by theygamesWith former Blizzard developers involved in the StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo series on its team, Frost Giant Studios certainly has a solid pedigree. But its new RTS game Stormgate landed last year to a decidedly mixed reception. Players felt it had arrived too soon, with criticisms of a lack of visual polish and low production values on its campaign cutscenes. Since then, however, the team has been hard at work on improvements, and a new Stormgate update out today looks to make some serious changes, including a visual overhaul and the game’s most-requested quality-of-life feature.
The new Stormgate update includes a full overhaul to the game’s lighting, along with improvements to the ground detail and textures, and a new pass to visual effects. You’ll even see the lighting shift over time when playing on a couple of maps. Based on the preview video below, it certainly looks like a major step up – good news for the RTS game after Frost Giant’s announcement four months ago that it had brought on former StarCraft 2 lead artist Allen Dilling as its new art director. Alongside this comes a full audio rebalance. Game director Tim Campbell notes that “there’s still a lot of work to do in this area, but we’re making progress.”
Perhaps the most exciting news for strategy game veterans is the arrival of fully customizable unit, structure, macro, and command hotkeys. This means you can now finally set up your controls exactly as you like them. While Stormgate’s clever hotkey model is fairly intuitive for a newcomer, everyone always has their own personal rhythm for how they like to play, so this is a massive improvement to overall quality of life.
You can also now organize your control groups. There’s the ability to set up user-defined automatic groups and determine which units are assigned to them as they’re trained. If you, like me, have always had a particular preference for which key you use to select all your melee units, or perhaps fancy a separate grouping just for transport vehicles, now you can make that happen.
The ‘select all army’ hotkey has been reworked so you can now pull units out of the group to send them on a different task without accidentally reselecting them immediately afterwards. There are also new, bindable hotkeys for features such as removing a unit from a control group, ‘stealing’ some of your forces from one group to put in another, and quickly cycling through all of your main base structures.
New ‘flocking’ behavior for flight units will mean they group up as they’re moving and then spread out at their destination, rather than trying to awkwardly path around each other. This feels a lot closer to the way StarCraft flyers work, and I’m very glad to see it. Unit turning and projectile behavior has also been rebalanced. Multiplayer games will now allow players to pause the game up to three times each in case of emergencies, and the post-game versus screen offers a range of detailed stats and graphs to check your performance.
Stormgate update 0.3.0 is out now. You can read through the full patch notes courtesy of Frost Giant Studios. Campbell adds that the team is “full speed ahead on both a campaign revamp and faction updates,” so there’s a lot to look forward to in the future for the free Steam game.
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