Our plan is to update our Roadmap if any major changes come up during Early Access. We fully expect that things will change as game development is never a straight line–it’s filled with twists and turns, but it also often includes cool surprises as the team develops features based directly on player feedback. We’ve lost track of how many changes have already been made to Stormgate based on what we’ve heard from our playtesters and we have no doubt this will continue throughout Early Access.
We’ve added a few notes below to clear up any questions you may have about this content rollout plan. Let’s dig in!
EARLY ACCESS RELEASE
- 3 Factions - Vanguard, Infernals, Celestials
- 1v1 with 7 Maps
- GM Leaderboard - courtesy of our friends at Untapped.gg
- 3P Co-op with 6 Maps
- 5 Heroes for 3P Co-op - Blockade is free to all players, with progression fully unlocked. Amara, Maloc, Warz, and Auralanna are all free to enjoy until level 5. It’s similar to how StarCraft II Co-op Commanders worked. Progression can be fully unlocked by purchasing a Hero ($10 USD, may vary by region). Hero progression is initially capped at level 15. Levels 1-10 are currently “core” linear progression for each Hero, expanding its power and kit, while levels 11+ open up customization through our Gear system. We plan to raise that level cap later in development.
- 6 Campaign Missions - Three prologue missions are completely free. We recommend playing through these first if you’d prefer to try before you buy. The first Vanguard Campaign Chapter is three missions. Future Campaign chapters will have a minimum of three missions. At Early Access release, these missions will be playable solo. In the future, we are adding the ability to play these missions cooperatively with friends.
- Tier 3 Units (Phase 1) - we’ll have a few Tier 3 units during our Early Access release, with more to come.
LATER 2024
- 1 New Co-op Map
- 2 New Heroes for 3P Co-op
- 3 New Campaign Missions - This is Vanguard Campaign Chapter 2. It will contain at least 3 new missions.
- Mini War Chest - We are planning to create “War Chest” events where players will be able to earn fun cosmetic rewards by earning XP. An initial “mini” version of the Stormgate War Chest will be released this year, with our first full War Chest coming in 2025.
- Weekly Mutators - These will provide players with modifiers and variants that will help keep the 3P co-op experience fresh.
- Map Editor Showcase - We’re planning to reveal more of our development on the Editor later this year, similar to how we’ve already unveiled some video of our editor tools and a look at one of the custom game modes developed in-house using this toolset. If there’s anything specific you want to see about the Editor, be sure to let us know in the modding channel on Discord!
COMING IN 2025
- 3v3 Debut - We expect to roll out the first public version of 3v3 next year!
- Map Editor Debut - While we’re aiming to get something out to players as soon as we can, we are confident in being able to put the initial version of the Editor into players’ hands next year.
- 9 New Campaign Missions - This includes Vanguard Chapter 3 and the first two chapters of our Infernal campaign.
- Co-op Campaign - We’ll be adding co-op functionality to all of our campaign missions! If you’ve paid for campaign content, you’ll be able to invite friends to play it with you for free–they won’t have to pay to play.
- Integrated Tournaments so that players can spin up tournaments from within the client.
- War Chests - Our seasonal War Chests will be making their proper debut next year.
- Learning tools - Still too early to go into too much detail, but our partners at Untapped.gg have ambitious plans around creating cutting-edge data-driven learning tools for Stormgate players and awesome profiles. Stay tuned for more information.
- Tier 3 Units (Phase 2)
…and this is just scratching the surface: 2025 and beyond will include more new Heroes, 1v1 and co-op maps, and more!
Our plan is to release regular content updates every couple months to keep the game fresh and exciting, without creating too aggressive a content cadence so that it feels like there’s too much to stay on top of and the game becomes a chore. We hope we strike the right balance and look forward to hearing from the community on how this all feels during Early Access.
On behalf of the Frost Giant team, thank you so much for your support. We’re incredibly excited about finally releasing to Early Access on August 13 and can’t wait to see our playtesters back for the early preview on July 30!
If you want to get in on that preview and haven’t already supported the development team, please consider picking up one of the bundles available here on Steam.
Thank you for supporting Stormgate!
-The Frost Giant team
