New RTS Game Stormgate Announced By Former Activision Blizzard Devs

A new RTS from ex-Activision Blizzard developers called Stormgate has been announced, and it looks very much like a Blizzard game based on its first cinematic trailer.

(Photo : YouTube - GameSpot)
stormgate trailer

First revealed during the Summer Game Fest, Stormgate is a free-to-play real-time strategy (RTS) title that was a project of former Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft developers at Frost Giant Studios. According to IGN, the game is set in a post-apocalyptic future whose visuals won't really look out of place in any other Blizzard IP.

Here's the world premiere trailer:

The trailer showcases bits of the game's lore, featuring what looks to be an archeologist unearthing an ancient shield and piecing it together. As she works, she is interrupted by a demonic-looking enemy that once again wouldn't look out of place in Diablo. She is then saved by a soldier piloting a mech suit who takes the fight to the demon and finishing it by blowing it up to pieces.

A bunch of other demonic-like beings pop up at the end chasing the archeologist and the mech suit pilot, where it all ends with the game's title card and an announcement that registrations for its 2023 beta are now open.

Since it is an RTS game, Stormgate has been revealed as a PC exclusive which will have a story campaign and multiplayer mode. Co-op is a massive part of the online multiplayer, which the veteran Starcraft 2 team headed by production lead Tim Morten has been working on for the last six years, writes PCGamer.

Here's what Morten has to say about the project:

There's an opportunity to take RTS away from feeling like a solitary experience and into feeling like a more social experience. MOBAs, battle royale, even Roblox - these are social experiences, and RTS had not kept up and evolved along that axis.

A Multiplayer-Focused RTS

Many people would say that RTS games are a very solitary category of games. And they would be right. The Red Alerts, Age Of Empires, and Battle Realms of old times were indeed focused on single-player experiences, with online multiplayer almost always just being a barebones version of PvP.

With Stormgate, however, Frost Giant Studios is incorporating a fully fledged, 3-player, open-ended co-op combined with competitive multiplayer to give a fresh perspective on this often lonesome (and perhaps forgotten) genre of games. Here's the full Summer Games Fest 2022 presentation if you want to watch the reveal:

But even if the game does have a lot of focus on multiplayer, it doesn't mean that the single-player experience will be left behind. This could be in the form of the game's story, which puts players in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth after a war waged by Infernals - the demon-like enemies you saw in the trailer.

Frost Giant promises to reveal more details about their new RTS during the PC Gaming Show presentation of Summer Games Fest, scheduled for June 12th (via GameSpot).