With former Blizzard builders concerned within the StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo sequence on its workforce, Frost Big Studios actually has a stable pedigree. However its new RTS sport Stormgate landed final yr to a decidedly blended reception. Gamers felt it had arrived too quickly, with criticisms of an absence of visible polish and low manufacturing values on its marketing campaign cutscenes. Since then, nonetheless, the workforce has been laborious at work on enhancements, and a brand new Stormgate replace out in the present day appears to be like to make some severe adjustments, together with a visible overhaul and the sport’s most-requested quality-of-life characteristic.
The brand new Stormgate replace features a full overhaul to the sport’s lighting, together with enhancements to the bottom element and textures, and a brand new cross to visible results. You’ll even see the lighting shift over time when taking part in on a few maps. Based mostly on the preview video under, it actually appears to be like like a significant step up – excellent news for the RTS sport after Frost Big’s announcement 4 months in the past that it had introduced on former StarCraft 2 lead artist Allen Dilling as its new artwork director. Alongside this comes a full audio rebalance. Recreation director Tim Campbell notes that “there’s nonetheless a number of work to do on this space, however we’re making progress.”
Maybe essentially the most thrilling information for technique sport veterans is the arrival of absolutely customizable unit, construction, macro, and command hotkeys. This implies now you can lastly arrange your controls precisely as you want them. Whereas Stormgate’s intelligent hotkey mannequin is pretty intuitive for a newcomer, everybody all the time has their very own private rhythm for the way they prefer to play, so this can be a large enchancment to total high quality of life.
You can even now manage your management teams. There’s the flexibility to arrange user-defined computerized teams and decide which models are assigned to them as they’re skilled. In case you, like me, have all the time had a specific desire for which key you utilize to pick out all of your melee models, or maybe fancy a separate grouping only for transport automobiles, now you may make that occur.
The ‘choose all military’ hotkey has been reworked so now you can pull models out of the group to ship them on a unique activity with out by accident reselecting them instantly afterwards. There are additionally new, bindable hotkeys for options akin to eradicating a unit from a management group, ‘stealing’ a few of your forces from one group to place in one other, and shortly biking by your whole major base buildings.
New ‘flocking’ habits for flight models will imply they group up as they’re shifting after which unfold out at their vacation spot, somewhat than making an attempt to awkwardly path round one another. This feels lots nearer to the way in which StarCraft flyers work, and I’m very glad to see it. Unit turning and projectile habits has additionally been rebalanced. Multiplayer video games will now permit gamers to pause the sport as much as thrice every in case of emergencies, and the post-game versus display affords a variety of detailed stats and graphs to test your efficiency.
Stormgate replace 0.3.0 is out now. You’ll be able to learn by the complete patch notes courtesy of Frost Big Studios. Campbell provides that the workforce is “full velocity forward on each a marketing campaign revamp and faction updates,” so there’s lots to stay up for sooner or later for the free Steam sport.
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