Frost Giant Studios will launch Stormgate: Campaign One — Ashes of Earth, a real-time strategy game that blends sci-fi and fantasy, on Steam on August 5.
The real-time strategy game was built by a development team with former Blizzard Entertainment veterans, and it has been in the works since 2020. The game has been in the access more than a year, in part because fans wanted a more realistic art style that reminded them of the inspired StarCraft games from Blizzard.
The team leaders are RTS veterans Tim Morten (former production director of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void) and Tim Campbell (former lead campaign designer of WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne).
“We’ve spent a year now in early access, getting feedback from the community on all aspects of the game. But I think one of the key themes to come out was that it’s really important to the community that we get the campaign and one-versus-one competitive (multiplayer) to a polished state,” said Morten, an interview with GamesBeat. “And so this first release really represents us taking all of that feedback and trying to make the campaign and 1v1 as great as we can for their initial debut.”
Stormgate is a free-to-play RTS inspired by Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft and StarCraft
games, bringing the genre into the modern era with more approachable design, deep strategy, and cutting-edge technology.
The debut of Ashes of Earth, the game’s first story-driven campaign, represents a major milestone for the game as it exits Early Access. However, Stormgate remains in active development, with many features still evolving.
Going back to work on the basics of the game was a lot of work, and Frost Giant Studios will find out soon if it was the right move. We’ve seen the consequences of someone cutting corners and shipping their game anyway with Build A Rocket Boy’s MindsEye, which had the benefit of huge funding and hundreds of developers — only to see the game fail miserably at launch thanks to a bunch of obvious bugs.
A big project
The editor is focused on layout and world building, for the purpose of making maps.
“Already we’ve seen players be just tremendously creative, both with the layouts, which are already getting used in tournaments, but then also with implementing functionality that we weren’t expecting them to be able to implement yet, things that we believed they would need,” Morten said. “They’re already going to town, ahead of us.”
Morten said the campaign is the first of the three factions, with a focus on the human faction, or the Vanguard. There are 12 story-based missions, with some available for free. But the purchased content, the full campaign, will for the first time be available now with the launch.
“We hope to add more faction campaigns in the future, but just like StarCraft, we’re starting out with the human action first,” he said.
The campaign features the character Amara, the protagonist, coming back to Earth after having been evacuated during the earlier events that we saw in the interim.
“And so she’s now returning to try to take back Earth from the Infernals with the Vanguard forces. And so this is her story, in a lot of ways, but also the story of trying to reclaim our planet from the invaders,” said Morten.
Most of the campaign focuses on Earth, but not all the fighting is terrestrial as the humans come to blows with the Infernals, a demonic faction with a fantasy look.
“They are fundamentally aliens from another world. And they, as part of their lore, have conquered a variety of other worlds, and so their forces include not just their race, but also a variety of others that have been assimilated into their forces,” Morten said.
A year of work
Morten said that the game has gone through a sweeping amount of change over the past year — everything from the look of the game, including the look of the characters, the look of the units, the look of the terrain and the world, to the composition of the factions.
“We’ve been reworking each of the factions based on feedback for the balance of the game. We’ve done a lot of performance optimization. We added hotkey customization. We completely revamped the story based on feedback and re-recorded dialogue and wrote the scripts. We’ve added a hub for the missions where you can talk to characters and make decisions that affect gameplay. And just like a massive list of quality-of-life and feature improvements throughout the game. So it’s been a tremendous amount covered over the last year,” Morten said.
The game can feature hundred of friendly and enemy units on the screen on a map at the same time.
“We have had to be very deliberate about making sure we’re smart in our code optimization for collision, for pathfinding, also in our part optimization in terms of how we allocate triangles and textures and effects passes to each of the units, and there’s always more to be done, but we feel like we’re in a really good place,” Morten said.
Last year, fans also said they didn’t like the graphics, which looked a bit more cartoon-like. So the team brought aboard an art director from StarCraft 2, Allen Dilling, who had worked with the team before.
“He’s been really instrumental in helping us continue to evolve the look of the game. It is grittier in some ways, but hopefully still inviting to a broad base of players. We have definitely revamped unit appearances, also character appearances to respond directly to some of the player feedback that we got early on,” Morten said.
The game has a lot more customization capability for things like the automatic control of groups. The story was revamped as well. There is also a progression system now and decisions that you make in the hub for the missions can make the campaign experience feel more robust and exciting.
Morten said the team managed to get this far with a team of 50 full-time and contract staff, with many people concentrated in Irvine, California, where Blizzard is based. There are also a number of people distributed throughout the U.S. and abroad. Over time, the company raised over $40 million over the life of the company, including money from its Kickstarter campaign.
“This is a huge moment for us as a team. And I think while there is always more that we are excited to add to the game, this foundation is something that we’re very proud of and very excited to get a chance to share with a broader base of players,” Morten said.
Morten said he was glad to see some excitement around RTS games lately. One new game was Tempest Rising, which had a Command & Conquer vibe, and Broken Arrow, which is an RTS focused on a modern military setting. (I’m still itching to play that game).
When Stormgate launches on August 5, players can expect:
● The Ashes of Earth campaign, chronicling the story of the Vanguard faction. Written by New York Times bestselling author Micky Neilson, with contributions from comics legend Marv Wolfman (Teen Titans) and Blizzard veteran Chris Metzen.
● An all-star voice cast, featuring:
○ Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Barbie, Kim’s Convenience)
○ Tara Strong (Bubbles in The Powerpuff Girls, Raven in Teen Titans, Harley Quinn in the Arkham Series)
○ Matt Mercer (Cole Cassidy in Overwatch 2, Levi Ackerman in Attack on Titan, Dungeon Master of Critical Role)
○ Rosanna Pansino (Nerdy Nummies YouTube series)
○ RTS voice acting legends Bill Roper and Chris Metzen
● Three asymmetric factions for players to master: the stalwart human Vanguard, the demonic Infernal Host, and the angelic Celestial Armada.
● SnowPlay technology, which layers onto Unreal Engine 5 to power the most powerful RTS engine to date. It includes Rollback netcode—tech that revolutionized online fighting games—to minimize the feel of latency in multiplayer, a first for RTS games of this scale.
● Player-friendly improvements, including fully customizable hotkeys, unique AI skirmish opponents, and BuddyBot, an optional in-game helper for players looking for support.
● A future of innovation through Sigma Labs, Stormgate’s in-game experimental playground.
Morten said there’s a new section of the game dubbed Signal Labs, which is where the team is continuing to refine features like co-op mode and the editor which players can use to craft their own Stormgate levels. Players can try out features like three-player co-op missions and the terrain editor alpha, a UGC toolset already being used by the community to build new maps and custom content.
Stormgate’s August 5 launch is only the beginning. Major updates and features, including the much-anticipated 3v3 Team Mayhem mode, are still to come.
Stormgate is available to download for free on Steam.
Further updates
Morten said one of the future updates will include a new game mode dubbed Team Mayhem, which is a 3v3 multiplayer game mode. It will be added to Signal Labs for initial feedback. There will also be updates to the cooperative mode. Eventually, there will be more campaigns for the ongoing story — with a focus on different factions — in the future.
So far, Morten said that the developers haven’t used much AI at all. He said the AI tools are progressing, but they’re not quite mature when it comes to production-level game development. There’s some AI use in the models for things like facial animation. But most of the work is going through human hands. The excitement around the editor is big.
“With Starcraft 2 fans, it feels like there is a very passionate content creator base out there looking forward to just pushing the limits of what a game editor can do,” Morten said. “That’s an area that we knew was appealing to players, but we didn’t understand the full magnitude of passion that that content creator audience has, so that’s been really encouraging for us as a team to see what they are doing.”
The game is free-to-play with three bundles that are at $25, $40 and $60 price points.
Morten said the team had access to great voice talent, like Simu Liu, the actor in Marvel’s Shang-Chi, who turned out to be a big RTS fan. Liu is the voice for the Infernal demon Warz. And there are Blizzard veterans Bill Roper and Chris Metzen who also lent their voices.