solo creeping.
Scrap the creeps they are garbage in this game
Another aspect is the fact infernal can get a lot of units out quickly as they insta-build like protoss warpgate, but celestial and van units take a long time to build
Not having a map editor is a kinda stupid idea when people could be using it to figure out what gameplay people enjoy the most.
I think it's fair to give them a pass on this since I'm sure it's simply unfinished at the moment. remember that warcraft 3's map editor wasn't done until the game was about to launch
@@machinatingminotaur6285 sc1 came out the year I was born... so no I don't remember I was 4 lol. But yah their probably working on it.
They should look at Dota - Roshan is a mechanic that forces engagement and battles, and is always exciting when a team decides it's time to kill Rosh. The benefit for doing so is that one player gets an "extra life" - but it doesn't last forever, so they're incentivized to push for an attack because it's like they have a man-advantage.
Or if you want to introduce RNG - the creep camps can give a random buff instead, and harder creeps will give a higher tier version of it.
that's interesting, I think they stole that from Leageu of Legends, the baron.
@@martymcfly420mph6 Roshan existed before LoL when Dota was just a warcraft 3 mod.
@martymcfly420mph6 Roshan existed in Dota years before league was in even beta
In HoN they found that the extra life actually reduced action because the other team would avoid combat until it wore off. It was replaced with a permanent stats boost. But yes, mid map objectives are fun.
@@martymcfly420mph6 It's true, and Leageu stole it from HoN which stole it from Demigod.
Great analysis, Dude. Awesome that you're so invested in helping make this game better
The game needs real constructive criticism honestly. Good stuff
2:42 I'm currently reading the Jason Schreier book on blizzard called "Play Nice", and it sounds like they haven't considered the casual audience (the outer circle of the donut) when developing this game, and only focused on the inner circle of the donut hole (the hardcore base, that is much smaller) and thus will turn away a large portion of players because their game isn't considering the whole donut (both casual and hardcore) and is not easy to enter but hard to master.
I want a donut now
Brood War and WC3 still have an active custom/casual scene! Blows my mind that modern RTS designers ignore the biggest share of the audience.
getting chills looking at arty's map
New memes pls
Getting shits from dead memes
It's insane how Artosis really gets it, really understands what the problem is and what is the core fun of RTS. I can't even talk to Stormgate people in the chat who are fans of such solo-creeping, no interactions, low time to kill, no worker management. 1v1 should be focused on "us" and not "them", there's plenty of other modes and games immo. :)
I totally agree about your last point that "This game is absolute garbage". This is a pretty accurate analysis and I do believe that most people would share your view.
Just awesome. They need to be daring and test out new things, nothing needs to be set in stone here.
Thanks for talking to the team and helping the game move forward Arty
Really cool that there willing to get such direct feedback and let Arty into the development process. Also very interesting reasoning. Hes actually putting into words a feeling that I had. Eespecially on that desert island map. Its insanely huge. I felt like I have no idea whats going on because there is sooo much hidden aswell.
Smaller maps is a great point. Steppes of War from SC2 is considered one of the worst maps for its short rush distance, but as a player it was so much fun to play because you got to rush (or be rushed) and the games were super action packed. RTS games should focus on being simple and exciting in the beginning, where depth can be added over time, including in maps.
I hated that map from the first second I've seen it. Gosh games on it were the worst. Lost Temple was way better.
Great to see your ideas being listened to. I haven't played in a few weeks but i'm going to play some this weekend for sure to try these out.
I agree to everything you have said. I want to add some more.
Greater Picture (Variety)
If we take a step back and look at Starcraft 2 or Stormgate and ask what makes a good RTS, we come across much larger and more fundamental issues that would need to be addressed. I believe the variety is one of the biggest factors. This is why SC2 Co-op commanders and fun maps are more successful than the ranked mode.
Even in Warcraft 3, fun maps were much more popular than ranked modes. In fact, some games like Dota and League of Legends have emerged from these maps and have overtaken RTS games in terms of player and viewer numbers.
Maps (more map types needed)
One of the biggest and most fundamental problem is the maps. All Starcraft 2 and Stormgate maps are structurally the same type. There is almost only one map type. In contrast, Age of Empires has dozens of map types. To name a few: Arabia, Island, Black Forest, Arena, Nomad, Rivers, Gold Rush. All these maps require completely different strategies. In Starcraft 2 or Stormgate, that's not the case. You can play any strategy on every map. There are maybe a few rare exceptions with very minor differences. The fact that SC2 and SG has only one map type compared to dozens in Age of Empires shows that SC2 and SG offers significantly less variety in this regard. (That's a problem)
There’s a reason for this: if SC2 had open maps like Arabia in Age of Empires 2, the game would be completely unbalanced. It’s essential to block narrow choke points with buildings and units because otherwise, it would lead to an automatic loss in most cases. This in itself is a problem. In SG it is maybe not as big, but could still be better.
Designing SC2 or SG from the ground up for more open maps would be the better approach to balancing the game, and as a positive side effect, this would allow for a greater variety of map types. If the balance works on completely open maps, then one can consider other, more complex map types, because all maps have open spaces where bases and armies meet and fight. The balance must work there. Open maps reveal the real balance problems with more clarity. So they should add a map completely without cliffs and trees. So they can see more clearly how much fun SG makes.
Scouting (procedural generated maps needed)
In SC2 and SG, you only have to scout enemy buildings and units. In Age of Empires, you also have to scout resources, the exact position of your opponent, paths to the enemy, choke points, potential expansion spots, etc. This means there’s more variety. It's often said that SC2 is harder and they will say it about SG, but that only applies to the mechanical aspect and not to the strategic one. Scouting an unknown map and using that information requires more strategic decisions. In SC2 and SG, you know everything in advance and have done it a thousand times before. It becomes more about execution and less about spontaneous decision-making. If SC2 or SG had procedural generated and unknown maps like Age of Empires 2, players would have more opportunities to show how well they can adapt to different situations. This would give them more room to demonstrate their skill. The skill ceiling would increase, which ties back into variety-something all RTS players crave.
The crave for variety is the reason why there are different maps, factions, units, abilities, game modes, etc. This is one of the reasons why MOBAs and SC2 Co-op Commanders have become more successful than ranked in SC2 or Warcraft 3 or SG will be. There are more, but that would require much more text. Solutions are often a combination of many changes.
2 second fights (/ massive massive damage / too low HP / and many more describe all the same problem in SC 2)
Frost Giant at least recognized this problem I have told them 14 years ago and in SG they have finally solved it.
In SC the problem is the high damage or the low health of units, which makes it difficult for casual players to keep up with the mechanical challenges of certain units and easy-to-execute rush strategies. This is why very few casual players participate in 1v1 ranked games. (By the way you can try my mod sc2youwant on EU and US servers, where I changed that and it makes much more fun for casual players) In standard SC2 you can have fun as a casual player in 1v1 ranked through executing a hard to defend rush faster than the opponent. This is fun that can be easily obtained, but on the other hand, it can also feel very frustrating, because there is no feel of a match with a story and chances for a comeback. Combacks are mostly seen by pro players, but these comebacks are hard to reach and therefore seldom in comparison to the number of matches. The tools for comebacks are missing and the strategic room SC2 offers is very limited (No buildable and destroyable walls, simplified economy, well-known maps, indestructable walls from the beginning of each map --> cliffs etc.) And StormGate has the same problem. I tell them now, but they will recognize it in 14 years like the other problem I told them 14 years ago.
Economy (a bit more complex economy needed)
All units need the same type of resources. So in the end everything is about to just get more resources, but there is no decision about on which resource I can or should focus on for my current strategy. Also the way how to get the resource is the same structure wise. Both resources are on fixed positions on the map. You can't choose the place like farms from Age or Landing Zones from C&C Generals, which makes it impossible to turn every position on the map into an interesting attack point. Wood is also more spread out on the map in Age, providing many different possible positions for the economy. Because of that there are much more possible places for expansions that increase the variety. Not just the number of resources are important, but also the ways how to get them which can also open up new strategic decisions. Also power plants from C&C that maybe work a bit like Pylons from SC can be seen as a resource. So you don't need farms or lumber camps, but the fundamental way a resource works has to be different to open up more strategies. As it currently stands in SG, you could make everything cost just one resource and replace Luminite with Therium (or vice versa) on any map, and there would be no gameplay or strategic difference. They have a different look and a different name, but almost no different gameplay mechanic.
Walls (cheap, fast buildable and high HP walls needed)
Cheap and fast buildable walls give players a tool to manipulate the map situation like no other tool can't. The reason why there are destructable rocks or in SG trees is that developers and players want to change the map situation. To open up new paths reach this. Walls that can be destroyed (not like cliffs) also open up this option, but it also makes it possible to close paths. So it will add even more variety and the situation on the map can change more often than ones, because destructable rocks or trees can't be build. Walls dramatically change the front lines, leading to more variety and diversity in a match. Players in SC, WC3 and SG uses structures as a wall and that shows the need of the players to have walls. Every SC2 and SG match feels like a bad version of Age of Empires arena map.
General
In general rts needs a lot of different challenges so each player can show their strength in different areas. Challenges in map scouting is reduced because of no procedural generated maps, the challenge in the eco is reduced because of a too simplified economy, the challenge to change the situation on the map is reduced because of no walls. Walls challenge the opponent to make a decision. To find different path, to build certain units to destroy the wall fast or to prevent walling. It also challenges the player that build walls because he has to protect the wall so the invest was worth it and he also have to find good positions for walls so the invest is not too big and cannot be easily stopped. If Frost Giant really implement all of this Age of Empires will have no chance anymore. Because all good things really come together in one game. The question is not if you make a game of type A (Age like rts) or B (Blizzard like rts). The target group of rts players is too small to think in this way. The question is do you have a good rts that fulfill all needs or not.
The ongoing changes are only a drop in the ocean and don’t significantly change the fundamental situation.
They won't believe it or won't even hear about it, because they don't read my texts and think in too narrow tracks. In Blizzard RTS tracks.
The typical misunderstanding is that I want SC or SG to be Age 2. But that is not the case, because Age 2 has a lot of more differences like less different cultures, less good unit controls, less good recognizability of units and abilities, mostly no active abilities, less replay features etc. So there are many things that are not good in Age 2. And I would also really enjoy playing in a futuristic setting as a change. But Age 2 has in sum much more good things for the gameplay and variety and that is what I love. I love not Age, I love the better rts mechanics, possibilties and variety. And these good things in SG would create the best rts ever made like it would improve every other rts.
So we need more map types, procedural generated maps, walls and a bit more complex economy.
K
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance had variable map sizes. Maps ranged from 5km*5km, to 80km*80km! This allowed players (and the community as a whole) to figure out what was their preferred map size was. For Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, this happened to be 20km*20km, the predominantly popular map size. But this was only possible because players could experiment what map size suited the game the most.
TL;DR - Stormgate needs a variety of map sizes in the map pool.
regarding creep camps. one of the RTS games ive been looking at is Immortal: Gates of Pyre and it has a pretty interesting take on them. your commander has global ability spells that cost a resource that can only be found in creep camps which are always placed in the middle areas between you and your opponent, incentivizing the players to go meet each other in the field. havent heard much on the game lately but i loved that concept. also your supply buildings were also your unit production buildings, which helped streamline people into building more production buildings and macroing more in a way that felt pretty natural
Pls fix this shit , Arty the Saviour
It cant be fixed, play Beyond All Reason instead
@@tictacterminator BAR is very different from blizzard type rts games
Artosis literally CAN NOT make a critical piece of content without starting by telling everyone else they're wrong.
You think you know more than him Mr Know It All ?
@ it must be so hard to go through life not knowing how to read.
Love it, you articulated the issues in a way that makes so much intuitive sense once you said it. I appreciate you bringing this to Frost Giant and Frost Giant actually acting on it. I think you've hit the nail on the head in that Creeps with Heroes is a winning formula, creeps without heroes feels really weird and unnecessary. I don't know what they should do, but because you have heroes in single player and it has a very Warcraft 3 vibe to it more so than SC I would like to see porting the heroes over. I also think it helps with monetization so theirs that.
I have no idea why they changed the original creep mechanics, in the original broken crown the creep camps were in the direct center, which meant about every 3 minutes there was a huge fight over who got them (either creep jacking or just a battle). The other 2 resource camps were right in front of your and their natural, which again meant way more fighting and trying to steal camps, and if you try to avoid fighting you just flat out lose.
One negative to this approach is that if you fail the first creepcamp pvp engagement, you're strictly behind and it becomes hard to both come back as the behind player and also to design a reasonable "comeback mechanic" on the design side to account for the advantage that exists in every game using such a camp location model. One way to get around this negative is to make such advantage less permanent (think like roshan or a positional advantage of winning a hockey faceoff vs a "claws of attack" that permanently exists as a buff forever)
Great initiative! I'm reminded of the early days of Starcraft 2 and Quake 3 at launch, where players were learning the game on maps quite different from those played today.
Spot on analysis and suggestions, I endend up not playing that much partly because of the size of the maps. I remember learning sc2 on super small 2 player maps, much more digestible for me personally.
It makes sense when you think about the simplicity of all the original and best brood war maps - bloodbath, lost temple. These were super simple and yet never got boring since the steadiness of the map encouraged creativity in builds, micro, etc. Even 15 years into BW the most popular maps (fighting spirit , eclipse, python) tended to still be the most boring and formulaic maps where the center is either open or has one base in it.
Even BGH, it’s also so dead simple. 8 bases all with one main and one natural. Then an open center . Some variation in the paths but that’s it. And millions of games played right to this day!!
Creeps were in WC3 for exp and items. Why are they in SG? I am not sure
They're trying to justify making WC IV without asking why.
Ye. It feels super arbitary. I have no idea why theyre there. They have no value.
@@Pangora2they are clearly not. You are not "trying to make wc4" without even putting heroes, XP and items.
@@franz009franzthe idea is always the same and pretty simple : trying to force players outside of the map to create action during the game. Now it's not really working but not understanding what their goal is even though they said it time and time again is kinda weird
@Frodonsake24 it's got trees and Warcraft style mines. The maps at the very least are clearly trying to be wc4.
I think you're right and I'm glad to have someone with a strong presence in the community to lend their ideas.
The most important thing to keep in mind when designing the maps is "will this encourage people to watch", "will it make people want to interact with this game". This goes for things like balance as well, where changes need to made such that the game will have a bigger audience. Generally that means changes should only be implemented if it will make games more interesting.
A bigger audience/community will lead to more investors since they can now reach enough people to make it worth thier while. In Stormgate's case, they want to be an Esport with tournments with big prize pools. Therefore they need to make changes that make the game attractive to lots of people, which will encourage companies like ESL to fund tournaments.
Yea I definitely feel this. A lot of Stormgate for me right now feels much more complicated than it needs to be and some of these simpler designs and maps make even just looking at the smaller map easier to digest design wise.
Map size isn't the problem, the path finding and sound effects are the problem, but they are solving slow, but the changes are making better
I love the simplification you've done here, because earnest simplification leads to truth. Here's my take. I think the crux of the issue here is "what is the point of the match?" I think it's easy to get bogged down in unimportant details like, "what's the level of build variety," and "how many different mechanics does this map have?" Those don't matter.
So what do I think the point of the match is? To engage with and defeat the other player. That's it. Each player should be doing that, resulting in natural resistance and conflict as they try to outwit each other. How do we make that more interesting? Give them things to fight over. You already have units farming resources. Resources can be spent on units to help you fight the other player. Unless you use those units to... farm more resources and not fight the other player, and Broken Crown actually puts you behind if you try and do that. It's a design that gets in the way of both players engaging in the entertaining part of the game, both for them and the audience.
What if the creep camps were in the center of the map? Then both players could contest over them. That way there's an incentive for both player to be near the center of the map, slightly on the opponent's side.
Provides a meaningful PvP decision each game: do I go for xyz camp/buff for my build? Do I contest their camp attempt to hopefully gain a strict advantage? Do I avoid them altogether and attempt to creep a different camp than what they chose? Can I let them get xyz camp/buff in the first place?
I like the smaller version of this map, feels better for sure
One of the best RTS i've played in recent years was made by a Russian studio (and it does become quite P2W throught the necessary timed consumables, but i mention it because the game design is solid.) called Art Of War 3. And the reason I mention it is because they understood how to lay out a map and make the units for different factions function. And due to this it has a lot of objective based gameplay like takign nodes and fighting over initial resource crates. There aren't creeps because they're not needed; you're contesting resources early on instead,and it's done in such a way that you *will* be forced into early fights. It's not like Halo Wars where you just run around and grab the crates, most of them need to be contested (and if you just grab them you'll likely lose units).
Creeps by comparion don't serve a purpose in Stormgate. It's not like WC3 where it's a vital/mandatory source of XP, Gold, and Items. They don't serve to force fights between players or provide an advantage. Everything included an RTS should be there to further the conflict, and if it's included then it has to be meaningful and mandatory. Random creeps forrandom creeps sake are the kind of thign you'd include in a single-player campaign, not a PvP experience. If creeps and resources are disgned to just kind of let each player do their own thing with no real/forced counterplay then it's bad design.
Good for you, Artosis, for providing constructive criticism
Here's a solution to the creeps issue: put the creeps on the players' teams! On my side of the map, the creeps are on my team; on your side of the map, the creeps are on your team. That means if I go around killing the creeps on my side of the map I'm not getting any benefit or resources at all and I'm losing bits of vision on the map. So in order to benefit I need to go to my opponent's side of the map and start killing his creeps. But then he can see me doing that (since his creeps give him some vision) so he can try to defend the creeps by engaging me! This means that at the beginning of the game each player has a bunch of vision of their side of the map from their creeps but at the end of the game all the creeps are cleared out so the players need to use their own units for vision. Of course, this idea can only work if the maps are designed well and the creep camps are not so closely packed that I can't sneak a bunch of units into my opponent's main and harass his economy. This idea actually matches with real life Medieval warfare, where a kingdom is going to have a bunch of peasant villages all over the place. Small groups of enemies might be able to sneak past the villages and into the castle but a large army moving through is going to be spotted long before it reaches the castle
actually such a cool idea
this is such expert advice from a lifelong fan of a RTS. Hats off for the way you gave them critique. This advice is pure gold. Unbuyable gold.
Did i hear King of the Hill? Cant wait for ZeroSpace King of the Hill to return
i love your approach, i really want this game to succeed - its great to see somebody with this much experience taking a go at it
I think this is a solid first step into figuring out why this game lacks retention and engagement. It seems overly complex to just be overly complex. It seems like they have the backend personal from the old blizzard team and that they are implementing these through and robust systems but without a clear gameplay objective and goal. Somewhat how I feel about the race design and lore so far. It feels all very centered around fitting into their preconceived tech stack they want to make for an RTS and less around a game they want to make systems for that bring something new or refreshed to the genre.
Stormgate definitely needs some feedback and I am glad to see they are listening to them.
I think this is a great idea 'tosis. Reminds me of early SC2 when most maps were pretty simple with one main feature you have to know about. It kept the focus on unit interactions.
My only thought with the creep camps and them being more central on the map is you now have the option to have them semi randomized if you wanted. If one of the camps is better for your faction or build you can create a competition or force conflict over that camp.
As critical as it is, I'm just not convinced that the stormgate devs have it in them to pull this off. It seems like it's just a bunch of programmers and project managers giving it their best shot, but in terms of design, they are completely lacking. Everything they've shown so far shows that.
Props to them for taking community feedback but at the end of the day you really need to have devs that know what they want to make and can design and execute systems that push it towards that conceptual goal. If every design decision is a community referendum, then it's hopeless.
Stormgate is simply unfocused and directionless. " We're doing 1v1, oh wait no... monetizing coop is the focus! WAIT....we are switching gears to 3v3!." It's just not a good look on top of all the other issues with the gameplay, maps, and the presentation.
Creeps are terrible idea. They are bad in WarCraft III too. You need to memorize the latest tricks for effective creeping, which is essentially single player
If your map is an even smaller version of "Broken Crown" does that mean it's called "Crown Jewel"
Couldn't agree more. If you're trying to understand a game, the last thing you want to do is introduce a ton of variables that ruin the clarity. If it was like LoL where the map design was a static, fundamental part of the game it'd be one thing - but this is a game that is blindly following an RTS trend of "oh have a lot of maps"
In general Stormgate lacks a spine. It's trying to be an amalgam of features in SC / WC without thinking about their place in the game. If creeps never existed in Stormgate and someone suggested adding them as they exist rn, I don't think Frostgiant would have a single argument for it. The way the Devs try to justify creep's place in the game by talking about encouraging activity on the map sounds more like team objectives in Heroes of the Storm, which would honestly probably be a way better way of handling it.
As of right now it's essentially just 3rd resource that you mine with units. Luminite, therium, creeps - which makes the RTS pillar of being 'greedy' way, way too complex for a game that wants you to find it's identity for it.
i really appreciate you trying and putting in the effort. really impressive, i love your passion and respect your care
Starting off super super simple is the way to go.
The first map needs the be the most basic one you can ever go for.
So the game can be played without any gimmicks, for other maps, the gimmicks add some spice and change the basic dynamics.
The map size aren't the problem, but path finding and sound are the biggest thing they need to solved
Stormgate threw RTS development into ChatGPT and this is what we got.
Thank you, you are working hard to save a game we all wanted
empires of steel is a simple version of a CIV game that plays out better overall. they don't have bunkers but it has an idle unit graphic where the units start building up a sandbag defensive position when stationed in one position. perhaps for starcraft/sg if units are idle for 80 seconds they could start digging in or setting up defensive positions that could grant unit in this area a +1 armor bonus but at the cost of reduced movement speed for 5 or 10 seconds after they leave the area and when empty the area goes back to normal
need to be able to walk before you can run
You see a plethora of games imitating older games ending up over-designed. A lot of platform fighters imitate smash melee, and a lot of MOBAs have bit these pitfalls, hoping to see some games willing to dedicate to an experience that may be slightly unbalanced in ways that bring out something interesting (like Starcraft and smash melee and other old classics that did the same thing). People forget these games were accidents in ways.
It feels like they wanted to have SC style micro/macro with WC3 style complex maps with a lot going on and it's gonna be interesting to see if they manage to make it work well together
You should make a follow up after to see what result of these two map
What about making creeps into control points which you should conquer and constantly control to gain some bonuses? Those points could be protected with creeps at the beginning so that you have to gather some army and cannot take points from the very start. This way there will be some strategic points which both players might be eager to fight for. Much like bases but in a slightly different way.
these are honestly good criticism of the game. I like the game, but the maps feel hard to wrap my head around (unlike SC2 where I immediately go "oh here's the pervert pillar" "here's a safe expand. this one is risky"). and the creeps feel weird coming from WC3 where creeps can be interacted with in deep, interesting ways ("do I creep jack? Do I go hard on creeps and get 2 leveled heros? Do I fast clear my expo and expand?"). In Stormgate they feel really flat by comparison "I take this creep camp and get a little gold and speed" or something. They feel more like a regular part of macroing, rather than a high varience tool to decide what degree to use, and a way to interact with opponents.
I think it’s possible you could just remove creeps but have some interesting ideas with the node on the map. Dawn of War II had some interesting aspects with that. Not sure how well it directly translates, though, as in that game your requisition and power nodes were your only way to get resources. No equivalent of workers getting minerals or gas.
Personally I think nodes are more interesting that mining. That said, if they made nodes more interesting maybe some hybrid approach could work.
Lol, he still thinks normal people cares about esport. We want a cool and awesome campaign and interesting lore. Nobody cares about map design.
It took 7 or 8 years before people started making brood war maps that nowadays we’d consider good.
I agree the map being so complicated makes it impossible for me to make my own ideas for how a match is going. I love pretending I know how to play the game and making my own calls on what they should or shouldn’t so because that gets me invested.
I wonder if the smaller map will make the flying building race OP with their mothership core rush
Flying buildings...should have limited flight time. Something they never implemented in SC2 and it's understandable why they never did it for SC1.
I think they do a grand total of 2 damage now so that strat has already been nerfed into the ground
Hero units seem like a must for creeping, but the heroes shouldn't be completely match defining by how powerful they are
Nony's vid did the best job at describing creep camps. In WC3 they feed your heroes early, right? There aren't heroes in 1v1. Ok, well they force players on to the map early. But only like 2 maps have a defensible natural and everything else is super open. And because every unit is so damn slow, it's actually not great to go out and creep right. It's this very weird design where they wanted camps but didn't design the game so everything fits together. They have 50 years of game dev experience. You're telling me with that many employees, that much money, and that much dev time, they couldn't come up with a good camp implementation???
That fact maps still have "Naturals" still hasn't struck enough people as odd. "Yeah, every round you expand here as soon as you can. Its Natural." They want people to get on the ap to battle but then lock both players in their bases with plenty of cash and wonder why no one left.
Artosis tried really hard to shill this game but it ended up flopping hard anyway so he felt like he can finally speak his mind
I think everyone wants to be happy for another contender and push it along. But after all this time its not getting better.
Creeps probably work better if they are huge monsters that require some actual investment to get rewarded. Kinda like League of Legends does the dragon, so your opponent even has a real incentive to catch you and steal it from you.
Basic creeps for the early game is not interesting and adds nothing.
Time to bring back Steppes of War, the greatest SC2 map ever made
NOT even CLOOOOse !! It's Cloud Kingdom LE
@@33shin33 You don't know what you're talking about. It's King Sejong Station.
Fantastic that the dev team is willing to listen to our ambassador , god speed!
i was in on the closed "Beta". piece of shit was still in alpha stage and had missing units, animations, textures, etc. played for about 20 mins before never touching it again.
this game was deadass made by people that never really enjoyed an RTS btw, it's just a startup scam and whoever gave these people money will never get their moneys worth. also worth noting the factions are so incredibly uninspired, just a mishmash of factions from other games
Love this take! I’ve played a few hundred hours and I agree that the fundamental structure of the game is still missing. In early beta I felt there was more clarity around basic economy, map control, etc. There’s simply too much “innovation” happening in the game design imo.
As someone who LOVES the idea of celestials, I think they’re the worst culprit of this. Something as simple as making workers and organizing bases feels completely unintuitive and unrewarding. There needs to be more fundamental iteration for 1v1 to be successful. Maybe 3v3 will succeed in this area with simplified unit sets 🙏
Aesthetics might not matter to Arty but the very first promotional image I saw of this game made me realise I won't like it and nothing I have seen from it has changed my mind since.
The art style is too late to change or fix, but I'm not going to be staring at this on the daily. SC2 came out 14 years ago, sc1 came out 26 years ago, AoE2 came out around the same time and they are all beautiful to this day.
This game is not.
love the vids! keep up the good work RT!
I am really looking forward for you saving this game, i think it has a lot of potential
Budget pixar mode engaged
What a lucky company to have such a good RTS mind helping them. Interesting to see the game develop. Good luck lads.
Great, thx for your map ideas, Ruination is really cool map too.
I am looking forward to videos of games on those maps
Feels like Artosis (and other youtubers) just doing the FG's job for them. Like iterating on the actual game and figuring out what's wrong with it. Things that should be done somewhere BEFORE early access.
I completely disagree, the maps are the least of the problems in my opinion. Smaller simpler maps just turn the game into a cheese fest, and i understand for people from starcraft 1 thats what theyre familiar with and would like to see.
I personally dont enjoy seeing hardcore pros cheese eachother out because its made viable in the highest leagues. (i HATE gambling) It removes the RTS aspect from the game and turns it more into a moba where you only have a set number of options, cuz u only have low tech and few units.
In my opinion the reall problem is its unit design.
The unit design was meant to look fun, but the gameplay isnt fun.
Blinking a stalker is fun, interactive micro. its fun gameplay, where you can actually dictate wether your winning or losing with micro skills. You feel accomplished if YOU microd like a god.
If blink stalkers would auto blink, the game would be allot less fun, because it doesnt feel like you are doing anything impactfull besides just amoving them. There is no sense of accomplishment.
In regards to stormgate we see a big dude split into two, doesnt really do anything. You press a button and it might look fun to see, but in reality, If the big dude is strong in a certain scenario, nobody will split, if its too weak in certain scenarios itll always happen.
It doesnt feel interactive. Most units dont in stormgate. They are kind of bland uninspired linear unit interactions.
For me i stopped playing when everyone was rushing dogs, Where the only micro is mobility/retarget micro.
warcraft 2 was really enjoyable for me because of the lategame potential. when i was a kid seeing a mage destroy an entire army, that was literally all i wanted to do. Or a cool ass dragon army, awesome. What do we get in this game? Pretty bland mediocre lategame units that dont feel impactfull or strong at all. There is no reall incentive to macro up beyond your 'strong' timing.
The time to kill, in stormgate is just, wait an eternity for something to die. Micro definatly is required, but doesnt feel impactfull at all. There are no proper big spells and hardcounter units, wich only turns the game into more of a snooze fest.
If i wanted a slower time to kill in starcraft 2 i would just play custom games with slower speeds. Because thats in its essence what stormgate is doing with HP sponge units. (and yes playing sc2 in custom games on slowest settings is also boring af.)
Warcraft 3 had its moments with heros, because of the impact they bring to the game. how strong a level 10 hero can basically turn the tide as a lategame force and item management wich allowed you to play a specific style, and tweak your own playstyles. Choices in heros also strengthened diversity in playstyles. And that made it a great game, strategically, but also interactively. (no wonder dota was a success)
Stormgate doesnt have this at all. Instead they have an entire race based on seemingly unhinged gambling a bunch(celestials), also not fun in my books at all. Not to play or play against.
If the gameplay was actually fun and felt interactive and reactive, because unit interactions where good, i couldnt give 2 hoots about map design or the artstyle.
This is also the reason why currently battle aces really feels allot more fun then stormgate in my opinion. Fast paced high octane battles where every slip up or pro micro can make you win or lose games.
there is no 'on the edge of your seat' gameplay happening in stormgate. There is no ultra higher skillcap ceiling (like forcefield donuts into a big distuptor hit timing) wich noone is even able to do at the highest level.
Just my opinion and my 2 cents.
I think small map with center creeps and hero’s are a decent idea for this game style. I think they need more abilities that do stuff. I think part of this issue is you can’t style on people. They don’t want you to be able to win fast or out class people like you can in sc2
I think this is great. I’m really disappointed by how things have gone so far and this makes me feel like there may still be some hope for the game.
thank you for helping stormgate
Starcraft captured me because of the universe and the idea of different factions interacting with each other. Stormgate doesnt seem to have that magic.
Yes! Maps are complex!
I couldn't understand what was wrong when I was playing Stormgate. They are not just complext, but also hard to read. You can't even tell what is a highground or a wall. SC2 maps are so contrast compared to this, they play themselves.
Also, most people are vetoing non-default maps in SC2 ladder, bc it's annoying to play.
Stormgate wanted to simplify sc, but added creep camps... They will be 100% ignored at low and mid -level play, bc it's one more annoying thing to deal with. At high level, yes, but... it's not interesting to play and watch.
to be honest i worry that the problem with stormgate is more that it doesn’t have much of a soul
Not only did he invent crazy zerg, he also SAVED stormgate
Not yet