Stormgate Campaign Review (Early Access)
Looking forward to the improvements
I spent the past couple weeks playing Stormgate’s Early Access campaign. Here are my thoughts.
Quantity Over Quality
Stormgate comes out the… gate (?) with six missions. My first playthrough came in at 95 minutes of mission time, or 183 minutes all-in - retries, cutscenes, and completing 3 missions on Brutal difficulty (the campaign gates the highest difficulty upon mission completion). I then went back and played through the missions a few more times for the purposes of this review.
By comparison, here’s my raw in-game time across a few other RTS games, including both indie releases and games from larger studios:
I’m surprised. Stormgate’s Early Access release is the shortest RTS campaign I’ve ever played; a younger me would have finished it in a single sitting.
And sure, quantity is not quality. But sometimes, delivering an experience requires a minimum amount of in-game time, to get players familiar with the controls and mechanics, to establish the plot, to engage in basic world building , and so forth.
All of the games I reference above, for instance, leverage their longer running time to execute on something, such as to tell a compelling story (Warcraft III, Age of Empires IV), showcase a ton of unique mechanics (Grey Goo), offer neato progression systems (Bannermen, StarCraft II), highlight diversity in gameplay (Northgard), or show off cool maps and scenarios (They Are Billions).
None of these would be possible without sufficient game time. You can’t, for example, have a meaningful progression system if there’s not enough content to progress through. You can’t showcase map or mechanical diversity if there aren’t enough maps. You can’t tell an epic story in six missions.
Setting aside all other design and balance choices, Stormgate’s campaign starts at a disadvantage because it’s simply too short to do a lot of interesting things.
Changes, Changes
The first few missions of Stormgate’s campaign have analogues with Wings of Liberty - like the opening mission to showcase unit controls, the follow-up macro introduction mission, or the hold-your-ground-and-defend-with-mech mission. I don’t hold these similarities against Frost Giant, because I think these missions make sense conceptually. It’s reasonable to show the player how to move around, how to build up their base, or how different units work.
I feel, though, that the developers made changes to the original concepts that I don’t understand. The Blade, for example, teaches basic macromanagement. But in contrast with Wings’ The Outlaws, it calls for the player to navigate an S-shaped valley to clear two side camps, simultaneously with the AI sending waves of attacks at the player’s base.
Why force the player back to their base - or worse, suggest that they multi-task - in a mission that teaches basic macromanagement? This felt strange and tedious to me. The Outlaws is visually arranged as an S, too. But the physical layout is a straight-line with two very short dead-end branches for optional objectives - the player can’t go anywhere except forward. This simplifies the unit control a lot and allows the player to focus on macro, while offering the illusion of a complex map layout.
I was also confused by The Blade’s choice to include a natural expansion. Given that the player may have just learned the basics of building Habitats and Barracks, why offer the choice to fully macro up? I went ahead and did so, and I was glad I did - the final base is quite challenging. But I don’t know what was accomplished; I didn’t feel like I got a huge payoff from all that build-up, because the mission is not very interesting. It gave me Warcraft III-esque build-a-base-itis vibes.
This mission is intentionally simplified because it’s early in the campaign; but the lack of breadth (units, structures) and depth (complex mission objectives) makes the addition of cumbersome unit management and a natural expansion more boring than anything else.
I felt similarly confused when I played through a few other missions, too:
Into The Fire, the first mission, offers players a choice as to how to complete the mission. But the choice doesn’t make any difference; why include it?
The Stand, the fourth mission, offers bonus objectives for players to grab outside of their turtled-up base. But one of the objectives is inside the player’s safe zone, so going to get it is more a hassle than a risk-reward decision; why?
Stormlands, the last mission, introduces the Vulcan’s Jump Jets ability. But the map is covered by lightning storms that are challenging to dodge for the slow Vulcan, even with the new ability; why? (Maybe I missed an interaction where you’re intended to clear a different path, somehow, where there isn’t lightning?)
To be sure, I don’t expect a carbon copy of StarCraft II. My point is that Wings’s missions felt more thoughtful in how they were crafted. When I look at the Stormgate analogues, it feels like they borrow the core concept, but then tweak it in ways that don’t always make sense in-context.
I can’t really speak to the intention, but it reminds me of that meme about “copying my homework but changing it a little bit”. It feels like these missions have a reactive relationship with prior art - here’s a good mission, let’s do something like that - rather than a proactive relationship - here’s what we’re trying to accomplish, and here’s a reference mission that accomplishes the same thing. And I think that nets out negatively for the gameplay.
Anyway, nowadays I reference memes in my analysis, so it’s all downhill from here, I guess.
Worldbuilding
I didn’t get Stormgate’s world building, particularly Amara. She is not a very sympathetic main character. When she captures a prisoner who was working with the Infernals, she is understandably unkind; but when he points out that his other choice was to literally die, she threatens to… kill him. Alright? Amara also never explains why she repeatedly chooses not to communicate with her higher-ups. She then makes a number of bizarre battlefield decisions, like dismissing one of her own crew members - but then turning around and wanting to rescue him in the very next mission.
Well, maybe she’s not supposed to be sympathetic. Sure. But in that case, I don’t get why I’m here. I’m new to the world of Stormgate - I don’t know any of these factions, or characters, or references. And I don’t have a reason to care about them, either. So in the absence of something that pulls me into the world - like a character I’m rooting for - it’s a struggle for me to maintain interest in the story.
I feel that this is a common mistake among indie campaigns. I wrote something similar about Grey Goo, and it unfortunately applies here as well:
I never feel this way about Grey Goo’s [characters]; I’m never a given a chance to understand their motivations or care about their fate. At times I feel like this is such a classic indie game mistake - the freedom to create whatever you’d like spilling over into self-indulgence - wherein the story and lore are deemed to be so inherently interesting that the game absolves itself of actually convincing anyone of that fact.
I guess I’m supposed to feel for the humans being invaded, but the game never does anything to pull me in that direction. I guess I’m supposed to be intrigued by the big baddie, but I don’t know anything about the Infernals anyway; what does it matter if it’s this bad guy or that bad guy? I guess I’m supposed to be interested in The Blade, but I’m assuming it’s just a Celestial artifact. (And if it’s not Celestial - I still don’t get why it’s interesting).
I don’t think Amara needs to be a sympathetic main character. But she’s the one of the few elements of the story with depth or backstory; in the absence of caring about her, I need some other reason to maintain interest in the world. And I haven’t found that yet.
Waiting for the Next-Generation
Shortly after the campaign’s release, Tim Campbell, Game Director at Frost Giant, released a laundry list of improvements that the team is planning for the campaign. Here it is if you want to check it out.
I mean, generally speaking, I’m sympathetic to the fact that Stormgate is unfinished and in Early Access. I hope that the campaign will be significantly improved; that sounds like the plan, based on Mr. Campbell’s description of this release as the starting line, not the finish line.
And I do think it’s important to separate criticism of the product with criticism of the developers themselves. I wrote a tweet thread about this a week or two back; the developers have proven their skills with v1 of the competitive play. I have no doubt that they’re capable of building a great campaign.
But… it’s really far from that, currently. And I don’t think Early Access should stop anyone from playing what’s been released and having an opinion on it. It is sold in a store as a product, after all. So from that perspective, I’m sad to say that I’m disappointed by Stormgate’s campaign. Objectively, it has the least content of any I’ve ever played, while subjectively it feels like a productionized tech demo - an absence of meaningful world building paired with heavily borrowed elements from previous games, while adding twists that I don’t understand.
And honestly, let me preface this next part by saying that I’m confused by the level of emotional investment many folks seem to have in this game, both positive and negative. But this campaign makes me feel semi-dumb for getting excited about Early Access. Even my cold, cynical heart sank when I cracked open The Stand and thought… wait, isn’t this The Dig, but worse?
I’ve played Early Access titles before, including one that I was intensely looking forward to (Satisfactory). And this is the first time I’ve felt negatively about it. It’s not a money thing (I was happy to pay $60 for the Deluxe thingamajig), and I don’t even think it’s an expectations thing. It’s just… not a great campaign, at least not yet.
Frost Giant went on record a week back stating that “mixed reviews are to be expected”. I’m a little confused as to why they would come out the gate with their most popular game mode in this condition. But, well, they did, and, well, here we are, I guess.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming improvements and new missions.
Until next time,
brownbear
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