Gerald here, your friendly neighborhood in-house reporter with the latest from Frost Giant Studios HQ. Our priorities have changed significantly since our Early Access release, as we’re determined to listen to player feedback and to move the game towards our ultimate goals with the community’s input serving as our guiding light. I’m here to share an update on what the team has been working on and what they’re planning for the months ahead. Buckle up, because we have some pretty big news to share.
Balance update today
First off, some exciting news for those of you who’ve been competing on the leaderboard. We’ll be releasing a balance patch later today. Kevin ‘monk’ Dong, our hard-working Lead Competitive Designer, will be providing another insider’s view into the thought process and analysis behind these changes.
Listening and adapting
Next up, the team is planning to release our first major content update in late September.
One key piece of feedback we’ve heard was that our Campaign missions simply need more work. These missions were released right after their initial versions were implemented, in the spirit of showing our work to you every step of the way. One of our core values is to bring you on this journey with us so that your feedback can directly help make Stormgate a better game. However, we recognize that many of you would much prefer to experience our Campaign missions as a finished product and not as an early work-in-progress. We want to acknowledge that we hear your voices loud and clear, and have already redoubled our efforts to further develop the Campaign missions, as well as to make a bunch of other changes also based on your feedback.
Addressing art, audio, and more
Early Access, like our previous development phases, is about improving the game with each release as we move towards achieving our vision for 1.0. That said, we’re well aware that many players had higher expectations in terms of art and audio for our day one Early Access release, so we’re going to dedicate significant efforts to improving key areas that players have identified need additional work. We’re going to be updating the body proportions for the unit models in our in-game cutscenes and reworking Amara’s character design. We’re also going to be making changes to our map visuals that we’re excited to roll out for you all to see.
3v3 coming this year
The biggest change we’re making, however, is readjusting our priorities so that we can get our new 3v3 mode into Stormgate before the end of the year.
It’s clear from what players are saying that we’ve built a strong foundation for RTS gameplay and that 1v1 is where Stormgate shines brightest, though we know we still have a lot of work to do across all areas of the game.
Originally planned for 2025, we believe that focusing on the game mode that most distinguishes Stormgate from other past RTS games is a high priority. This decision is informed by feedback we’ve received from many players who expressed a desire for more teamplay modes, including all of you who have asked that we add matchmaking for our popular 2v2 custom games. It’s too early to share extensive details on 3v3, but we can confirm that it will include Heroes and that it will feature a win condition that isn’t just “first team to take down an opposing player wins.” Stay tuned for more.
We’ve always seen 3v3 as the most innovative game mode that Stormgate would be bringing to players, and hopefully a really fun way to play with friends. We feel like this shift in our priorities is the right move and we look forward to getting our highly-anticipated 3v3 mode out sooner than originally planned. This means we’ll be pushing back some other work until later in development, and we plan to update our public roadmap accordingly.
Building Stormgate together
We’re excited to work towards delivering one of our most-wanted modes even earlier as we simultaneously focus on addressing the most critical feedback. To summarize, as the team is working on improvements to the rest of the game, our plan is to release 3v3 in an early state sometime this year so that it can also benefit from playtesting and feedback like our other multiplayer modes.
Stormgate has been a collaborative development journey from the earliest days of pre-alpha to our initial Early Access release–and it will continue to be a partnership as we go forward. Thank you for being part of that journey.
Good luck and have fun,
Gerald, on behalf of the Frost Giant team
