i have tons of respect for day9 being truly honest on his thoughts of the game, despite having friends/family who worked on it. I think a lot of us can sense that something isn't quite right with Stormgate, and I also think a lot of us are hoping it gets ironed out, because we need more competition in the RTS scene. (i gotta say though.....I really enjoyed battle aces.....)
@@JerryS-zb2lf To be fair, in an rts, feeling is soooo important. If things don't feel quite right it makes it feel clunky or kinda weird. Also I think he doesn't like the play pattern in general with how control points work and mercing around the map. Day9 loves the macro aspect of an rts and Stormgate kinda took out a lot of the required macro elements that other rts's have like AOE4 and SC2. Not saying that what Stormgate did is bad because of it but its just not his cup of tea is all
Agreed. So much respect for Day9 here. Despite him having every incentive and bias in the world to help this game succeed, he goes in in good faith and responds honestly. That's a level of personal integrity we should all aspire to. All of the issues Day9 pointed out were obvious in the alpha, and while it wasn't as well-articulated as Sean just gave, FrostGiant was given VERY strong feedback about it from a community who genuinely wanted to love their game. They took the easy way out of scoffing at us, insistign that they know best, and that the only problem was that we weren't giving it time to cook. The main theme of the feedback was that the fundamental design of the gameplay is what needed to be rethought, and they charged forward down the path they had already set. They sadly deserve the flop that this game is going to be unless they take this second round of feedback MUCH better than the first, delay the game by a year, and swallow their pride about its core design.
@@duskytcg It's missing the spark right now that SC and WC have. Factions don't quite connect, which can be attributed to a lot of factors, including visual presentation, audio, basic conceptual design, etc. Zerg, Protoss, and Terran all communicate an immediately identifiable core concept. Right now, I'd say only Infernals sort of do in the same way, and even they're much less coherent (they need to make the whole faction look and feel as spooky and unsettling as the Weaver). The perfect example is if you look at the base Tier 1 unit for each faction, the Zealot, Zergling, and Marine. Zealots immediately tell you "Protoss are proud, quasi-magic warriors", Zergling tells you "Zerg are swarming, aggressive alien monsters", and the Marine tells you "Terran are militaristic heavy metal rednecks". For SG, Lancer, Brute, and Argent just don't communicate the core idea of the faction the same way. The design is less clear and compelling.
Also in regards to Spikes, the developers tried to claim that no one wants to lose an army quickly, its no fun. But they forget the other side. You know what's fun? Rolling a tidal wave of Banelings into a stack of marines. The spikes they worry scare people away are also the reason why people stuck around. Every newbie SC1 player at some point hid behind bunkers and put a mountain of Siege Tanks behind them - or the supply depot wall in! Nuking the enemy's army is the Ultimate Spike. And it always feels good to do it. They're so worried about scaring players away they aren't giving them a reason to show up in the first place.
on paper you are correct but sc1 spikes and sc2 spikes are not the same in the slightest. In sc2 sure one move like that can end the game and it makes it so much stressful, but in sc1 this doesn't 'just happen', it's much more stable, and the spike D9 is talking about feels like an outplay or something skillful unlike sc2 where if you run a stack of banelings into marines and feel that you caught someone on a mistake which shouldn't have happened instead of you were just better. It all feels more random and since every occasion like that (unlike sc1) will literally end some games, it becomes a chase for that one big moment and a fear that this moment will happen to you. When you get doom dropped in sc2 because you didn't pay attention to 1 dot on thrusters it doesn't feel like you've been outplayed, it's just frustration. I'd argue BOTH losing an army and decimating an army is no fun in the grand scheme of things after you did it like 5 times. SC1 was about strongarming the enemy one step at a time, it was a gradually increasing tension and difficulty, while SC2 is more like a gotcha machine where one mistake ends the game. There's nothing fun in that.
I feel the same thing, what's the point of using units if everything's balanced to the point where noone's complaining? What if BCs or Carriers didn't decimate all stuff in the lategame? It'd feel pretty bad to have a lategame army that pretty much cannot do anything. What if Siege Tanks didn't deal that much damage? Why would on Earth anybody use Siege Tanks then? What if, from Kane's Wrath, Stealth Tanks didn't oneshot this Power Plant? Or that group of Juggernauts? Would they be satisfying to use? Or if Flame Tanks/Black Hand didn't fry infantry instantly? Why would they carry flamethrowers then, and would people even enjoy playing Nod as a faction then? What if Zone Troppers only had mobility instead, and not those super-cool railguns that vaporize every armored target? What if, from Red Alert 2, Apocalypse Tanks were just high health units with low damage? Would anybody even bother building them if they were "balanced" enough to do their job in multiplayer? What if Kirovs were faster but were just slow flying units? Would a culture about "Kirov Reporting" meme even evolve back then? What about Command and Conquer's superweapons, both Nukes/Weather Machines or Chronospheres/ICs? Maybe those are broken too, why even bother giving the player a powerful tool at hand, people would complain about its balance! ...from almost every succesful RTS that I've played a lot of them have absurdly powerful units - but that's the point, why would you play a game of becoming a commander of an army if your army doesn't feel worth enough to even utilize? Focus on E-sports and catering to a competitive audience which is less than 1/5 of any community was a shitty idea, why even bother "balancing" a game if it's not even fun to play and nobody wants to play it in the first place?
That summary at the end is so spot on. This is a game about units fighting each other, but the game makes those units so BORING. Couse individually they don't feel impactful at all. And because they don't feel impactful they don't feel important and they don't feel fun to use or watch. I'd say if they want to stick to longer time to kill, they should get back and play some Warcraft 3. Right now everything feels like a flavor of the basic orc Grunt. And if W3 had only this unit in different flavors it would also be boring.
Aside from the mechanical diversity that W3 has over Stormgate, W3 had much smaller armies. You can't have long TTK and huge armies and still have exciting moments.
orc grunts are more interesting then stormgate units because your only going to have 5 grunts, not 50 when you only have 5 grunts each one feels important and special, even if functionally they are very "boring" and so you work hard to keep them, and to catch the enemies and kill them one grunt being out of position and being caught is a big deal, you cherish your grunts when you have 50 of them, whats 1 dieing? just grab them all and attack move and go do something else, if they die they die who cares you have more
His nostalgia for sc2 reminded me how there were all those units with flare but then the most boring units, roach, marauder and blink stalker were the core unit of almost ever match up.
Have you played the game? Honestly, having actually played it, unlike seemingly 90% of the people commenting on how bad it is, the units all are quite unique in their functionality. If anything, they're too technical and specific for my simple brain to use with their activateables lol. For me, the issue is that the units don't pack enough oomph when they attack and are visually hard to differentiate at a glance in a fight
Imagine that you have a large, chunky army with low DPS versus a very similar army from your opponent. The battle takes place, and your high-hp, low damage units start whittling away at the enemy. As Day9 explains, there is actually a huge amount of decisions that could be taking place, moving individual units back, focus firing, isolating groups of units that are slightly out of position etc. But the core takeaway is that this kind of skill expression (tons of small unit positioning/focus firing/etc.) is not very interesting to play or to watch. This is also not to posit that giving a "spikey" power to each side would in any way diminish the skill of winning battles with good positioning, focus firing or anything else. Rather, those "spikey" moments (such as an AoE spellcaster with high cooldown, or a unit with a re-positioning ability), in these moments you also have the capacity for skill expression but the risk/reward is much, much greater. In the aforementioned examples, a skilled player would be more accurate with their AoE damage, but there is always the opportunity for a miss-timing or an unexpected dodge. It's very obvious for those who play Warcraft 3. These Stormgate battles look like two armies of Grunts just whacking away at each other. There's just no high-risk + high-reward plays that are even possible. Combined with the uninspired unit designs, the overall bland aesthetic, and you get something that is just joyless.
Also low dps means range means less. Imagine a Siege Tank that did half the damage. A tank or two with a few meatshields can splash some huge damage over an army coming in carelessly. This is the core behind zone controlling enemies. You can make them pay a huge price for carelessly moving about. Now, if you have a unit on the flank they just can't do anything meaningful on their own. So you have to bring over your deathball. A widow mine or a lurker can control a zone, because they have kill potential that slows the enemy down without committing everything.
Yeah imagine War3 without the hero units. That's what Stormgate is. Except Stormgate also manages to have larger armies that do even lower dps than the units in War3. It's a bizarre mix of War3 and SC2 that just doesn't work. There's creeping...but there's no hero to level up. Units have several abilities and yet the combat manages to be bland. It's because of how slow paced this game is. Very few units and abilities can actually put out big damage.
Yea totally same. It reminds me of how I felt about torchlight when that came out 12-15 ish years ago. I dont get why they would abandon the gothic blizzard style that was always successful. IMO, return to the original formula for future games, bring back Uelmen the composer and you cannot mess it up.
@@zzMrP I wish people would stop matter of factly stating that when a pc game looks bad it looks like a mobile game, that is just not simply how graphics works, mobile graphics doesn't equal bad, if a pc game has bad graphics it's either an unappealing style or unpolished assets, and Stormgate seems to suffer from both
Speaking on "time to kill," a slower time is fine as long as it isn't boring. It's boring in Stormgate. I want my units to feel powerful, not to feel like they're swinging around wet noodles and shooting bubbles. They need to spice things up (whether that's visually or design wise). Make me feel awesome while controlling these armies.
I mean, it worked on wc3 because there were powerful heroes. You don't want your units to die quickly and then have a 1v1 duel. Besides heroes had enough powerful abilities to quickly turn the tide of battle, and got stronger the higher level they got, which was satisfying. None of this is present in SG so the higher ttk just makes it like sc but more boring.
Wc3 has low time to kill, but there are spells, unit abilities, minion blocking and surrounds. This doesn't really have any of that and it's a slower time to kill...
@@MrHeorhe Yea, not to mention armor and damage types played a bigger role in WC3. If you brought the right damage type for the job, you never felt like you were hitting the enemy with a wet noodle. Magic damage absolutely bodied heavy armor, for example.
I definitely like the idea of longer, more drawn out battles. Some of my most memorable battles in starcraft were ones that were drawn out micro battles. However, it’s hard to force these situations to happen with balance. And there is something immensely satisfying about blowing the hell out of your opponents army in seconds with things like storms, banelings, or widowmines.
The game actually has a sharpness setting which reduces the blurriness and makes everything crisper. But for some reason no one is savvy enough to notice that the slider exists.
Feels eerily like "wc3 but without heroes". Heroes are what causes the "wow" moments/excitement spikes to happen in wc3. Creep system without heroes also feels more like a hassle than a source of fun Very sadly, the thing this game reminds me of the most is dawn of war 3 when no heroes are on the field
They need heroes in 1v1. I’m a fan of wc3 and I was excited for heroes and creeping. It’s beyond me why we don’t have heroes here. Like you said that’s where the spikes come from when the time to kill is this slow. And also, give this game some sound, even a grunt smacking a wall with his axe in wc3 had some oomph.
something i noticed was really missing in all the games was ways to "force" engagements the only option you had with any race was to just run in, and the only option any races had in response was to stand and fight, or run away there was no real ways to make sudden plays, to "force" something in SC2 if i charge in with zerglings the fight is starting, the opponent has no choice as i am always faster, but likewise the protos player can force an engagement using forcefields or tempests which will slowly wittle me down if i dont go for a fight through all of these games there was no real moment where you activly CHOSE "we are fighting now" and made it happen, every single fight was a mutual decision from both players to just send their units at each other
I kinda don't even want to say, but they're in it for the long haul. The map editor for free is a massive gift to the gaming community. Stormgate will be the mariomaker of rts. Kids love free software and making games, stormgate can provide that space for a long time. Oh the story mode is so derivative, are these just rewashed characters? As if it's a bad thing to have an engine with every wc3 sc2 OW hero alread somewhat prebuilt? Even if all the other modes and characters and story are "Total Bunz!", map maker is crazy OP
@@moonasha Have the same feeling. WC3 with a bit more poly, but no soul and interesting spikes, interesting abilities. WC3 was released 22 years ago, and this game is almost on par with it when it comes to graphic design...
She works at like marketing though? And she might be leaving already by the pace things are going, so who knows, best of luck to the people there, I know making games is a herculean effort but this game is just bad I dunno
it looks like starcraft made for mobile with that childish valorant/fortnite aesthetic. I never understood the appeal but even today it's just an SC2 clone with a few added units basically, since every core mechanic and gameplay is exactly the same. So what's the point?
Infernals aren't as cool as Orcs or Zerg... but they still tower over the dumpster fires that are Vanguard and Celestials. They at least seem to have some amount of personality and soul in them.
Yeah, I think that they're the only faction right now which manages to communicate their core concept at least semi-effectively. The Weaver is legitimately spooky and cool & when you look at an Infernal base/army, you generally understand the idea of "evil aggressive demons". When you look at a Vanguard or Infernal base/army, you get "sci-fi human guys" and "shiny alien guys". It's way less coherent than Terran and Protoss.
@EvilMagnitude I'd argue it's even worse than that. All of the factions blend together in general but the Vanguard and Celestials more so. I genuinely can barely tell what the enemy faction is until I see a specific unit or I see the buildings.
But somehow far more expensive. For 40USD you can get the entire SC2 campaign. And while SC2 is nearly 15 years old this game doesn't look like 15 years of progress over SC2. 10USD for 3 missions is insane to me when they also have microtransactions.
When you come to realize that games such as Starcraft: Broodwar and C&C Kane's Wrath along many other names were simply gorgeous and amazing at their time and still are up to this day...
In regards to Spikey, Stormgate's idea of a Nuke would take 5 minutes to drop, and do 10% hp damage to those in the center and push away everyone else.
Another "from the developers of X big company" game that proves once again that the people who leave to create their own games were either not the people who made the magic happen or they dont know how to capture lightning in a bottle twice
Creeping camps without a hero will never not be weird AF to me. Anyway, it's good to see Day9 being honest about his feelings with the game considering his personal relationship to the company. I will say one thing also, for all of the problems this game has, one of the biggest is that they completely missed the "Low skill floor" goal. There is just way too much going on in a 1v1, even at the most basic level. Creeps, Capture points, an excessive amount of active abilities(Which most people aren't using anyway), unintuitive tech trees and gameplay mechanics, completely unnecessary top bar spells, the pointless instant tier upgrade of the main building, etc. You could actually just flat out remove half of the game right now and it would straight up be an improvement to what the game currently is. Graphics are something most people can get over if gameplay is good...but the gameplay here is fundamentally flawed in so many ways.
Yeah, good point about the low skill level point. I had the same feeling. Not only are isometric 1v1 RTS games nearly defined by their micro intensity, but the way this one was made to replicate Sc2 makes that problem much worse. Slowing down battles alone doesn't resolve the issue, since people can always be faster micromanagers.
@@againsttheleftandright4065 FGS would probably make the argument of "You can always play x other game mode and use BuddyBot," or say to ignore various game mechanics entirely to validate their claims of the low skill floor...but at a fundamental level, this games skill floor for the regular PvP experience is actually higher than any other RTS I've ever seen. There's just too many mechanics involved at a core level. It's completely overwhelming for the average RTS player, much less a new player with little experience in RTS. TBH, the way they initially marketed it, I thought control points and creeps were only going to exist in the 3v3 game mode. I think the game would be a lot better off with just that change: move the creeps and control stuff into 3v3 only where heroes are or into an "Archon mode" where multiple people are controlling things. Leave the 1v1 closer to a vanilla StarCraft experience without all the extra crap.
Graphics and unit design is more of a problem than you think. The reason I became a RTS fan in the first place was being able to command an army that looks cool and is fun to fight with. Why would anyone be interested in these units? No one will care about gameplay and it's mechanics if the game never draws you in the first place.
@@Skumtomten1 Yeah, when I was 14 or so I fell in love with the videos I saw of the Starcraft 2 trailers on the internet. I think it was the first game my parents bought me for their home computer. The siege tanks and hordes of zerglings were the coolest thing I'd ever seen in a game, considering that all I knew up until then was Mario Kart and Smash Bros.
@@Zibit21I think he means personality. Everything about SG just seems so generic, like there’s nothing we haven’t seen before elsewhere. What does exist in the game doesn’t have much, if any, unique flair. It literally just feels like if someone tried to mod SC2 using WC3 engine and base models. And despite those two franchises both being from Blizzard, their themes don’t really mesh, and so a lot of what exists in SG feels out of place. And then lastly, unit movement still has a sort of “ice skating” feel, which takes away from the game feeling grounded and visceral.
this new capture point stuff drives me insane, it's so annoying also what are we doing here? what even is this game? sc2, wc3, dawn of war, c&c (probably even more) all smushed together into one which makes it an absolute mess. it's like putting all good nba players on the same team and yet it's not a team at all, gameplay wise
This has literally nothing in common with Warcraft 3 except for "creeps" which function in no way like WC3 creeps as there are no heroes and items! Honestly feels like the devs just tossed em in there in order to try to appeal to the WC3 audience. No WC3 player is going to want to play this game, though. It is far too different.
@@Krakaet well, yes there are no heroes but you have sort of "hero" abilities at the top, also the art style and the choppable trees, etc. and the arcship is also like the goo from grey goo in a way. this game is just an amalgamation of at least 6 different rts with no clear vision and focus whatsoever.
The map design isn't necessarily bad, but it's not great. Creeping should not be a mechanic in a game that does not have unit xp such as heroes or veteran unit buffs. You're correct that there's way too much going on design wise they needed to choose a road.
@@JerryS-zb2lf Im no diehard rts fan, i've been getting into wc3 lately if that counts, i didnt know shitting on stormgate was a whole thing and i dont know what you think i would gain from it, it looks kind of bland but not unsalvagable, but i also didnt play it. Day9's review seems fair but the comments seem to try to defend the game from even being criticized at all which makes the fans of the game seem dishonest.
I also really dislike the concept of capture points being captured and recaptured ad nauseam... And I agree with Sean's analysis about time to kill. I can still remember before Wings of Liberty came out and blizzard released unit previews for sc2 and thinking how amazing the units looked, even basic units like stalkers, reapers and roaches had cool stuff like blink, cliff-jumping and burrow movement + health regen... Starcraft 2 was just so inspired and awesome, I haven't felt the same sense of excitement watching any other RTS preview since. Hell I'm sure most us still remember dustin browder's famous "TERRIBLE TERRIBLE DAMAGE" line. Shit was just epic. Another thing that strikes me as very weird and misguided is the addition of creeping while there are no "hero" units. In warcraft 3 creeping was rewarding as it would give heroes items and experience (and a small amount of gold) but without heroes I feel like creeps are more of a hindrance than anything else. That is also one of the main differences between sc2 and wc3: where starcraft is purely a strategy game where 100% of the actions you take are directly against your opponent, warcraft is more of a hybrid RTS/RPG where building your hero is just as, if not more important as harassing or directly attacking your opponent. Seems to me like the designers just wanted to mix elements from wc3 and sc2 without actually understanding what made each game so different yet equally awesome. I guess time will tell if the developpers manage to turn this game into a hit but unfortunately that does not seem likely, I feel like there is a problem with the core design of the game and I have to say I haven't seen a single quality that made me want to try it... Hate to be this negative especially knowing that Sean apparently has friends/family working on this game but I really feel like this is going to be mid at best. It's sad that old blizzard died, I truely believe that if they hadn't screwed wc3 reforged so bad it could have been at least as succesful as sc2 if not more and could have bought new life to the genre and popularised it to the newer generation of gamers... I guess I'll stick to sc2 for the foreseable future.
Seeing this tragedy of a video game be created and fail in front of our eyes has made me go back and play through all of the original Command and Conquer games. Its insane that the basic rifleman unit feels better than almost any unit in Stormgate. The personality, sound effects, and art design are just chefs kiss despite being like 20 whole pixels worth of army guy.
Yeah looks terrible today and felt boring back then. But i'm not sure why the command and conquer crowd would want to play a game by sc2 devs anyways. That game had an entirely different idea of what RTS should be. One that I just could not care about despite trying several times. So gold standard for me would not be C&C but WC2 I agree with all your points, the units had character, sound effects and art design were just chefs kiss despite being like 20 whole pixels worth of fantasy guy.
@@vexienroe C&C is simple and small but fun. Also I could add, back then there was more arsenal and asset distinction for the factions in C&C and basically none for WarCraft 2 other than spells.
@@AttilaKattila i mean yeah an ogre and a grunt isn't as different as a tank and a plane. But thats not really a fair comparison either. Just because guns have more variety than an arrow to a crossbow doesn't mean the units didn't have character distinction or a different use.
As the kids say: negative aura. No rizz. When you're winning this game you're going "huh?" instead of feeling good about it. How the heck do you fix that from this point without remaking everything?
@@yGKeKe I mean the feedback from the alpha was art sucks, sound sucks, animations suck, not gameplay is broken at a base level, so not sure what you are talking about.
Just a random thought, but the unit audio feels like it needs to be compressed and de-essed. The "capture point lost" lines seem to spike in volume and it bugs me
Also every unit only has 1 or 2 dialogue lines, which gets very annoying. All the units sound very similar too, which doesn't help because the artstyle feels 'samey' for every unit. There's a lot of fires all over the place.
@@Aeolus_000 weird that you bring up that particular notification. It completely ruined the immersion for me as soon as I heard that. Orcs saying capture the point? I feel like their vocabulary should be much more visceral
As a Warcraft 3 player since the game's release I was really excited about having creeps. But then learned that there are no heroes. . . Then learned that the creeps respawn...wtf? Now they are part of this really obnoxious capture point system which seems tedious rather than interesting.
@@neonmarblerust WC3 creeping is communicated by my streamer of choice as integral to build order and even alters it depending on specific creep spawns. For example, if you picked a hero that doesn't clear a specific camp well, you may fall behind your opponent(s). Never played myself but this is my understanding of Grubby's WC3 explanations. It seems like creeping in this game is lower stakes than in wc3 unless you're interrupting/maxing vanguard creeping. That said, Day9 seems to benefit from smaller armies, no matter the faction, because he farms creeps more than the SC style players he matches with. Day9 is WAY better at micro than the average player so that must be accounted for. I haven't got a fix on these sort of things yet, these are only first impressions of stormgate.
@@fakename9500 What it seems to do is spam capture point captured/lost messages because you have to actively be at all points to fight off challengers or a single unit will steal a point from you. I honestly think the game would be better if the capture points simply didn't exist.
StarCraft raised the bar insanely high. You dont need to be as good as StarCraft to be a good game. But SG is just not a good game, and lets not even pretend it's even remotely comparable to SC, that would be an insult to SC.
I feel like the glaring spikey moment is the Magmadon stomp. It’s bigger impactful ability, however it’s feels like it’s missing an audio component to sell the effect for both players to say, something is happening and you need to pay attention.
Primal Beast in Dota does a similar visual/effect and you can FUCKING tell because it's boom-booming. And you know when he's not, via visual and audio, which makes a big difference. I would've preferred better audio cues and ui/ux changes to a third faction and t3 additions. Now they need to work from back to front....maybe they already addressed all this in their latest updates and it's queued up. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt but I'm going to tune out of SG coverage for a bit while they figure their game out. Re: Communication and Implementation Strategies They seem to be taking a cue from corporate bureacratic Blizzard of the last 15 years rather than boundary-pushing creativity of its golden years. This is the hardest sticking point for me and my harshest criticism. They are a small company and cannot rely on the unsustainable "too big to fail" approach that Activision->Blizzard takes.
in c&c generals, you need to spend some time to capture a capture point from the enemy. A marine puts up a flag and has to hold the flag for 15-20 seconds to capture it, meantime enemy gets a notification that says "your building is being captured". You can kill the marine to stop the progress
Day9 is a stickler for bold creativity. There's nothing innovative here. I installed BAR today and am stunned by the ease of access it provides any user. A bad rts player like me can look like a SC 1/2 pro because the controls and UI are stunningly deep and intuitive. Moment after moment of "Wow" reactions out of me in one sandbox session and I haven't even gotten close to the meat and potatoes.
I'm not normally one for obsessing over graphics but they somehow made it look terrible. The art style is just uncanny in some sort of way. Also I immediately closed the game when in the first 5 minutes of playing I tried to stutter step with the first hero unit (the asshole one) in the first level of the campaign and the attack animation AND sound were playing but no damage was registering, I have no idea how stuff like that makes it out of alpha/beta. I learned to wait slightly longer to let the damage actually go off but it felt so terrible to not be able to trust the audio and visual cues while kiting that I just turned it off.
Most people don't care about graphics as much as they care about aesthetics. The problem is that this game is not particularly graphically impressive, and it's aesthetically terrible.
I think they look way too good for some reason, like unaturally good, you know what I mean? Unit design is also very bland and generic, they have no personality, no female units? It's like dudes, dogs, demons, sexless angels, it's a game so neutered... Plus it barely runs on my potato PC so no idea who they are pandering to, the "GAMORS" that want photorealistic games that feel like movies with no gameplay? With THAT artstyle? lmao
I think they just forgot that stuff being cool is really important. The visual and sound design is just massively lacking. The 'marine' gun quite literally goes 'pew pew pew'. What are the moments we remember from SC2. Black hole storms, baneling traps, nukes, raven bombs. Huge swings in the game flow, with massive visual elements. Longer time to kill...fine, but there's also a reason SC2's default speed is faster. It doesn't really matter how good this game is 'tactically', we aren't here to play chess.
Being able to kill things fast is the kind of story you tell your friend. "I was outnumbered but then I dropped a nuke on his army!" It sucks for the player that got nuked but he did get the warning message. Nothing you do in Stormgate is something you'll run to your friends to share.
Arena FPS are in a struggling state but Stormgate's path reminds me of the handfuls of arena games that toed the line staying very close to Quake 3 / Quake Live. Made you want to go and play Quake instead of the new game that doesn't quite hold up to the old legend.
Currently addicted to AOE 2 / 4 and it’s been scratching the RTS itch, me and my friends love 2v2/3v3 in that game series, super cool, very refreshing.
I've finally placed it. I was wondering why the "art" didn't fit together and it just dawned on me. Why in the world are all the natural barriers in this sci-fi themed game TREES!? Its like they took WC3 and slapped the tile set on there. The whole art and design still feel very alpha stage. Even some of the old SC2 development assets had better quality than this released product.
Its the post apocalypse and there are lush forests or they're in Hawaii with palm trees. The first thing I did in Red Alert was I went to make a custom map where my base had a river and you needed to cross a bridge. Where are all the bridges?
In the first game it's clear that the enemy has an easy time decapping capture points, which seems enormously frustrating... They should make it so that defensive structures prevent decapping from the enemy player, so they can't just send in single units if you built a bunker or such.
The actual art direction, the designs (not the simplistic type style) are bad and kinda generic. That’s why everything feels so bland and boring. No unit in this game makes me excited to get out or build too
I wish people wouldn't harp on the art direction so much, because as bland and awful as the visuals are, it really takes away from the monumental amount of other issues the game has that are far worse.
@@archlorddestin Funnily enough this game has nothing to do with WC3, basically the only thing in common is that there are creeps, but not having heroes gives creep a complete different meaning to the game anyway. Even graphically, it's not even remotely similar to WC3, at least to the classic version, which is not bland at all.
The factions do have a big problem right now in that they just don't grab you the same way the SC factions do. The core conceptual design simply isn't as compelling. It can be fixed, but they need to workshop it a lot.
I don't see how people are misunderstanding Day9. This is why we have bo3, bo5, bo7, etc. The longer the fights/series, the more likely is that the better player wins. In a bo1, any pleb could sometimes catch a pro unprepared and cheese them out of the game.
It's weird because every esports tourney is organized this way, yet it seems like a lot of spectators are unaware of the "Swing" phenomenon whether it is through cheese, map, mode, snowball, and build advantages.
It's the worst parts of StarCraft2 but wimpier and underbaked, with a smaller player base, with boring uninspired units, $10-per-option casual content and worse visual/sound design. Units don't actually "do" anything or expand the battlefield. It also looks like a mobile game that was churned out by tired devs ten years ago. I see more excitement and unit variance when I watch current day DUNE 2000 tournaments. Edit: On top of it all, there's a RU hack group that release free cheats to sabotage it. So everyone with a weird name is likely map hacking.
Thinking about your thoughts towards the end, particularly your comments about the importance of 'spiky' moments, and I can't help but agree. I'm reminded of my thoughts about a turn-based strategy game, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, where ultimately one of the big things that attracts me about it in comparison to titles like Endless Legend or others in the AoW franchise or the Civilisation games is that almost every unit in Planetfall has at least one active ability available besides its regular attack, there's a clear design ethos at work that your units should DO THINGS, which makes it very easy to differentiate factions and create asymmetric gameplay. It's not quite the same thing, you can't really do that in an RTS where the micro load is just impractical for any player to really use, but it achieves a similar goal in making fights feel distinct and meaty, because all your stuff has one or more big shiny buttons and it matters when and where you push them, it creates interesting decisions, and that is, after all, the basis of gameplay.
I remember a year or so after Sc2 WoL came out, someone on the Sc2 official forums made a super serious post about adding a 4th Panda race to the game (as in, Pandas, the animals from China). Everyone made fun of the post so he deleted it and it became a running joke on the forum for a few weeks. Who's laughing now?
Felt the same way when I played Battle Aces. After 2 hours I was thoroughly bored by the game and felt like I had no reason to ever return to it. Haven't tried StormGate out now that it's available on Steam because watching it has already worried me that I will wind up in the same situation. These new RTS games just don't have that IT factor so far, I get it, I see it, I hope they can do something about it.
Yes. I want these new RTS games to succeed so badly but they just don't have anything to offer. The 2000s RTS games are just better in everything, and I can play those without paying anything. Sorry but why would I buy these new ones?
I'm playing BAR for the first time today and really optimistic about Godsworn. The latter is a fresh take that retains identity with clear inspiration from Age of Myth/Emps and Warcraft. Haven't played it but I it looks more promising than Sgate.
A concern I have about camps in rts, and please contradict me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that they add anything positive to the viewing or playing experience. Compare the camps in Stormgate to capturable bonus building in Command and Conquer Generals. You can capture these buildings with infantry that can provide bonus income, reduce the cost of vehicles, or provide constant automatic healing for infantry. These buildings can be infinitely captured, or destroyed to deny the bonus. Once you capture it, it's yours until captured or destroyed by the enemy. They provide a bonus meaningful enough to be worth an investment of money to capture (being the first to capture the resource building reimburses the cost of the capture upgrade) and provide useful long term benefits. However they cost no units and, more importantly, no unit health to capture, only time and attention. The camps in Stormgate provide similar bonuses, a small amount of resources for getting last hits, constant healing for all units (in the vicinity of the camp), constant energy regeneration for all units (in the vicinity of the camp), a small speed buff, a small defense buff, and some vision. But they cost units, a significant amount of attention (at least in the early game) and are impermanent. Meaning that capturing the health camp near your base gives you a temporary healing zone, then you have to clear it again. Any units you lose taking that camp have to be replaced and any units damaged need to sit in the healing zone until they get their health back. Worse, if the opponent has good vision and map awareness, they can react to you taking the camp by getting a free fight win on your damaged units, then finishing off the camp themself and getting the benefit. As much as it rewards good play and punishes risk, that's something you want, but considering the magnitude of punishment for trying to take a risky camp early, I don't think it will end up with a positive viewing or high level playing experience. It feels like League of Legends' dragon objective. Dragon in League of Legends is *designed* to try and force teams to fight throughout the game because objectively the best way to win a game of League of Legends is to simply farm your position until you are full build, then fight the enemy team once and destroy half their base. With dragon, there's a permanent buff that you can get that lets you have an advantage in those late, full build fights. These are small side shows for the players to fight over that are supposed to drive the engagement of the game and keep players contesting each other. But in low level play, we don't necessarily want to do that because we don't have the attention for it, and at high level play, they constantly harass and attack each other anyway. For viewers, it doesn't really add to the tension because either they are taking camps safely or they aren't taking camps. It's just something else to fight over instead of real worker or base damage. At the end of the day, I would rather see two people constantly fighting and harassing each other than fighting the map. That's what campaigns are for.
yeah you don't know the bonuses of the SG camps. They apply also to your army on the whole map (healing, speed, and so on) but a smaller amount than when you are in viscinity
@@anonymeforliberty4387 That's the issue, when viewing or playing hidden number bonuses aren't that fun Imagine this, if you walk your units in a complete circle they get to do 50% more damage. To the viewer it makes no sense. That's what the camps are. Now imagine if you beat the camp and the camp joins your army. Or they lower a bridge for you tangible things. It really paints a difference. Consider knocking down rocks in sc2, even someone that never played before can tell what is going on.
I truly hope they get it to a great spot. It's not there atm. Not that we can't have more than one competitive RTS, but I do feel like Battle Aces is going to end up the more successful title. And no way would I have believed that 2 or 3 years ago. NO way.
on the "sharpness/spikiness" the issue is that there are just way too many units, your hitting 100+ supply at like 6 minutes in, when you have fights between 100 units on each side it just becomes a mess, micro isnt really a thing and any individual "spikes" dont really have any impact in WC3 time to kill is really high, but there are only 10 units on each side, 15 at most, so when a "spike" happens and a player catches a unit and nukes it, thats only 1 thing that died, but there are so few units, so it feels really impactfull here theres 100 things on each side, so when a "spike" happens well, it doesnt look like it did anything because there is still 90 things on each side its also an issue with the team coloured health bars, everything is blue, so theres really no visual feedback when a big blast happens and you lose a lot of health the only real visual feedback of a fight being lost/won is right at the end of it when everything is dead its just, not well designed
It's interesting to me that a quick solution to this would be to introduce early hero units. I felt they should avoid it because of balance nightmares however it'd be an effective "swing" mechanic.
It’s amazing how games with pixels or polygons are still being played and loved after 20-30+ yet game devs don’t lean more into that ascetic. We don’t want super smooth, especially in rts’. We need clear lines and click boxes, having a boxier ascetic helps that.
Sometimes when I blink, for a glimpse of time I can feel like it's 2002 all over again. It's a great to feel young again! But then I come back to the present and the game doesn't look great.
I remember WC3 had a very customizable map editor that also let you design scenarios and stuff. From that things like Footman Wars and DOTA were born. I once made a map with crazy shops that had a limited supply of OP mercenary units in them. Like one unit gave literally every aura in the game to your surrounding army but was very squishy so having one in your composition would wildly swing how powerful your army was. Being in limited supply, and one only being available every 2 minutes or so, you'd see big fights contesting who had access to the shops when the mercenary popped. If you missed one you'd have to find a way to flank or snipe the OP unit or go across the map and buy a limited invincibility potion to rush something in or find some other way to level the playing field or you'd get steam rolled, but like you were saying, there were big spikes or swings and it was really fun. I don't think this game would benefit from hero units, but maybe a third party arms dealer on the map trading for credits you get from camps, and instead of constantly contesting camps, whoever get them first gets it for 2 or 3 minutes until the mobs respawn again. Would give you some incentive to take out the camps, then doing so maybe you get a unit or a buff for some amount of time, and instead of it seeming like work to clear the camps, you're building up credit with this third party that can help swing the game. Then you could make plays like, should you macro hard or rush camps to try and get a boon? Anytime spent building your base is time not spent working on camp credit and so on.
Oh my gawd! This whole situation is tragic. I feel like everyone was so hopeful and hyped for this game. But it was more than just a game with the ex blizz employees, and the whole revival of rts, and making it the successor to sc and WC. And everyone saw this train wreck coming in slomo for long while. A tragic letdown.
pretty much exactly, yes. i was so hyped about it, instead i play sc2 again all the time stormgate really is kind of a letdown, maybe needs like 2 years more in development - maybe even a complete overhaul nothing is clear in this game, it's just a "what even is going on?"- kind of a game
It kinda sounds like the game or the units are "too fair" where the units abilities or characteristics don't have enough extremes. Like abilities or attacks can't whiff or affect the state of the fight in a huge way ( like a slow skill shot that covers a wide are like storm from SC1).
As someone who is enjoying stormgate and is actively making content on it, I actually agree with a lot of a criticisms that day[9] has here. The game does definitely lack polish and that spike-y-ness. I feel like you can have a long time to kill whilst still having impactful effects like big stuns or timeout but atm there's not a lot that does that. Hellborne, atlas' the big seige weapons don't actually feel that scary. Even the one ability that I think does that which is the celestial storm, doesn't feel good to hut because it slows units first then does damage and there's no like aim or targetting, it's just click circle and it appears.
Ever since i first saw gameplay from those trailers my enthusiasm for this game just evaporated. It feels and looks so extremely uninspired and bland that I'd much rather go back and play a 10-20 yr old game. Add on that the long time to kill, every attack feels weak as hell. What a complete failure.
I think Stormgate's design really highlights WHY the whole "every unit has spells" thing isn't common in RTS - because when every unit is a spellcaster, spellcasters are no longer uniquely fun and powerful to play around. You can't make any of the abilities particularly powerful because every unit is supposed to have useful abilities, so instead they just all feel like they're equally unimpactful. I think this is why Warcraft 3 managed to still feel so high impact despite the very 'slow' time to kill for units, because you had these super powerful hero units - essentially all spellcaster-type units though plenty of them were also autoattack damage machines too - with an array of high impact abilities to create those spikes of interesting gameplay on top of powerful spellcaster units, but the backbone of every army was still just 'regular' units that didn't necessarily do anything special but still all felt like they had their place. The existence of heroes also makes the creep camp control around the map feel way more interesting, but that kinda goes without saying. Camps in Stormgate feel really directionless by comparison. It genuinely feels like Stormgate was originally designed to be more like WC3 and at some point they decided to cut heroes from the game for god knows what reason.
I really want to enjoy Stormgate but after playing it with a friend I'm not sure what the game is asking me to do. I think its slow & grindy (like Total War & Warcraft) but then it wants me to lean into Tier 1 units for damn near every encounter (StarCraft, C&C). I want to like the game & see it succeed, I think the devs need to hone in on just one design philosophy. I agree with Day9 about "time to kill" being interesting. Part of what pushed me away from SC2 was how fast the game had gotten, every fight felt like mere seconds & always decisive. I'd enjoy a grindier experience similar to AoE2 with a SciFi paintjob.
I remember WoL release. I think people have a point that new games need time to grow, and that SC had had DECADES to develop, through 2 stellar rts and multiple expansions that MADe the game into what it has become. However, the game STARTED unbalanced and "spikey" as hell. The emphasis (for SC2 at least) seemed to be "make fun units and throw them at each other" and then work on balance as an afterthought. And it SOMEHOW miraculously worked... most of the time :P Perhaps this more... sedate... design philosphy can allow the spikes to be added later, while grounding the factions in a balanced way. What this has REALLY demosntrated to me though... is that I want to play more SC :D
My biggest issue with the game (among, unfortunately, many) is that the races aren't nearly asymmetrical enough. Each race has a little melee guy, a little ranged guy, a little fast guy, an artillery guy etc... And they have very little distinction. In SC each race was unique and had units unlike any units from other races and in WC the units were very similar but it was all about the asymmetry of the heroes. This... this is just nothing...
I'm not saying this is the answer and should be done but I wonder if having heroes in the 1v1 would help the spikiness aspect. I mean if they are going to keep the creep camps in 1v1 might as well.
What he's talking about at the end with having to make more decisions over a longer period of time favoring the stronger player, the same thing is true in fighting games. Counterintuitively, a game where characters do tons of damage and rounds are over very quickly favors new players a lot more than a game where each hit barely chips away at the opponent. The reason is that the new player only has to get the drop on their opponent a few times, whereas if you have to string together massive combos multiple times in order to get anywhere, the new player will never stand a chance.
Yeah but it also just adds clutter and stalemates into the game. It's like no matter how good you are, if you make a mistake, even a little one, your opponent might get a chance to comeback. Also the "better player wins" is always a fallacy, and having no pressure to win the game early just takes away from the adrenaline of having to get shit done in the moment, like it's now or never. Like I feel there's should be moments in the game where things matter more, and if every little interaction counts the same, then the whole game feels like a bore, because nothing is really exciting, everything is the same, you know?
@@raven-a Agreed. What's the point of a flank or attacking their base if the damage happens so slow they can always respond in time? A storm drop or Reaver drop would be different if the victim can bring an army back before any workers even die.
2:24:48 That is a large part of what the art in a game is though. Graphics ''power'' isn't important ofcourse. Having everything look nice in some way is very important as well ofcourse, but the way the units work and feel as units in a world is also part of the art design. That even includes all of the abilities and unit movements and ideas. What is this? It's a colossus. Giant tall high tech alien robot that can fire lasers in a line and eradicate a small army. That's a design and part of the job of whoever is in charge of the art direction.
02:09:12 is when he gives his overall review of the game
legend
Thank you!!!
Ouch. But yeah I can tell it's early days..
thank you so much
@@kael13There are gonna be no "later days", DoA.
- Adûnâi
i have tons of respect for day9 being truly honest on his thoughts of the game, despite having friends/family who worked on it. I think a lot of us can sense that something isn't quite right with Stormgate, and I also think a lot of us are hoping it gets ironed out, because we need more competition in the RTS scene.
(i gotta say though.....I really enjoyed battle aces.....)
Hard to explain but def agree with the sentiment. Something's not connecting
@@JerryS-zb2lf To be fair, in an rts, feeling is soooo important. If things don't feel quite right it makes it feel clunky or kinda weird. Also I think he doesn't like the play pattern in general with how control points work and mercing around the map. Day9 loves the macro aspect of an rts and Stormgate kinda took out a lot of the required macro elements that other rts's have like AOE4 and SC2. Not saying that what Stormgate did is bad because of it but its just not his cup of tea is all
Agreed. So much respect for Day9 here. Despite him having every incentive and bias in the world to help this game succeed, he goes in in good faith and responds honestly. That's a level of personal integrity we should all aspire to.
All of the issues Day9 pointed out were obvious in the alpha, and while it wasn't as well-articulated as Sean just gave, FrostGiant was given VERY strong feedback about it from a community who genuinely wanted to love their game. They took the easy way out of scoffing at us, insistign that they know best, and that the only problem was that we weren't giving it time to cook. The main theme of the feedback was that the fundamental design of the gameplay is what needed to be rethought, and they charged forward down the path they had already set. They sadly deserve the flop that this game is going to be unless they take this second round of feedback MUCH better than the first, delay the game by a year, and swallow their pride about its core design.
@@duskytcg It's missing the spark right now that SC and WC have. Factions don't quite connect, which can be attributed to a lot of factors, including visual presentation, audio, basic conceptual design, etc.
Zerg, Protoss, and Terran all communicate an immediately identifiable core concept. Right now, I'd say only Infernals sort of do in the same way, and even they're much less coherent (they need to make the whole faction look and feel as spooky and unsettling as the Weaver).
The perfect example is if you look at the base Tier 1 unit for each faction, the Zealot, Zergling, and Marine. Zealots immediately tell you "Protoss are proud, quasi-magic warriors", Zergling tells you "Zerg are swarming, aggressive alien monsters", and the Marine tells you "Terran are militaristic heavy metal rednecks". For SG, Lancer, Brute, and Argent just don't communicate the core idea of the faction the same way. The design is less clear and compelling.
i was onboard until i read your bunker wars comment. shameful.
this game is slowly turning day9 into artosis
How long until his chat starts talking about Mario and Luigi having sex?
it ... DIDN'T MAKE
@@Mene0 did you just...
I'm here for this arc.
@@Mene0 why would you say such a disgusting word? "mario"
Also in regards to Spikes, the developers tried to claim that no one wants to lose an army quickly, its no fun. But they forget the other side. You know what's fun? Rolling a tidal wave of Banelings into a stack of marines. The spikes they worry scare people away are also the reason why people stuck around. Every newbie SC1 player at some point hid behind bunkers and put a mountain of Siege Tanks behind them - or the supply depot wall in!
Nuking the enemy's army is the Ultimate Spike. And it always feels good to do it.
They're so worried about scaring players away they aren't giving them a reason to show up in the first place.
It's hard to feel like you have an impact when you remove spikes
on paper you are correct but sc1 spikes and sc2 spikes are not the same in the slightest. In sc2 sure one move like that can end the game and it makes it so much stressful, but in sc1 this doesn't 'just happen', it's much more stable, and the spike D9 is talking about feels like an outplay or something skillful unlike sc2 where if you run a stack of banelings into marines and feel that you caught someone on a mistake which shouldn't have happened instead of you were just better. It all feels more random and since every occasion like that (unlike sc1) will literally end some games, it becomes a chase for that one big moment and a fear that this moment will happen to you. When you get doom dropped in sc2 because you didn't pay attention to 1 dot on thrusters it doesn't feel like you've been outplayed, it's just frustration.
I'd argue BOTH losing an army and decimating an army is no fun in the grand scheme of things after you did it like 5 times. SC1 was about strongarming the enemy one step at a time, it was a gradually increasing tension and difficulty, while SC2 is more like a gotcha machine where one mistake ends the game. There's nothing fun in that.
I feel the same thing, what's the point of using units if everything's balanced to the point where noone's complaining?
What if BCs or Carriers didn't decimate all stuff in the lategame? It'd feel pretty bad to have a lategame army that pretty much cannot do anything. What if Siege Tanks didn't deal that much damage? Why would on Earth anybody use Siege Tanks then?
What if, from Kane's Wrath, Stealth Tanks didn't oneshot this Power Plant? Or that group of Juggernauts? Would they be satisfying to use? Or if Flame Tanks/Black Hand didn't fry infantry instantly? Why would they carry flamethrowers then, and would people even enjoy playing Nod as a faction then? What if Zone Troppers only had mobility instead, and not those super-cool railguns that vaporize every armored target?
What if, from Red Alert 2, Apocalypse Tanks were just high health units with low damage? Would anybody even bother building them if they were "balanced" enough to do their job in multiplayer? What if Kirovs were faster but were just slow flying units? Would a culture about "Kirov Reporting" meme even evolve back then? What about Command and Conquer's superweapons, both Nukes/Weather Machines or Chronospheres/ICs? Maybe those are broken too, why even bother giving the player a powerful tool at hand, people would complain about its balance!
...from almost every succesful RTS that I've played a lot of them have absurdly powerful units - but that's the point, why would you play a game of becoming a commander of an army if your army doesn't feel worth enough to even utilize?
Focus on E-sports and catering to a competitive audience which is less than 1/5 of any community was a shitty idea, why even bother "balancing" a game if it's not even fun to play and nobody wants to play it in the first place?
That summary at the end is so spot on. This is a game about units fighting each other, but the game makes those units so BORING. Couse individually they don't feel impactful at all. And because they don't feel impactful they don't feel important and they don't feel fun to use or watch.
I'd say if they want to stick to longer time to kill, they should get back and play some Warcraft 3. Right now everything feels like a flavor of the basic orc Grunt. And if W3 had only this unit in different flavors it would also be boring.
Aside from the mechanical diversity that W3 has over Stormgate, W3 had much smaller armies. You can't have long TTK and huge armies and still have exciting moments.
orc grunts are more interesting then stormgate units
because your only going to have 5 grunts, not 50
when you only have 5 grunts each one feels important and special, even if functionally they are very "boring" and so you work hard to keep them, and to catch the enemies and kill them
one grunt being out of position and being caught is a big deal, you cherish your grunts
when you have 50 of them, whats 1 dieing? just grab them all and attack move and go do something else, if they die they die who cares you have more
His nostalgia for sc2 reminded me how there were all those units with flare but then the most boring units, roach, marauder and blink stalker were the core unit of almost ever match up.
@@cameron8779 thats cos those are core units
the units with flare are support/carry units, they arent the "core army" unit
Have you played the game? Honestly, having actually played it, unlike seemingly 90% of the people commenting on how bad it is, the units all are quite unique in their functionality. If anything, they're too technical and specific for my simple brain to use with their activateables lol. For me, the issue is that the units don't pack enough oomph when they attack and are visually hard to differentiate at a glance in a fight
Imagine that you have a large, chunky army with low DPS versus a very similar army from your opponent. The battle takes place, and your high-hp, low damage units start whittling away at the enemy. As Day9 explains, there is actually a huge amount of decisions that could be taking place, moving individual units back, focus firing, isolating groups of units that are slightly out of position etc. But the core takeaway is that this kind of skill expression (tons of small unit positioning/focus firing/etc.) is not very interesting to play or to watch.
This is also not to posit that giving a "spikey" power to each side would in any way diminish the skill of winning battles with good positioning, focus firing or anything else. Rather, those "spikey" moments (such as an AoE spellcaster with high cooldown, or a unit with a re-positioning ability), in these moments you also have the capacity for skill expression but the risk/reward is much, much greater. In the aforementioned examples, a skilled player would be more accurate with their AoE damage, but there is always the opportunity for a miss-timing or an unexpected dodge.
It's very obvious for those who play Warcraft 3. These Stormgate battles look like two armies of Grunts just whacking away at each other. There's just no high-risk + high-reward plays that are even possible. Combined with the uninspired unit designs, the overall bland aesthetic, and you get something that is just joyless.
great summary
Also low dps means range means less. Imagine a Siege Tank that did half the damage. A tank or two with a few meatshields can splash some huge damage over an army coming in carelessly. This is the core behind zone controlling enemies. You can make them pay a huge price for carelessly moving about.
Now, if you have a unit on the flank they just can't do anything meaningful on their own. So you have to bring over your deathball. A widow mine or a lurker can control a zone, because they have kill potential that slows the enemy down without committing everything.
Yeah imagine War3 without the hero units. That's what Stormgate is. Except Stormgate also manages to have larger armies that do even lower dps than the units in War3. It's a bizarre mix of War3 and SC2 that just doesn't work. There's creeping...but there's no hero to level up. Units have several abilities and yet the combat manages to be bland. It's because of how slow paced this game is. Very few units and abilities can actually put out big damage.
Similarly to other people's sentiment, I dislike the weird glossy/plastic-y aesthetic
I think a lot of that is just a lack of visual polish. A lot of things look very basic.
@@XerrolAvengerIIit's not, they confirmed this is the look they're going for. Looks like a mobile game honestly
Yea totally same. It reminds me of how I felt about torchlight when that came out 12-15 ish years ago. I dont get why they would abandon the gothic blizzard style that was always successful. IMO, return to the original formula for future games, bring back Uelmen the composer and you cannot mess it up.
@@zzMrP I wish people would stop matter of factly stating that when a pc game looks bad it looks like a mobile game, that is just not simply how graphics works, mobile graphics doesn't equal bad, if a pc game has bad graphics it's either an unappealing style or unpolished assets, and Stormgate seems to suffer from both
@@asdfffs it looks like a mobile game cause mobile games are low effort
Speaking on "time to kill," a slower time is fine as long as it isn't boring. It's boring in Stormgate. I want my units to feel powerful, not to feel like they're swinging around wet noodles and shooting bubbles. They need to spice things up (whether that's visually or design wise). Make me feel awesome while controlling these armies.
I mean, it worked on wc3 because there were powerful heroes. You don't want your units to die quickly and then have a 1v1 duel. Besides heroes had enough powerful abilities to quickly turn the tide of battle, and got stronger the higher level they got, which was satisfying. None of this is present in SG so the higher ttk just makes it like sc but more boring.
Wc3 has low time to kill, but there are spells, unit abilities, minion blocking and surrounds. This doesn't really have any of that and it's a slower time to kill...
@@MrHeorhe Yea, not to mention armor and damage types played a bigger role in WC3. If you brought the right damage type for the job, you never felt like you were hitting the enemy with a wet noodle. Magic damage absolutely bodied heavy armor, for example.
I definitely like the idea of longer, more drawn out battles. Some of my most memorable battles in starcraft were ones that were drawn out micro battles.
However, it’s hard to force these situations to happen with balance. And there is something immensely satisfying about blowing the hell out of your opponents army in seconds with things like storms, banelings, or widowmines.
early in a game of SC2 a 10 marines with Stim pack are scarey dangerous.
I love how the minimap has more sharpness than anything in the actual game
it's negatively amazing how much the game looks like reforged
The game actually has a sharpness setting which reduces the blurriness and makes everything crisper. But for some reason no one is savvy enough to notice that the slider exists.
@@Leonhart_93The real question is why that’s a setting and not the default then.
@@TheLoneLlama My exact thoughts. May as well just have a "sleepy" and "awake" setting.
Feels eerily like "wc3 but without heroes". Heroes are what causes the "wow" moments/excitement spikes to happen in wc3. Creep system without heroes also feels more like a hassle than a source of fun
Very sadly, the thing this game reminds me of the most is dawn of war 3 when no heroes are on the field
Yep it's bad design. Why would you have creeping when there's no hero unit to level up?
They need heroes in 1v1. I’m a fan of wc3 and I was excited for heroes and creeping. It’s beyond me why we don’t have heroes here. Like you said that’s where the spikes come from when the time to kill is this slow. And also, give this game some sound, even a grunt smacking a wall with his axe in wc3 had some oomph.
something i noticed was really missing in all the games was ways to "force" engagements
the only option you had with any race was to just run in, and the only option any races had in response was to stand and fight, or run away
there was no real ways to make sudden plays, to "force" something
in SC2 if i charge in with zerglings the fight is starting, the opponent has no choice as i am always faster, but likewise the protos player can force an engagement using forcefields or tempests which will slowly wittle me down if i dont go for a fight
through all of these games there was no real moment where you activly CHOSE "we are fighting now" and made it happen, every single fight was a mutual decision from both players to just send their units at each other
Why do all the units in this game look like something I'd buy for my nephew at a flea market
Lmfao, when you play the campaign there is a cutscene where it rains. The characters look like literal plastic toys.
It will be years before it feels like anything more than a Warcraft 3 alpha
With less than 500 24-h peak player count the game is already dead.
All these Stormgate videos make me want to play SC2, I wonder if that was their intention.
It should be xD
Yeah, that's the biggest problem of this game I think, I gete the same vibe xD Looking at this game makes me want to play SC2 or W3.
Yup I am already back - it’s awesome.
Im playing my pirated copy of WC3 lol.
Got my brother and my pal from work coming over monday for LAN games.
I kinda don't even want to say, but they're in it for the long haul. The map editor for free is a massive gift to the gaming community. Stormgate will be the mariomaker of rts.
Kids love free software and making games, stormgate can provide that space for a long time. Oh the story mode is so derivative, are these just rewashed characters? As if it's a bad thing to have an engine with every wc3 sc2 OW hero alread somewhat prebuilt?
Even if all the other modes and characters and story are "Total Bunz!", map maker is crazy OP
Instead of "dog o'clock" call it Kay [9] Time.
Kay[9] O'clock
I think he also says D for Dog because it is the build hotkey in the grid
The game just looks and feels like Starcraft got fucked by fucking fortnite
And got its soul ripped out at the same time
for real. why does this happen every time!?
dont disrespect a good game and good lookig game like fortnite, peasant.
how old are you people? 10? it's warcraft 3 with a dash of starcraft added. Jesus christ
@@moonasha I'm 35 and no I can see the fortniteification
@@moonasha Have the same feeling. WC3 with a bit more poly, but no soul and interesting spikes, interesting abilities. WC3 was released 22 years ago, and this game is almost on par with it when it comes to graphic design...
Can we appreciate the fact his mom is co creating this game and yet hes honest about it
She works at like marketing though? And she might be leaving already by the pace things are going, so who knows, best of luck to the people there, I know making games is a herculean effort but this game is just bad I dunno
co creating is an overstatement, she works at the studio
Oh my god, my 14th favorite thing, Day9 being reluctantly critical about game design.
It just looks far too generic. Like its an asset store flip.
it looks like starcraft made for mobile with that childish valorant/fortnite aesthetic. I never understood the appeal but even today it's just an SC2 clone with a few added units basically, since every core mechanic and gameplay is exactly the same. So what's the point?
In this game you have 3 factions. Angels, demons and dogs
Infernals aren't as cool as Orcs or Zerg... but they still tower over the dumpster fires that are Vanguard and Celestials. They at least seem to have some amount of personality and soul in them.
Yeah, I think that they're the only faction right now which manages to communicate their core concept at least semi-effectively. The Weaver is legitimately spooky and cool & when you look at an Infernal base/army, you generally understand the idea of "evil aggressive demons". When you look at a Vanguard or Infernal base/army, you get "sci-fi human guys" and "shiny alien guys". It's way less coherent than Terran and Protoss.
@EvilMagnitude I'd argue it's even worse than that. All of the factions blend together in general but the Vanguard and Celestials more so. I genuinely can barely tell what the enemy faction is until I see a specific unit or I see the buildings.
celestials are by far the worst. So incredibly generic
they honestly need to throw out all the art and start over.
@@moonasha yeah but that's not realistically doable
Hi hf!
Can't believe I got to play against day nine...
1:01 Made my day to hear you say.
Love the content thanks for what you do!
I can only perceive this as dollar store starcraft
"starcraft at home"
But somehow far more expensive. For 40USD you can get the entire SC2 campaign. And while SC2 is nearly 15 years old this game doesn't look like 15 years of progress over SC2.
10USD for 3 missions is insane to me when they also have microtransactions.
I dunno why but I get more W3 vibes.
@@Sawarynk I get more piece of trash vibes
@@boynextdoor1951 that goes without saying :D
When you come to realize that games such as Starcraft: Broodwar and C&C Kane's Wrath along many other names were simply gorgeous and amazing at their time and still are up to this day...
C&C is nowhere near the caliber of Starcraft. That being said even the worst C&C game is way better than Stormgate.
@@Ziegfried82 C&C is simple and small but fun.
Oh boy that title lmao
here we go again
In regards to Spikey, Stormgate's idea of a Nuke would take 5 minutes to drop, and do 10% hp damage to those in the center and push away everyone else.
Another "from the developers of X big company" game that proves once again that the people who leave to create their own games were either not the people who made the magic happen or they dont know how to capture lightning in a bottle twice
My guess is the former.
Back 4 Blood all over again
@@Opnoyup. Back 4 blood / turtle rock / l4d. Mega man creator / mighty number 9. Banjo kazooie team / yooka laylee
CEO joined Blizzard in 2014, long after SC2 was done(I know about new units/expansions, but most of core design was done for WoL).
People needed to learn this from "The creator of Megaman"
Creeping camps without a hero will never not be weird AF to me.
Anyway, it's good to see Day9 being honest about his feelings with the game considering his personal relationship to the company.
I will say one thing also, for all of the problems this game has, one of the biggest is that they completely missed the "Low skill floor" goal. There is just way too much going on in a 1v1, even at the most basic level. Creeps, Capture points, an excessive amount of active abilities(Which most people aren't using anyway), unintuitive tech trees and gameplay mechanics, completely unnecessary top bar spells, the pointless instant tier upgrade of the main building, etc. You could actually just flat out remove half of the game right now and it would straight up be an improvement to what the game currently is.
Graphics are something most people can get over if gameplay is good...but the gameplay here is fundamentally flawed in so many ways.
Yeah, good point about the low skill level point. I had the same feeling. Not only are isometric 1v1 RTS games nearly defined by their micro intensity, but the way this one was made to replicate Sc2 makes that problem much worse. Slowing down battles alone doesn't resolve the issue, since people can always be faster micromanagers.
@@againsttheleftandright4065 FGS would probably make the argument of "You can always play x other game mode and use BuddyBot," or say to ignore various game mechanics entirely to validate their claims of the low skill floor...but at a fundamental level, this games skill floor for the regular PvP experience is actually higher than any other RTS I've ever seen. There's just too many mechanics involved at a core level.
It's completely overwhelming for the average RTS player, much less a new player with little experience in RTS.
TBH, the way they initially marketed it, I thought control points and creeps were only going to exist in the 3v3 game mode.
I think the game would be a lot better off with just that change: move the creeps and control stuff into 3v3 only where heroes are or into an "Archon mode" where multiple people are controlling things. Leave the 1v1 closer to a vanilla StarCraft experience without all the extra crap.
@@yGKeKe Never played a game with creeps. Always disliked the WoW/LoL style aesthetic and this hasn't won me over.
Graphics and unit design is more of a problem than you think. The reason I became a RTS fan in the first place was being able to command an army that looks cool and is fun to fight with.
Why would anyone be interested in these units? No one will care about gameplay and it's mechanics if the game never draws you in the first place.
@@Skumtomten1 Yeah, when I was 14 or so I fell in love with the videos I saw of the Starcraft 2 trailers on the internet. I think it was the first game my parents bought me for their home computer. The siege tanks and hordes of zerglings were the coolest thing I'd ever seen in a game, considering that all I knew up until then was Mario Kart and Smash Bros.
This game has ZERO attitude
Interesting way to put it. Which RTS has the most attitude?
@@neonmarblerust I'd vote for WC3 because you can really identify yourself with one of the four factions and the heroes and units have character.
@@neonmarblerust Command and Conquer had the most attitude.
WTF is that supposed to mean? What is an "attitude" of an RTS game?
@@Zibit21I think he means personality. Everything about SG just seems so generic, like there’s nothing we haven’t seen before elsewhere. What does exist in the game doesn’t have much, if any, unique flair. It literally just feels like if someone tried to mod SC2 using WC3 engine and base models. And despite those two franchises both being from Blizzard, their themes don’t really mesh, and so a lot of what exists in SG feels out of place. And then lastly, unit movement still has a sort of “ice skating” feel, which takes away from the game feeling grounded and visceral.
this new capture point stuff drives me insane, it's so annoying
also what are we doing here? what even is this game? sc2, wc3, dawn of war, c&c (probably even more) all smushed together into one
which makes it an absolute mess. it's like putting all good nba players on the same team and yet it's not a team at all, gameplay wise
This has literally nothing in common with Warcraft 3 except for "creeps" which function in no way like WC3 creeps as there are no heroes and items!
Honestly feels like the devs just tossed em in there in order to try to appeal to the WC3 audience. No WC3 player is going to want to play this game, though. It is far too different.
Dawn of war had cool as fuck units and you could choose all their colours and banners. Don't even compare haha
....It would be better if the cap points are destructible or require a worker to capture it.
@@Krakaet well, yes there are no heroes but you have sort of "hero" abilities at the top, also the art style and the choppable trees, etc. and the arcship is also like the goo from grey goo in a way. this game is just an amalgamation of at least 6 different rts with no clear vision and focus whatsoever.
The map design isn't necessarily bad, but it's not great. Creeping should not be a mechanic in a game that does not have unit xp such as heroes or veteran unit buffs. You're correct that there's way too much going on design wise they needed to choose a road.
The more i see of Stormgate the more i have the sinking feeling of dread.
I think this is not it :( and i see much better RTS games in the horizon.
Maybe you listen to wrong people - ones who can't have fun while playing this game?
Fun is subjective, so is perception.
age of mythology retold looks and plays 10 times better
@@JerryS-zb2lf aha yes, if you like rts you must play these new rts games, and if you are not playing them it must be out of spite
@@JerryS-zb2lf Im no diehard rts fan, i've been getting into wc3 lately if that counts, i didnt know shitting on stormgate was a whole thing and i dont know what you think i would gain from it, it looks kind of bland but not unsalvagable, but i also didnt play it. Day9's review seems fair but the comments seem to try to defend the game from even being criticized at all which makes the fans of the game seem dishonest.
@@JerryS-zb2lf ive been playing, way to miss the point though, i hope they fix your game, good luck!
I also really dislike the concept of capture points being captured and recaptured ad nauseam... And I agree with Sean's analysis about time to kill. I can still remember before Wings of Liberty came out and blizzard released unit previews for sc2 and thinking how amazing the units looked, even basic units like stalkers, reapers and roaches had cool stuff like blink, cliff-jumping and burrow movement + health regen... Starcraft 2 was just so inspired and awesome, I haven't felt the same sense of excitement watching any other RTS preview since. Hell I'm sure most us still remember dustin browder's famous "TERRIBLE TERRIBLE DAMAGE" line. Shit was just epic.
Another thing that strikes me as very weird and misguided is the addition of creeping while there are no "hero" units.
In warcraft 3 creeping was rewarding as it would give heroes items and experience (and a small amount of gold) but without heroes I feel like creeps are more of a hindrance than anything else.
That is also one of the main differences between sc2 and wc3: where starcraft is purely a strategy game where 100% of the actions you take are directly against your opponent, warcraft is more of a hybrid RTS/RPG where building your hero is just as, if not more important as harassing or directly attacking your opponent. Seems to me like the designers just wanted to mix elements from wc3 and sc2 without actually understanding what made each game so different yet equally awesome.
I guess time will tell if the developpers manage to turn this game into a hit but unfortunately that does not seem likely, I feel like there is a problem with the core design of the game and I have to say I haven't seen a single quality that made me want to try it... Hate to be this negative especially knowing that Sean apparently has friends/family working on this game but I really feel like this is going to be mid at best.
It's sad that old blizzard died, I truely believe that if they hadn't screwed wc3 reforged so bad it could have been at least as succesful as sc2 if not more and could have bought new life to the genre and popularised it to the newer generation of gamers...
I guess I'll stick to sc2 for the foreseable future.
I remember how much fun Day 9 had with AOE 4 and that was 15 patches ago and 2 expansions ago.
aoe 4 is pretty fun, played it a bit on release.
TheCrustyPrawn was very wholesome opponent and it warms my heart a little to see a day9 fan just being so happy
Seeing this tragedy of a video game be created and fail in front of our eyes has made me go back and play through all of the original Command and Conquer games. Its insane that the basic rifleman unit feels better than almost any unit in Stormgate. The personality, sound effects, and art design are just chefs kiss despite being like 20 whole pixels worth of army guy.
Yeah looks terrible today and felt boring back then. But i'm not sure why the command and conquer crowd would want to play a game by sc2 devs anyways. That game had an entirely different idea of what RTS should be. One that I just could not care about despite trying several times.
So gold standard for me would not be C&C but WC2 I agree with all your points, the units had character, sound effects and art design were just chefs kiss despite being like 20 whole pixels worth of fantasy guy.
Command and Conquer always looked bad and played bad. But through nostalgia lenses yes it may look better than Stormgate.
@@godfreyofbouillon966amazingly bad take, good job
@@vexienroe C&C is simple and small but fun. Also I could add, back then there was more arsenal and asset distinction for the factions in C&C and basically none for WarCraft 2 other than spells.
@@AttilaKattila i mean yeah an ogre and a grunt isn't as different as a tank and a plane. But thats not really a fair comparison either. Just because guns have more variety than an arrow to a crossbow doesn't mean the units didn't have character distinction or a different use.
I hope we eventually get a good condensed ranting video
As the kids say: negative aura. No rizz. When you're winning this game you're going "huh?" instead of feeling good about it. How the heck do you fix that from this point without remaking everything?
You can't. You have to start over.
They should have listened to the vast majority when it was first revealed and gave people what they want
@@tylerj3855 They should have listened to people in the fucking alpha. Most of the actual important feedback was ignored from day 1.
@@yGKeKe I mean the feedback from the alpha was art sucks, sound sucks, animations suck, not gameplay is broken at a base level, so not sure what you are talking about.
@@vexienroe art and sound are actually part of the game play.
Just a random thought, but the unit audio feels like it needs to be compressed and de-essed. The "capture point lost" lines seem to spike in volume and it bugs me
Also every unit only has 1 or 2 dialogue lines, which gets very annoying. All the units sound very similar too, which doesn't help because the artstyle feels 'samey' for every unit. There's a lot of fires all over the place.
@@Aeolus_000 weird that you bring up that particular notification. It completely ruined the immersion for me as soon as I heard that. Orcs saying capture the point? I feel like their vocabulary should be much more visceral
As a Warcraft 3 player since the game's release I was really excited about having creeps. But then learned that there are no heroes. . . Then learned that the creeps respawn...wtf? Now they are part of this really obnoxious capture point system which seems tedious rather than interesting.
It seems Day9 is mostly playing the creeps like it is part of his build order. Is that how it’s supposed to work?
I like the capture points, it keeps you active and gives you cool bonuses.
@@neonmarblerust WC3 creeping is communicated by my streamer of choice as integral to build order and even alters it depending on specific creep spawns. For example, if you picked a hero that doesn't clear a specific camp well, you may fall behind your opponent(s). Never played myself but this is my understanding of Grubby's WC3 explanations.
It seems like creeping in this game is lower stakes than in wc3 unless you're interrupting/maxing vanguard creeping. That said, Day9 seems to benefit from smaller armies, no matter the faction, because he farms creeps more than the SC style players he matches with. Day9 is WAY better at micro than the average player so that must be accounted for. I haven't got a fix on these sort of things yet, these are only first impressions of stormgate.
@@josephreynolds2401 interesting, thanks
@@fakename9500 What it seems to do is spam capture point captured/lost messages because you have to actively be at all points to fight off challengers or a single unit will steal a point from you. I honestly think the game would be better if the capture points simply didn't exist.
You can't beat the legacy of StarCraft by just doing something.
You need a whole vision.
StarCraft raised the bar insanely high. You dont need to be as good as StarCraft to be a good game. But SG is just not a good game, and lets not even pretend it's even remotely comparable to SC, that would be an insult to SC.
@@godfreyofbouillon966 yeah Stormgate is nowhere near Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, any of em really.
Starcraft BW is the best game both to play and watch. Ill die on this hill
I feel like the glaring spikey moment is the Magmadon stomp. It’s bigger impactful ability, however it’s feels like it’s missing an audio component to sell the effect for both players to say, something is happening and you need to pay attention.
Primal Beast in Dota does a similar visual/effect and you can FUCKING tell because it's boom-booming. And you know when he's not, via visual and audio, which makes a big difference.
I would've preferred better audio cues and ui/ux changes to a third faction and t3 additions. Now they need to work from back to front....maybe they already addressed all this in their latest updates and it's queued up. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt but I'm going to tune out of SG coverage for a bit while they figure their game out.
Re: Communication and Implementation Strategies
They seem to be taking a cue from corporate bureacratic Blizzard of the last 15 years rather than boundary-pushing creativity of its golden years. This is the hardest sticking point for me and my harshest criticism. They are a small company and cannot rely on the unsustainable "too big to fail" approach that Activision->Blizzard takes.
in c&c generals, you need to spend some time to capture a capture point from the enemy. A marine puts up a flag and has to hold the flag for 15-20 seconds to capture it, meantime enemy gets a notification that says "your building is being captured". You can kill the marine to stop the progress
Even in Dawn of War and company heroes you can make a fortification to protect the capture point
Made in the US of A
You know with all the glaze Dan and Nick were giving this game I was afraid sean was going to let me down. He did not.
In the end we're all hopeful nerds that want the game to be what it claims to be.
Day9 has really good design judgement, one of my favorite people in the RTS space. Love you day9
1 or 2... out of 10! God damn, skipping the IGN review scale and going straight to the jugular. Absolutely brutal.
Day9 is a stickler for bold creativity. There's nothing innovative here. I installed BAR today and am stunned by the ease of access it provides any user. A bad rts player like me can look like a SC 1/2 pro because the controls and UI are stunningly deep and intuitive. Moment after moment of "Wow" reactions out of me in one sandbox session and I haven't even gotten close to the meat and potatoes.
The music sting at 2:22:50 is perfect
9:54 you left the game, yet your rank went up. modern gaming is incredible
I'm not normally one for obsessing over graphics but they somehow made it look terrible. The art style is just uncanny in some sort of way. Also I immediately closed the game when in the first 5 minutes of playing I tried to stutter step with the first hero unit (the asshole one) in the first level of the campaign and the attack animation AND sound were playing but no damage was registering, I have no idea how stuff like that makes it out of alpha/beta. I learned to wait slightly longer to let the damage actually go off but it felt so terrible to not be able to trust the audio and visual cues while kiting that I just turned it off.
Most people don't care about graphics as much as they care about aesthetics. The problem is that this game is not particularly graphically impressive, and it's aesthetically terrible.
I think they look way too good for some reason, like unaturally good, you know what I mean? Unit design is also very bland and generic, they have no personality, no female units? It's like dudes, dogs, demons, sexless angels, it's a game so neutered... Plus it barely runs on my potato PC so no idea who they are pandering to, the "GAMORS" that want photorealistic games that feel like movies with no gameplay? With THAT artstyle? lmao
10 dollars for 3 missions is a crap deal to be honest. Lets not kid ourselves.
yea its bad, especially when your buying some short ones early on too.
I think they just forgot that stuff being cool is really important. The visual and sound design is just massively lacking. The 'marine' gun quite literally goes 'pew pew pew'. What are the moments we remember from SC2. Black hole storms, baneling traps, nukes, raven bombs. Huge swings in the game flow, with massive visual elements. Longer time to kill...fine, but there's also a reason SC2's default speed is faster.
It doesn't really matter how good this game is 'tactically', we aren't here to play chess.
Even in wc3 it was a lot more interesting to play and watch
Being able to kill things fast is the kind of story you tell your friend. "I was outnumbered but then I dropped a nuke on his army!" It sucks for the player that got nuked but he did get the warning message.
Nothing you do in Stormgate is something you'll run to your friends to share.
Sometimes I think maybe Frost Giant is just trolling us
Arena FPS are in a struggling state but Stormgate's path reminds me of the handfuls of arena games that toed the line staying very close to Quake 3 / Quake Live. Made you want to go and play Quake instead of the new game that doesn't quite hold up to the old legend.
Currently addicted to AOE 2 / 4 and it’s been scratching the RTS itch, me and my friends love 2v2/3v3 in that game series, super cool, very refreshing.
I've finally placed it. I was wondering why the "art" didn't fit together and it just dawned on me. Why in the world are all the natural barriers in this sci-fi themed game TREES!? Its like they took WC3 and slapped the tile set on there. The whole art and design still feel very alpha stage. Even some of the old SC2 development assets had better quality than this released product.
Also why are space marines and advanced aliens killing *slimes*?! Why do the demons care about a "capture point" to get a rocket launcher?
@@SLiV9 This is understated. Mixing scifi and fantasy always feels horrible
Its the post apocalypse and there are lush forests or they're in Hawaii with palm trees. The first thing I did in Red Alert was I went to make a custom map where my base had a river and you needed to cross a bridge. Where are all the bridges?
In the first game it's clear that the enemy has an easy time decapping capture points, which seems enormously frustrating... They should make it so that defensive structures prevent decapping from the enemy player, so they can't just send in single units if you built a bunker or such.
This game is ugly and unimpressive
I think the description "fun free game" is the best one i've heard yet.
Minus the fun
@@allanshpeley4284 Yeah, that's what he said. Not "fun, free game" but "fun free, game".
@@DenDodde Like free of fun lmao, I had to read your comment again to get it
Lol that was too deep for me to understand immediately as well. Well played, sir.
The actual art direction, the designs (not the simplistic type style) are bad and kinda generic. That’s why everything feels so bland and boring. No unit in this game makes me excited to get out or build too
They're definitely leaning into the "we made WC3" thing but I think they're doing that too far.
I wish people wouldn't harp on the art direction so much, because as bland and awful as the visuals are, it really takes away from the monumental amount of other issues the game has that are far worse.
The tauren unit from wc3 alone is more interesting as a design than anything in this game.
@@archlorddestin Funnily enough this game has nothing to do with WC3, basically the only thing in common is that there are creeps, but not having heroes gives creep a complete different meaning to the game anyway. Even graphically, it's not even remotely similar to WC3, at least to the classic version, which is not bland at all.
The factions do have a big problem right now in that they just don't grab you the same way the SC factions do. The core conceptual design simply isn't as compelling. It can be fixed, but they need to workshop it a lot.
I don't see how people are misunderstanding Day9. This is why we have bo3, bo5, bo7, etc. The longer the fights/series, the more likely is that the better player wins. In a bo1, any pleb could sometimes catch a pro unprepared and cheese them out of the game.
It's weird because every esports tourney is organized this way, yet it seems like a lot of spectators are unaware of the "Swing" phenomenon whether it is through cheese, map, mode, snowball, and build advantages.
It's the worst parts of StarCraft2 but wimpier and underbaked, with a smaller player base, with boring uninspired units, $10-per-option casual content and worse visual/sound design.
Units don't actually "do" anything or expand the battlefield. It also looks like a mobile game that was churned out by tired devs ten years ago.
I see more excitement and unit variance when I watch current day DUNE 2000 tournaments.
Edit: On top of it all, there's a RU hack group that release free cheats to sabotage it. So everyone with a weird name is likely map hacking.
Day9 is a legend. At this point, we have fun just staring at his silence
Thinking about your thoughts towards the end, particularly your comments about the importance of 'spiky' moments, and I can't help but agree. I'm reminded of my thoughts about a turn-based strategy game, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, where ultimately one of the big things that attracts me about it in comparison to titles like Endless Legend or others in the AoW franchise or the Civilisation games is that almost every unit in Planetfall has at least one active ability available besides its regular attack, there's a clear design ethos at work that your units should DO THINGS, which makes it very easy to differentiate factions and create asymmetric gameplay. It's not quite the same thing, you can't really do that in an RTS where the micro load is just impractical for any player to really use, but it achieves a similar goal in making fights feel distinct and meaty, because all your stuff has one or more big shiny buttons and it matters when and where you push them, it creates interesting decisions, and that is, after all, the basis of gameplay.
This game is just starcraft without the heart and soul.
You don’t need to subject yourself to this game anymore
I remember a year or so after Sc2 WoL came out, someone on the Sc2 official forums made a super serious post about adding a 4th Panda race to the game (as in, Pandas, the animals from China). Everyone made fun of the post so he deleted it and it became a running joke on the forum for a few weeks. Who's laughing now?
I tried playing the game and was turned off immediately
Same. It really is hard on the eyes.
Felt the same way when I played Battle Aces. After 2 hours I was thoroughly bored by the game and felt like I had no reason to ever return to it. Haven't tried StormGate out now that it's available on Steam because watching it has already worried me that I will wind up in the same situation. These new RTS games just don't have that IT factor so far, I get it, I see it, I hope they can do something about it.
Yes. I want these new RTS games to succeed so badly but they just don't have anything to offer. The 2000s RTS games are just better in everything, and I can play those without paying anything. Sorry but why would I buy these new ones?
AoE4 is a lot better than this, and I don't think highly of that game.
Imagine sitting down to make a cool new RTS and all you do is mash StarCraft and WarCraft together.
I'm playing BAR for the first time today and really optimistic about Godsworn. The latter is a fresh take that retains identity with clear inspiration from Age of Myth/Emps and Warcraft. Haven't played it but I it looks more promising than Sgate.
And take the worst parts of each
A concern I have about camps in rts, and please contradict me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that they add anything positive to the viewing or playing experience.
Compare the camps in Stormgate to capturable bonus building in Command and Conquer Generals. You can capture these buildings with infantry that can provide bonus income, reduce the cost of vehicles, or provide constant automatic healing for infantry. These buildings can be infinitely captured, or destroyed to deny the bonus. Once you capture it, it's yours until captured or destroyed by the enemy. They provide a bonus meaningful enough to be worth an investment of money to capture (being the first to capture the resource building reimburses the cost of the capture upgrade) and provide useful long term benefits. However they cost no units and, more importantly, no unit health to capture, only time and attention.
The camps in Stormgate provide similar bonuses, a small amount of resources for getting last hits, constant healing for all units (in the vicinity of the camp), constant energy regeneration for all units (in the vicinity of the camp), a small speed buff, a small defense buff, and some vision. But they cost units, a significant amount of attention (at least in the early game) and are impermanent. Meaning that capturing the health camp near your base gives you a temporary healing zone, then you have to clear it again. Any units you lose taking that camp have to be replaced and any units damaged need to sit in the healing zone until they get their health back. Worse, if the opponent has good vision and map awareness, they can react to you taking the camp by getting a free fight win on your damaged units, then finishing off the camp themself and getting the benefit.
As much as it rewards good play and punishes risk, that's something you want, but considering the magnitude of punishment for trying to take a risky camp early, I don't think it will end up with a positive viewing or high level playing experience. It feels like League of Legends' dragon objective. Dragon in League of Legends is *designed* to try and force teams to fight throughout the game because objectively the best way to win a game of League of Legends is to simply farm your position until you are full build, then fight the enemy team once and destroy half their base. With dragon, there's a permanent buff that you can get that lets you have an advantage in those late, full build fights. These are small side shows for the players to fight over that are supposed to drive the engagement of the game and keep players contesting each other. But in low level play, we don't necessarily want to do that because we don't have the attention for it, and at high level play, they constantly harass and attack each other anyway. For viewers, it doesn't really add to the tension because either they are taking camps safely or they aren't taking camps. It's just something else to fight over instead of real worker or base damage.
At the end of the day, I would rather see two people constantly fighting and harassing each other than fighting the map. That's what campaigns are for.
Camps also reward more resources the more you take them. So you have to Grind camp levels. Why is grinding levels in my RTS game?
yeah you don't know the bonuses of the SG camps. They apply also to your army on the whole map (healing, speed, and so on) but a smaller amount than when you are in viscinity
@@anonymeforliberty4387 That's the issue, when viewing or playing hidden number bonuses aren't that fun
Imagine this, if you walk your units in a complete circle they get to do 50% more damage. To the viewer it makes no sense. That's what the camps are.
Now imagine if you beat the camp and the camp joins your army. Or they lower a bridge for you tangible things.
It really paints a difference. Consider knocking down rocks in sc2, even someone that never played before can tell what is going on.
The game is basically a SC2 wish version, and it's very sad
I truly hope they get it to a great spot. It's not there atm. Not that we can't have more than one competitive RTS, but I do feel like Battle Aces is going to end up the more successful title.
And no way would I have believed that 2 or 3 years ago. NO way.
TOTALLY AGREE WITH DAY9. This game lacks "cool"
yea it lacks cool and "identity" tbh.
on the "sharpness/spikiness"
the issue is that there are just way too many units, your hitting 100+ supply at like 6 minutes in, when you have fights between 100 units on each side it just becomes a mess, micro isnt really a thing and any individual "spikes" dont really have any impact
in WC3 time to kill is really high, but there are only 10 units on each side, 15 at most, so when a "spike" happens and a player catches a unit and nukes it, thats only 1 thing that died, but there are so few units, so it feels really impactfull
here theres 100 things on each side, so when a "spike" happens well, it doesnt look like it did anything because there is still 90 things on each side
its also an issue with the team coloured health bars, everything is blue, so theres really no visual feedback when a big blast happens and you lose a lot of health
the only real visual feedback of a fight being lost/won is right at the end of it when everything is dead
its just, not well designed
He sees the light
Does he? I haven't noticed...
It's interesting to me that a quick solution to this would be to introduce early hero units. I felt they should avoid it because of balance nightmares however it'd be an effective "swing" mechanic.
It’s amazing how games with pixels or polygons are still being played and loved after 20-30+ yet game devs don’t lean more into that ascetic. We don’t want super smooth, especially in rts’. We need clear lines and click boxes, having a boxier ascetic helps that.
Sometimes when I blink, for a glimpse of time I can feel like it's 2002 all over again. It's a great to feel young again! But then I come back to the present and the game doesn't look great.
this is sick, day9 starcraft commentary vibes holyshit
Is this a warcraft 3 mod?
I remember WC3 had a very customizable map editor that also let you design scenarios and stuff. From that things like Footman Wars and DOTA were born. I once made a map with crazy shops that had a limited supply of OP mercenary units in them. Like one unit gave literally every aura in the game to your surrounding army but was very squishy so having one in your composition would wildly swing how powerful your army was. Being in limited supply, and one only being available every 2 minutes or so, you'd see big fights contesting who had access to the shops when the mercenary popped. If you missed one you'd have to find a way to flank or snipe the OP unit or go across the map and buy a limited invincibility potion to rush something in or find some other way to level the playing field or you'd get steam rolled, but like you were saying, there were big spikes or swings and it was really fun. I don't think this game would benefit from hero units, but maybe a third party arms dealer on the map trading for credits you get from camps, and instead of constantly contesting camps, whoever get them first gets it for 2 or 3 minutes until the mobs respawn again. Would give you some incentive to take out the camps, then doing so maybe you get a unit or a buff for some amount of time, and instead of it seeming like work to clear the camps, you're building up credit with this third party that can help swing the game. Then you could make plays like, should you macro hard or rush camps to try and get a boon? Anytime spent building your base is time not spent working on camp credit and so on.
Oh my gawd! This whole situation is tragic. I feel like everyone was so hopeful and hyped for this game. But it was more than just a game with the ex blizz employees, and the whole revival of rts, and making it the successor to sc and WC. And everyone saw this train wreck coming in slomo for long while. A tragic letdown.
pretty much exactly, yes. i was so hyped about it, instead i play sc2 again all the time
stormgate really is kind of a letdown, maybe needs like 2 years more in development - maybe even a complete overhaul
nothing is clear in this game, it's just a "what even is going on?"- kind of a game
It kinda sounds like the game or the units are "too fair" where the units abilities or characteristics don't have enough extremes. Like abilities or attacks can't whiff or affect the state of the fight in a huge way ( like a slow skill shot that covers a wide are like storm from SC1).
As someone who is enjoying stormgate and is actively making content on it, I actually agree with a lot of a criticisms that day[9] has here. The game does definitely lack polish and that spike-y-ness. I feel like you can have a long time to kill whilst still having impactful effects like big stuns or timeout but atm there's not a lot that does that. Hellborne, atlas' the big seige weapons don't actually feel that scary.
Even the one ability that I think does that which is the celestial storm, doesn't feel good to hut because it slows units first then does damage and there's no like aim or targetting, it's just click circle and it appears.
Ever since i first saw gameplay from those trailers my enthusiasm for this game just evaporated. It feels and looks so extremely uninspired and bland that I'd much rather go back and play a 10-20 yr old game. Add on that the long time to kill, every attack feels weak as hell. What a complete failure.
I think Stormgate's design really highlights WHY the whole "every unit has spells" thing isn't common in RTS - because when every unit is a spellcaster, spellcasters are no longer uniquely fun and powerful to play around. You can't make any of the abilities particularly powerful because every unit is supposed to have useful abilities, so instead they just all feel like they're equally unimpactful.
I think this is why Warcraft 3 managed to still feel so high impact despite the very 'slow' time to kill for units, because you had these super powerful hero units - essentially all spellcaster-type units though plenty of them were also autoattack damage machines too - with an array of high impact abilities to create those spikes of interesting gameplay on top of powerful spellcaster units, but the backbone of every army was still just 'regular' units that didn't necessarily do anything special but still all felt like they had their place. The existence of heroes also makes the creep camp control around the map feel way more interesting, but that kinda goes without saying. Camps in Stormgate feel really directionless by comparison. It genuinely feels like Stormgate was originally designed to be more like WC3 and at some point they decided to cut heroes from the game for god knows what reason.
This game is a colossal letdown. "There really isnt that much to do..." that quote sums up the entire SG experience.
I really want to enjoy Stormgate but after playing it with a friend I'm not sure what the game is asking me to do. I think its slow & grindy (like Total War & Warcraft) but then it wants me to lean into Tier 1 units for damn near every encounter (StarCraft, C&C). I want to like the game & see it succeed, I think the devs need to hone in on just one design philosophy. I agree with Day9 about "time to kill" being interesting. Part of what pushed me away from SC2 was how fast the game had gotten, every fight felt like mere seconds & always decisive. I'd enjoy a grindier experience similar to AoE2 with a SciFi paintjob.
I remember WoL release.
I think people have a point that new games need time to grow, and that SC had had DECADES to develop, through 2 stellar rts and multiple expansions that MADe the game into what it has become.
However, the game STARTED unbalanced and "spikey" as hell. The emphasis (for SC2 at least) seemed to be "make fun units and throw them at each other" and then work on balance as an afterthought. And it SOMEHOW miraculously worked... most of the time :P
Perhaps this more... sedate... design philosphy can allow the spikes to be added later, while grounding the factions in a balanced way.
What this has REALLY demosntrated to me though... is that I want to play more SC :D
Capture point captured! Capture point Blackmailed! Capture point secured... in the basement!
My biggest issue with the game (among, unfortunately, many) is that the races aren't nearly asymmetrical enough. Each race has a little melee guy, a little ranged guy, a little fast guy, an artillery guy etc... And they have very little distinction. In SC each race was unique and had units unlike any units from other races and in WC the units were very similar but it was all about the asymmetry of the heroes. This... this is just nothing...
to me it's embarrassing how much they steal from WC3. It seems like there is zero originality to this game
It's like a cheap version of SC2, which has to be like 15 years old.
I'm not saying this is the answer and should be done but I wonder if having heroes in the 1v1 would help the spikiness aspect. I mean if they are going to keep the creep camps in 1v1 might as well.
they need to redesign all of the factions
Ive always thought the developers have created an engine and hoping they get the contract to create SC3. This game is just proof of concept.
21:20 Am I the only one hearing "Our horses are under attack"?!
What he's talking about at the end with having to make more decisions over a longer period of time favoring the stronger player, the same thing is true in fighting games. Counterintuitively, a game where characters do tons of damage and rounds are over very quickly favors new players a lot more than a game where each hit barely chips away at the opponent. The reason is that the new player only has to get the drop on their opponent a few times, whereas if you have to string together massive combos multiple times in order to get anywhere, the new player will never stand a chance.
Yeah but it also just adds clutter and stalemates into the game. It's like no matter how good you are, if you make a mistake, even a little one, your opponent might get a chance to comeback. Also the "better player wins" is always a fallacy, and having no pressure to win the game early just takes away from the adrenaline of having to get shit done in the moment, like it's now or never. Like I feel there's should be moments in the game where things matter more, and if every little interaction counts the same, then the whole game feels like a bore, because nothing is really exciting, everything is the same, you know?
@@raven-a Agreed. What's the point of a flank or attacking their base if the damage happens so slow they can always respond in time? A storm drop or Reaver drop would be different if the victim can bring an army back before any workers even die.
2:24:48 That is a large part of what the art in a game is though. Graphics ''power'' isn't important ofcourse. Having everything look nice in some way is very important as well ofcourse, but the way the units work and feel as units in a world is also part of the art design. That even includes all of the abilities and unit movements and ideas. What is this? It's a colossus. Giant tall high tech alien robot that can fire lasers in a line and eradicate a small army. That's a design and part of the job of whoever is in charge of the art direction.
Huge props for his honest feedback.