On Tuesday, May 23, Frost Giant invited a little over 100 content creators and pro players to get a sneak preview of the content they will be showing at the PC Gaming Show on Sunday, June 11. I'll be co-streaming it on twitch.tv/beomulf and we’ll have a full suite of analysis about the big reveals there as well. That being said, we’ve got a ton of juicy details to go over before June 11, as Frost Giant went over a lot at the summit. This first article will go over what we can talk about now, and then we’ll have a follow up article after the PC Gaming Show that goes even more into things (and you should definitely be excited!)
First, some housekeeping: all the content creators at the summit (you may have seen some of their vague tweets about getting excited) will have access to the pre-alpha coming in July. Unfortunately for the audience at large, that content will be under streaming embargo for the time being – so if your favorite content creator streams markedly less in July, that’s probably why! Creators will be able to discuss our general impressions of the closed alpha and future betas, however. If you want to get into the beta, there will be a lottery randomly selecting people that have registered for Closed Beta on playstormgate.com as well as a selection of people that fulfil specific testing criteria.
New Content
Now that the official stuff is out of the way, let’s get into the juicy content drop. We’ll split this into two sections – new game and character art concept art. We should also note that this article is a bit of a summary – there’s far too much content here to dive deep into everything at the depth we would like to. We’ll save that for future coverage!
In Game Concept Art
The first takeaway from this new concept art is the inclusion of different biomes or terrains. At the time of writing, the only real terrain set that has been revealed has been some version of a beautiful, verdant forest that Frost Giant is calling the “Hinterlands.” The Earth contains far more locations that that, and it makes sense that this planet (and maybe universe?) spanning battle will move from green forests. For those of you that are fans of arid wastelands – good news! We’ve got some art of a new area that Frost Giant is calling the “Deadlands,” a region obliterated by nuclear or chemical warfare in the early days of the war with the Infernals.
Even better, we’ve got some fun UI mockups in the Deadlands as well. It seems that our rampant speculation over the background of that one Simu Liu picture was mostly correct – we’ve got a centered command console with a tabbed card for what looks like army units, army production, structure production, and research (although that UI is apparently several iterations behind the current iteration, per Gerald Villoria). We can also see two different resources (blue and pink) and supply. Also, for those of you worried about unit portraits, there is a rather clear slot for a unit portrait to slot into. On the art side, its going to be interesting to see what color palate they go with for the wasteland – that greenish blue or sickly yellow?
For lovers of the Hinterlands, we’ve got a couple shots to allow us to explore. Outside of the art being gorgeous, it is interesting to point out a) the sense of scale that the terrain provides and b) the fact that one of the images has 4+ terrain levels in it. It makes sense that a modern engine might provide the option, but this is something that was added very late into Starcraft 2’s lifespan and still hasn’t been fully explored. It’s also awesome to see that they are experimenting with terrain effecting structure appearance, as we can see the structure in the Deadlands looking a bit more faded and weathered than it is in the Hinterlands.
Finally, we’ve got some story hints. The last two pieces of concept art that Frost Giant provided us with give us a bit of insight into a Project Sigma research facility. As a refresher, the Sigma program was a series of endeavors that was intended to help save humanity from a hothouse early scenario – Sigma 6 developed/reactivated the Stormgates that brought the Infernals back to Earth. The images we’ve seen here seem to be telling that story. The first one shows a pristine Sigma installation flanked by a massive infernal Skeleton. The second shows that same facility annihilated with blood splattered about the place. Clearly the Infernals were brought into the world and slaughtered everyone and everything in their escape. That, or this was a research station raided and destroyed by the Infernals for some other reason, but I choose to believe that this is potential storyboard for the early campaign!
Character Art
Not only does the concept art provide some campaign hints, we’ve got three images that Frost Giant describes as “Key Art – Look of Show.” I assume these images will be used to define the theme of some upcoming presentation? Regardless, we’ve got some new shots about some of the main characters we can expect to see in the campaign. We don’t know much about them just yet (although it appears that the woman is going to be named Amara!), but all three images seem to be characterized by a much grittier look compared to the initial images we saw at the Summer Games Fest last year. Amara in particular seems to be wearing some powered bodysuit – is she the mech pilot from the announcement trailer?
Finally, we’ve got some sort of an action shot of what we can assume is a Sigma scientist and some sort of soldier. If we look at the background, we can see a similar setup to the Sigma Lab we looked at earlier – is a storyboard still of the first summoning of the Infernals?
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!