For some time now, MassivelyOP’s Not So Massively column has been keeping an eye on the crop of upcoming real time strategy games that seek to continue the legacy of StarCraft II: Stormgate, ZeroSpace, and Immortal: Gates of Pyre.
The recent Steam strategy game festival a few weeks ago had all three games participating in some way, so now’s a good time to check in and see how they’re coming along.
Immortal: Gates of Pyre
While the game is still in a barebones state, this recent demo of Immortal: Gates of Pyre added a lot more content than we’ve seen previously, including a tutorial, several more maps for competitive play, and a very early draft of co-op missions. The latter was of course my focus.
There were two missions available. One was a fairly standard “holdout” mission focused on defending an objective structure from waves of enemy attackers. This structure is supposed to automatically upgrade and offer you some kind of bonus over the course of the match, but to be honest, I couldn’t see what this bonus was. I assume it was probably some kind of resource trickle or a buff to my units that I glossed over because I’m still learning the game. It’s a cool idea, but it definitely needs more clarity.
The other mission has you fighting over a series of control points to earn points toward victory – a fairly common scenario in PvP, but less common in versus AI RTS modes. I found it made for a fun, hectic back-and-forth battle.
A further wrinkle comes in the form of waves of war golems that spawn under your command as you progress toward victory. I like this idea in theory, but since the golems count towards your population cap, they eventually start to overtake your army composition, which can be a bit frustrating. I want to play the army of my chosen immortal, not just use the golems. I would like to see the golems either not take up population or be much fewer in number, with stronger stats to compensate.
I haven’t heard a peep about Immortal‘s supposed plan to integrate NFTs for a while. I hope this means the devs are backing off the idea, but it’s much more likely that they just know it’s bad press and are keeping it on the downlow. Overall, my opinion of the game remains unchanged by this demo: It has incredible potential and brilliant concepts, but I think it’s very unlikely to ever launch in a complete and polished state. After years of development, it’s still barely more than a proof of concept build.
ZeroSpace
Moving over to ZeroSpace, I found the biggest addition in its recent demo was a small sample of the campaign in the form of its first two missions.
The demo campaign opens with a message warning the campaign is still in an unfinished state, and it definitely showed. Facial animations for portraits were janky or missing, voice lines played over top of each other or didn’t play at all, and Mera’s hair changed colour from one scene to another.
As with the faction design, the story is extremely tropey and a bit too obvious about where it’s drawing its inspiration. When the protagonist’s old friend started talking about his son, I knew exactly what was going to happen to him, and I kept expecting Hel to tell me he had to get back to his calibrations.
Despite these issues, though, I did mostly enjoy this small sample of the campaign. I groaned a bit when the second mission turned out to be a dungeon crawl, as those are often tedious in an RTS, but collectible power ups and some light puzzle mechanics added a lot of spice to the experience, and I ended up having a lot of fun with it. This is the kind of inventive level design we saw in StarCraft II, and it’s great to see ZeroSpace keeping that legacy alive.
Its lack of originality notwithstanding, the story already shows some promise. There’s some intriguing hints of deeper mysteries, the introduction of Mass Effect style story choices are an interesting twist on the RTS genre, and the characters felt pretty well-realized right off the bat, helped along by some fairly strong voice acting.
Overall, I enjoyed this sample of the campaign, and I was disappointed when I got to the end of it as I wanted to keep playing, but I do hope the rest of the campaign doesn’t lean quite so hard on familiar tropes.
Also new with this demo was a revamp of the Legion of Truth faction. Most notably, the Legion received a new unit in the form of the mammoth, a massive beast that can be ridden by Legion infantry units. I found this single unit had a surprisingly large impact (no pun intended) on my experience with the faction. Cheaper than terror tanks and dreadnoughts, the mammoth provides a solid mid-game option and strengthens the Legion’s identity as a faction that starts out with weak units but then transitions into huge, tanky bruisers. Good stuff.
The Legion also got their first co-op commander for use in the galactic war, the mage-like Galavax. An adaptation of one of the hero’s from competitive play, the co-op version of Galavax has two stances he can swap between, one using fire and one lightning, with different specialties. His army is pretty much like the competitive version of the Legion, though, same as the other two factions’ current commanders. As I said in the past, I think this is OK as long as future commanders are more creative.
Finally, while the co-op missions haven’t changed much, there is a new addition in the form of mutators that can be randomly applied to planets on the frontline of the war. These mutators include effects like increased range for enemy units, or enemy units spawning hostile spiderlings on death, and completing a mutated mission provides bonus XP. The mutators added a significant amount of challenge and variety to the experience, and I like that they make where you’re fighting in the galaxy somewhat relevant.
The mutators are also available in custom games, which could make for some really whacky versus AI or casual PvP games.
This most recent demo showed ZeroSpace making positive progress, but it’s also clear to me that the game still needs a lot more work before it’s ready for release. I know the devs have already said they’ll probably be delaying their planned May launch, but honestly the fact that timeline was even considered is concerning. This game seems as if it’s at least a year away from completion.
I’m also growing increasingly worried about the apparent lack of hype around the game. I found it very difficult to find partners for co-op missions this time around (possibly because the demo was delayed a few days and missed the initial rush of the start of the festival), and there doesn’t seem to be much chatter about ZeroSpace in the wider gaming community.
My takeaway from this demo is that I am more confident that ZeroSpace is a game I want to play, but less confident that it’s a game I’ll actually get to play in a completed form.
Stormgate
As it’s already available to the public in free to play form, it wouldn’t make much sense for Stormgate to offer a demo, but it did participate in the strategy fest by offering some sales, and after Steam’s event ended, developer Frost Giant Studios followed up with a double XP event for co-op commanders.
Otherwise, Stormgate‘s development has been mostly quiet lately as they focus on releasing the first version of their 3v3 Total Mayhem mode. Not just standard PvP with more players, this is a specialized mini-game with its own bespoke mechanics and balance, and it sounds like it will be borrowing heavily from MOBAs for inspiration.
Unfortunately, this was all overshadowed by the recent revelation that several members of Frost Giant, including the CEO, had been posting fake positive Steam reviews. While Frost Giant tried to brush this off as a well-intentioned whoopsie and promised that it would not happen again, it’s hard to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point.
I think most gamers are far too quick to accuse developers of dishonesty these days. Nine times out of ten, what gets called dishonesty is usually just a miscommunication or an unexpected change of plans. But between the fake reviews scandal, the false claim of authorship over StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, exaggerating the team’s ex-Blizzard pedigree, the back-pedaling of the “fully funded to release” claim to mean “fully funded until early access begins,” and confusing messaging around what crowdfunding packages included, I think we can now fairly state that Frost Giant Studios has an established pattern of dishonest behaviour.
It might bother me more if I actually liked the game, but thankfully for me Stormgate has yet to impress me. By comparison Immortal‘s flirting with NFTs causes me genuine angst because I don’t want to support blockchain shenanigans, but I otherwise love everything it’s trying to do. Stormgate, though… Stormgate I have no problem writing off.
I’m feeling increasingly pessimistic about the future of RTS right now. Stormgate is all but dead in my eyes, and while I like what ZeroSpace and Immortal: Gates of Pyre are promising more than ever after their recent demos, I’m getting more and more doubtful of their ability to deliver on those promises. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Please prove me wrong, guys.
The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.
