In some of the biggest news yet this year, the good folks at Frost Giant announced in a reddit thread that a small closed Pre-Alpha testing phase will begin in July. This smaller phase will roll into a slightly larger (but still small) alpha phase, and a more expansive beta phase as progress continues. While there are no confirmed timelines on the alpha and beta, we can hope that that they are shooting for late 2023/early 2024 for those larger cohorts.
Closed Beta Selection
Of course, the big question anyone is going to be asking about this announcement is “how do I get my hands on the beta that was just announced?” The answer is somewhat nuanced and coincides with the different phases of testing.
The pre-alpha stage kicking off in July will be very small and appears to be comprised mostly of people who have made significant impacts in the RTS space and/or the budding Stormgate community in particular. That being said, anyone who signed up for the closed beta will be eligible to be selected, and Gerald is careful to point out that they want to include players from different RTS, tech, regional, etc backgrounds to each playtest. He also states that some of the more active contributors of the /r/Stormgate subreddit will receive invites, and we can assume that something like that will be offered to members of some of the bigger discord communities as well (s/o Stormgate & Frost Giant Community!).
From there, the beta will only continue to grow more expansive and inclusive, with players chosen from the closed beta signup link – make sure to fill it out if you haven’t already! Invites are still expected to go out “well into 2024.”
Gameplay
Frost Giant has spoken in the past about their “vertical slicing” approach to development – an approach that has them upgrade very thing slices of content to production quality as a proof of concept. From reports from the earliest community playtests (like Neuro’s), it appears that the Human Resistance is the only faction sufficiently ready for testing, and Gerald confirmed this in a reddit comment. It’s going to be interesting to see how close the Frost Giant team is to deploying a second faction (and non 1v1 content!), and what changes they have made to make mirror matches more dynamic than they were in the Blizzard RTS games.
Content
Unfortunately, the first rounds of closed pre-alpha testing will be under an NDA and content embargo, so excited fans won’t be able to “binge watch Stormgate” just yet. That being said, while it doesn’t look like Frost Giant will be presenting at the Summer Games Fest, repeated hints by Gerald and Tim Morten’s statement in the December 2022 tech reveal that they would “share some gameplay footage next year before closed testing starts” strongly points at one of the other gaming shows around the same time, with the PC Gaming Show on June 11 looking a likely candidate!
Getting Involved
As always, if you want to engage with the Frost Giant developers and get information from them as they post it, you should sign up for their newsletter, head on over to /r/Stormgate on reddit, and sign up for the beta and wishlist the game on steam!