StarCraft 2's veterans left Blizzard to make Stormgate, the co-op RTS of their dreams
There's a world in which Stormgate never exists. In that world, Blizzard never merged with Activision or discovered just how lucrative Overwatch's loot boxes could be. Bizarro Blizzard decided that StarCraft 2, one of the finest real-time strategy games ever made, was worthy of a sequel pronto, and this preview in Bizarro PC Gamer would be about StarCraft 3 instead. But in our real world, the key minds behind StarCraft 2 got tired of waiting for the chance to maybe, someday, make StarCraft 3. When it became clear that a new RTS was not happening at Blizzard anytime soon, they stopped waiting, struck out on their own, and started making Stormgate instead.
In one sense Stormgate is a brand new RTS, launching into beta in 2023. In another sense it's the sequel to StarCraft 2 that production lead Tim Morten and a veteran crew have been wanting to make for six years.
Take a glance at what they're planning, and it's easy to see how Stormgate began life as the dream of a StarCraft that would never be. Naturally it hits the classics:
But generic brand StarCraft this is not: after checking off those must-have features, Stormgate's developers actually seem focused on convincing players the RTS isn't washed up just yet, despite a lean decade in the wake of League of Legends. This is what actually has me excited for Stormgate:
«There's an opportunity to take RTS away from feeling like a solitary experience and into feeling like a more social experience,» says Tim Morten, who co-founded Frost Giant after years of working on StarCraft 2. Morten says that even when they added co-op to StarCraft 2, players still often gave them the feedback that the game felt lonely. «MOBAs, battle royale, even Roblox, these are social experiences,
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