In what is perhaps Frost Giant’s biggest reveal to date, today we got a look behind the scenes at what’s been happening in the various Alpha tests Frost Giant has been conducting. Not only that, we got a look at some of the internal tournaments that testers have been organizing – one cast by yours truly! It’s a sweeping look at a whole host of awesome details in about 7 minutes.
Performance
Per the video, one of the big goals for the Pre-Alpha test was not necessarily to test any specific thing about the game (balance, gameplay, mechanics, etc), but instead to just test how stable the game was when deployed to several hundred people. To the delight of the play testers and devs alike, it turned out to be extremely stable, which allowed us to quickly try to develop the best ways to break the (limited) meta for the Vanguard units available to test.
That’s not the only big performance check, though. More recently, Frost Giant announced that they were testing rollback netcode in the current Alpha test. The results aren’t included in this video, but feedback that Frost Giant has shared publicly is overwhelming positive – people report being able to play games from some pretty terrible connections. If this works (and it still is very much a work in progress), rollback netcode looks like it may solve or mitigate the majority of issues that come from playing cross-server. Its never going to be 100% perfect, but between rollback and the Hathora infrastructure, the days of certain servers being abjectly unplayable seem to be a thing of the past.
They also mention that each build is named after an RTS unit or concept. The Pre-Alpha was named Apocalypse, Alpha 1, Baneling (things didn’t explode!), and the current build of the Alpha is called Chronosphere. Each build, they’ve significantly increased the number of players in the test – pre-alpha was several hundred and Chronosphere tripled the number of testers compared to Baneling. The tests should only continue to grow from there
Meta
In the video, Frost Giant talks about how the goal of these tests is not to develop balance – but instead to test server stability, try out new ideas, and look at how the design of systems works. Of course, when you invite a bunch of high-level players and content creators into an alpha, they’ll immediately get to work breaking the balance of the game. In fact, the literal first build order published in the Alpha discord was from feardragon64 and involves the placement of Vanguard turrets inside your opponent’s base as quickly as possible.
In the Pre-Alpha and Alpha 1, the first B.O.B. that was used to build a structure would hide inside of that structure – so it was nearly impossible to reactively stop these turret rushes, and they became a stable of high level play extremely quickly, even going so far as to secure the win of the Pre-Alpha Tournament that Catz organized. Of course, there were more builds in the Pre-Alpha – Scarlett in particular was fond of a two factory hedgehog opener to establish tempo, but it was certainly cannons that dominated the meta.
The other dominant component of the meta was the inclusion of Skyriders later into the game. Skyriders were included in the gameplay reveal back in June, but we had no information on what they did at the time. All we knew was that they had some energy bar and a basic attack. This video reveals more – skyriders had a bubble that would mitigate 100% of the damage that units within it would take from units outside of the bubble. This, coupled with the strength of exos in the Pre-Alpha and Alpha 1, meant that the game would inevitably turn into a game of “who has more bubbles?”
However, before the days of turret and skyrider supremacy, the pre-alpha map led to a totally different meta altogether. Frost Giant has been talking about including creep camps into Stormgate as a tool to force players to interact on the map and provide different win conditions. That was extremely true in the Pre-Alpha, as the map included a speed zone just outside of each players base. As the early-game S.C.O.U.T. unit that each player starts with would slow other S.C.O.U.T.S., it rapidly became a fight over how fast you could take your speed camp – because if you didn’t, you opponent surely would, and that was game over. Your opponent’s S.C.O.U.T.s would overrun yours, and the slow meant that only having one additional S.C.O.U.T. would win the fight and the game.
Luckily, those ideas have been toned down significantly for the more recent testing, as even the video acknowledges that it was a bit too overpowered!
Tournaments
Frost Giant has been rather vocal about how their goal is to make a great game – any esports will follow the game genuinely being good. Of course, that doesn’t stop us in the community that love both the intersection of RTS games and esports – so each alpha stage has had a tournament. In the Pre-Alpha tournament, Catz organized a team-based tournament with 4 teams of 4 players and one revive each. The interesting part, though, was that the winning team from the semifinals could steal a player from the losing team for the finals in an attempt to ensure that the best players from the Pre-Alpha would play for the glory of a discord tag in the finals. Scarlett’s team ended up taking the victory over PartinG’s in the EPA, securing her position as the best player of the Pre-Alpha.
The fun didn’t stop in the Pre-Alpha, as Rally Cry organized the End of Alpha 1 tournament. In this one, I pulled together a production for the discord that involved multiple discord accounts sharing their perspectives – not the high quality production that Stormgate will eventually have, but enough to watch the action. Adico (of Age of Empires tournament organizing fame) cast the Round of 8 onwards with me. This tournament was also characterized by skyrider bubbles and turrets, but the games that went later really showcased the promise of Stormgate. The video unfortunately doesn’t have any clips of the game, but Mixu vs Kiwian in the Round of 8 took the entire map and showcased some incredible gameplay. It’s going to be incredibly interesting to see what happens as more maps and factions are introduced and those factions’ tech trees are filled out.
In the finals of the Alpha 1 tournament, kiwian took a 2-0 victory over PartinG – clearly this relegates PartinG to the kong of Stormgate. That final series was really defined by the skyriders, as kiwian was able to consistently get to the bubble tech faster off some interesting turret play. He wasn’t trying to kill PartinG – just steal his camps and put pressure on his natural as he expanded behind.
Moving forward into Alpha 2, Adico has started running a weekly tournament series called the Alpha Navigators Cup. I guess we’ll just have to wait until the next battle report to see whats happening in those events!
Infernals
The big reveal for the current Alpha stage is that Frost Giants have opened up Infernals for testing. In the last couple seconds of the video, we see new Infernal gameplay – and the confirmation of a new unit called the Gaunt. Gaunts are Tier 1 ranged units that apply a damage-over-time effect on their ranged attacks. If units die while under the effect of this effect, their corpse will spawn a fiend (the tiny units that come out of splitting brutes as revealed at Gamescom). This marks five units that have been revealed for the Infernals thus far – the Gaunt, the Brute, the Fiend, the Imp, and the Spriggan flying unit that was revealed in their most recent community update.
The other interesting component of the video was the structure that showed in the last seconds as the gaunt player went on the attack. This structure is called a Barrow Farm, and is the supply structure for the Infernals. It provides some base supply, and spawns units called Fellhogs that are each worth one supply. They also will attack any aggressive units within a leash range, which is an incredibly interesting take on static defense – effectively sacrificing some supply cap in exchange for some level of defense.
The final interesting component of the video is that it provides a bit more insight into what the Shroud does (at least in this iteration of the build). Some of the infernal units have a white bar above them that replaces their health bar that appears to increase when they are in the Shroud – so it appears that the Shroud mechanic provides some amount of shield over time when Infernal units are inside of it, at least in this build of the Alpha.
It bears repeating that everything in this video is currently in significant development – there have been significant changes between Alpha 1 and Alpha 2, and I expect this to continue as development continues. This is just a snapshot in time, and doesn’t really represent the final Stormgate product.
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!