Stormgate is finally getting a real campaign—or at least one that fans say looks „a thousand times better” than the disappointing version from its Steam Early Access launch.
Stormgate is getting a major overhaul after the critical reception of a new free-to-play RTS from StarCraft veterans. Developers will change the most controversial element of the game.
It’s hard to call Frost Giant studio’s first game particularly successful, despite the support shown by players. Of course, the team quickly set about improving their title along with the fans — after all, that’s what early access is for. That’s why there have been some big updates, with the latest one (version 0.3) released at the end of February (although additional hotfixes were made available later).
So far, their efforts haven’t yielded results, or at least not the ones that would satisfy the players. This is clearly evident from the «mixed» reviews on Steam, which are closer to negative than «mostly positive»: the «positive» reviews for Stormgate constitute only 48% of all ratings (out of over 7,000).
The title also doesn’t look better in the context of the number of players. It’s enough to say that since mid-March, the number of people playing Stormgate at the same time has almost never reached three-digit values. Having less than 5,000 users at once isn’t really impressive for a strategy game, especially considering it’s free to play.
Campaign for renovation
If you look at the reviews on Steam, you can find many opinions suggesting that Stormgate had the potential to become at least a decent game. However, even in positive reviews, there are complaints about the incomplete campaign, artistic layer, and microtransactions.
The developers had already addressed the second issue earlier (which resulted in many graphic updates, including new unit models), but on April 11th, they also addressed the first issue. During the Find Your Next Game show, the Frost Giant team presented a new story campaign for Stormgate, which was completely transformed based on player feedback and the developers’ vision.
Fans appreciated many improvements shown in the developer’s video — from the much better and more cinematic presentation to the much more interesting mission objectives.
Thanks to this, the game is closer to what players expected before its release, and the whole thing looks — quoting one of the comments from YouTube — «a thousand times better than the old version.» The only thing that somewhat disappointed people was the lack of cutscenes. However, many of them would not blame the developers if they reduced the number of these, especially if they were to look as terrible as the cutscenes from the «launch» version of the game.
The new Stormgate campaign will be part of the 0.4 update, the release date of which remains unknown for now.
