Stormgate's Poor Launch; Players Disappointed With RTS From Blizzard Veterans
Stormgate, an RTS from the co-developers of Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2, scored a disappointing release in Steam Early Access. The game is getting poor activity scores and mixed reviews.
The day before yesterday, the Stormgate strategy was released in early access. There were high expectations for this game - out of all the premieres this week, this title has the most followers on Steam. Moreover, some saw the project as a potential catalyst for a revival of traditionally developed RTS games, as it involves people who played pivotal roles in creating popular titles like Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. With such high expectations, we are checking how the game is doing several hours after its premiere on Steam Early Access.
The activity results are poor, but this may change
Unfortunately, discussing attendance success is difficult. The activity record on the premiere day reached 4854 players playing simultaneously. What's worse, on the second day this result dropped significantly - yesterday's record was only 2547 users at the same time.
However, it's not worth dismissing the game based on this data alone. The situation here is unusual because the Early Access version is currently being offered for a fee. However, it won't last long - because on August 13th, the game will switch to a free-to-play model. Most probably, a significant number of interested Stormgate players, if not the majority, chose to wait for two weeks, believing that the bonuses of the paid version (an extra character and one additional campaign mission) aren't worth purchasing without knowing.
Poor reception
A more significant issue is that players who purchased the game during early access aren't expressing great enthusiasm for it. Stormgate currently has only 56% positive reviews on Steam, which the website categorizes as a "mixed" reception of the game.
Gamers are unhappy with the insufficient technical polish and lack of originality in the gameplay. The latter is a big problem, because the target group of this title is people who mostly still play StarCraft 2, so they have no good reason to switch to its clone, which also has less content and more bugs. In many reviews, the opinion is repeated that Stormgate offers nothing that we can't find in other RTS games.
Below we present a few reviews from Steam.
Good thing you can refund even though the store page says you can not. Everything feels like a placeholder. Where did the 40M+ budget go?
The game makes no sense at all. he slogan "next gen RTS" is an absolute lie. But even ignoring that slogan and just looking at the game itself, there is nothing in it that even comes close to the level of Starcraft 2, Warcraft 3, or Age of Empires 4 (though admittedly, the game has little in common with AoE4 and is more of a mix of 80% Starcraft 2 and 20% Warcraft 3). But that's the main problem: in no aspect does the game outperform any of these titles; it lags behind by 5-10 years.
The game is extremely incomplete and it will likely take years to achieve the necessary level of polish. It's also unnecessarily complicated for the basic level of most RTS players. What's worse, it's painfully similar to SC2 to such an extent that it's surprising that the devs weren't sued for copyrights.
This doesn't mean, however, that all players have a negative attitude towards Stormgate. Some people liked it, despite its poor technical condition. They praise the performance and enjoyable gameplay, particularly in 1v1 multiplayer battles. Among positively inclined Steam users, a high level of game complexity is often cited as an advantage, as such people hope for long-lasting entertainment.
Overall, the game's release has been disappointing. So we are curious whether the premiere of the free-to-play version will improve the perception of the game. The title, however, has considerable potential - provided that the devs manage to improve its technical condition. The main question is whether StarCraft 2 players will give Stormgate a chance or will they stick to the older game.
