Tag Archives: sci-fi

Growing Frustration with Stormgate

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After an releasing an intensely mediocre Steam Next Fest demo, Stormgate developer Frost Giant Studios has continued to court controversy. The developers have caused confusion over what “fully funded to launch” means, they’ve flirted with the idea of using generative AI to run its story NPCs, and they’ve launched an equity crowdfunding campaign.

A promotional image for upcoming RTS Stormgate.I think equity crowdfunding is a bit of a dodgy road to go down in the first place, but what really raised my eyebrows is that in the documentation around said campaign they claim StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was their previous release.

A screenshot of a Frost Giant Studios equity crowdfunding document, in which they falsely claim to have been the team to launch StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty.This is problematic because — and I can’t stress this enough — Frost Giant Studios and Blizzard Entertainment are not the same company.

Yes, some people at Frost Giant are ex-Blizzard, but the extent to which they have anointed themselves Blizzard 2 is getting really questionable, and they certainly can’t claim to have been the same team that launched WoL.

I’ve seen some seemingly well-researched reddit posts claiming that almost no one at Frost Giant actually had a major leadership role in the development of SC2. Certainly as a long time SC2 fanatic I can confirm that the only names I recognize at Frost Giant are Micky Neilson, who is just doing lore and not even a full-timer at FG, and Kevin Dong, who only joined the SC2 co-op team well after its launch (and in hindsight co-op’s quality dropped significantly under his leadership).

When I think of the main brains behind SC2, I think David Kim, Dustin Browder, Chris Metzen, Brian Kindregan, and Valerie Watrous, none of whom are employees at Frost Giant to my knowledge. Metzen is supposedly doing some consulting for them, but we have no idea how big his role actually is.

A promotional image for upcoming RTS Stormgate.I’m generally in favour of not ascribing to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, and I think calling game devs shady is an over-used trope, but I find it really hard to frame Frost Giant’s claim of ownership over Wings of Liberty as anything but deliberately disingenuous.

At this point I’ve lost pretty much all hope for Stormgate. There’s just way too many red flags around the game, not the least of which being that its current version just isn’t fun.

It’s frustrating because the RTS genre really needs a new champion right now, and Stormgate seemed to be the best candidate. Age of Empires IV has stumbled a lot post-launch. Godsworn is fun, but too small to be the Next Big Thing. ZeroSpace and Immortal: Gates of Pyre both have great ideas, but I don’t think either has a very good chance to deliver on their lofty ambitions. ZeroSpace so far looks far too complex to appeal to casual gamers, Gates of Pyre has been all but silent for a worryingly long time, and both are from small teams with little to no mainstream name recognition.

I want to be clear I’m not saying this to hate on Gates of Pyre or ZeroSpace. I love the ideas both games have presented, and I would be incredibly happy to see both survive and thrive. I’m just worried they won’t be able to.

Still, I have more faith in them than I do in Stormgate at this point.

Thoughts on Halo’s Bizarre Second Season

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I was sure I had posted about the Halo TV series when the first season aired, but I can’t find the post now, so presumably it was yet another thing I’ve let fall through the cracks recently.

Master Chief John 117 in the opening credits of the Halo TV series.The short version is I was a big fan. I haven’t technically played the games, but I did watch through them on YouTube for the stories. I found the plot of the original trilogy largely enjoyable, in no small part due to the massive influence it clearly draws from StarCraft, but I don’t view it as an unimpeachable masterpiece with no room for improvement.

The first season of the TV series felt to me like it took the source material and elevated it, adding a level of depth that a first person shooter can’t deliver. It was a great deconstruction of the super-soldier trope, illustrating in exquisite detail just what a horrible idea turning humans into weapons actually is.

After an interminable wait of several years, the bite-sized eight episode second season has finally arrived (modern television is a miserable hellscape). Between seasons, they completely changed the showrunning team; I was concerned this would make the show feel different, and good lord did it ever.

This is scarcely recognizable as the same series. This is especially true in the early part of the season, where they go out of their way to avoid addressing season one’s cliffhanger or continue its plot threads for several episodes before finally circling back around to continuing the original story. What an utterly bizarre way to do things.

A Sangheili elite pilots a Covenant ship in Halo season two.Even once things do meander back to the original plot, it never quite feels the same. Many cast members have wildly different characterizations. Even visually, the show feels radically different. Once a very bright and colourful show, the pallet has become dominated by grey and gloom.

The style of writing is different, too. Season one felt shockingly smart considering the source material. I wouldn’t say season two is dumb, but it does hew a lot closer to standard media tropes and generally feels more safe and predictable.

It’s all even more confusing because if you were going to reset the direction of the show, you’d think it would be to bring it more in line with the canon of the games, as season one deviated from it a lot. But that’s largely not the case. Things do start to trend a bit more towards the events of the games, particularly near the end, but it’s still diverging pretty wildly from original canon.

I am, as I said, a big fan of season one, but a criticism I can agree with it is that it had far too little focus on the Halo itself, and on Cortana. Some dudebro gamers may disagree with me on this, but I’ll die on the hill that Cortana is the real main character of this franchise. Master Chief is her sidekick.

Kwan Ha in Halo's second season.But bafflingly these are mistakes season two continues to make. The Halo isn’t even mentioned for the first several episodes, and Cortana is barely there.

It’s not a bad season, to be clear. I’m griping a lot, but it’s still a largely enjoyable action series. It’s mostly the comparison to season one that makes it suffer. Season two isn’t bad, but season one was better, and the jarringly abrupt transition between the two styles is so hard to overcome.

Mind you, it does seem like most of the fanbase prefers this season, so once again I appear to be the lone voice in the wilderness on this. One day it would be really nice to have a normal opinion on something…

I’m invested enough in the show that I’d like to see another season (which given current trends will probably be three episodes long and take five years to make), but I do really wish we could have seen the original showrunners deliver on their vision.