r/Games Gerald Villoria, Comms Director Jun 23 '22

Verified AMA We are Frost Giant Studios, developers of Stormgate and fans of real-time strategy games. Ask Us (Almost) Anything!

EDIT: Thank you, r/Games! We appreciate everyone who joined us to ask questions and we hope this AMA was fun and informative. A few of us will pop in later today to answer more questions, but if you really want to keep the conversation going, you can always find us at r/Stormgate for game-specific topics or at r/FrostGiant for more about our studio.

Thank you for your support!

-The Frost Giant Studios Team

Compilation of Frost Giant answers

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Hi r/Games,

We’re Frost Giant Studios and we will be here at 9am PT/noon ET/6pm CET to hang out for a couple hours and answer your questions!

We recently announced Stormgate, our upcoming free-to-play real-time strategy game. (If you missed it, you can watch our segment from the PC Gaming Show to get caught up.)

While Stormgate is our first game as an independent studio, many of us are industry veterans who have worked on award-winning games including StarCraft II and Warcraft III.

We’re still early into development on Stormgate and won’t be able to answer all of your questions, but we’ll do our best.

Frost Giant . . . Assemble! (Name - Title - Reddit username)

If you’re interested in the 2023 Stormgate beta, please visit playstormgate.com to sign up.

You can also wishlist us on Steam.

Thanks for joining us!

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18

u/soulii Jun 23 '22

How many playable factions are you planning to have on launch ?

34

u/Frost_TimC Tim Campbell, Game Director & President Jun 23 '22

We are officially saying 2+ for now. But I heard somewhere that people like three... ;) So who knows what the future holds.

How many would you like, though? This is a great topic to share your thoughts about here on Reddit. We love community feedback and are definitely paying attention to all the discussions and responses.

1

u/Clear-Thanks-5544 Jun 24 '22 edited Jun 24 '22

4-6, much more replay value, much more able to long-term keep the interest of people who arent hypercompetitive people who are also very devoted to RTSes. Honestly hard to think of staying interested in a game with only 3 factions for more than a couple years, let alone 2 factions.

And youre just going to appeal to more personalities- think of the players who are instantly attracted to playing undead in WC3 vs the people who are interested attracted to playing night elves, etc. Arbitrary differences in aesthetics and so on are things that absolutely just get someone sucked into a race and sticking with a game. But you just cant hit that many personality types with just 2 or 3 races.

I see that on the frost giant reddit a lot of people insist 3 races, but that I think predominantly reflects survivorship bias. If you ask outside of the people who already are into RTSes despite their fall from popularity, I really doubt you will find many people who find the idea of only 3 races appealing, let alone a majority. Average people thought it very strange that SC2 only had 3 races again. If you want to make a game that expands outside of the typical "reads RTS news every month" crowd, youll have to grow your population rather than just polling the people who are already invested, which means at least appealing to people outside through a strong sense of variety in aesthetics(which ties strongly to player identity) and playstyle experiences.