StarCraft spiritual successor Stormgate adds its most highly requested feature

With former Blizzard builders concerned within the StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo sequence on its staff, Frost Big Studios actually has a stable pedigree. However its new RTS recreation Stormgate landed final 12 months to a decidedly blended reception. Gamers felt it had arrived too quickly, with criticisms of an absence of visible polish and low manufacturing values on its marketing campaign cutscenes. Since then, nevertheless, the staff has been onerous at work on enhancements, and a brand new Stormgate replace out in the present day appears to make some severe modifications, together with a visible overhaul and the sport’s most-requested quality-of-life function.

The brand new Stormgate replace features a full overhaul to the sport’s lighting, together with enhancements to the bottom element and textures, and a brand new go to visible results. You’ll even see the lighting shift over time when enjoying on a few maps. Based mostly on the preview video beneath, it actually appears like a serious step up – excellent news for the RTS recreation after Frost Big’s announcement 4 months in the past that it had introduced on former StarCraft 2 lead artist Allen Dilling as its new artwork director. Alongside this comes a full audio rebalance. Recreation director Tim Campbell notes that “there’s nonetheless numerous work to do on this space, however we’re making progress.”

Maybe essentially the most thrilling information for technique recreation veterans is the arrival of totally customizable unit, construction, macro, and command hotkeys. This implies now you can lastly arrange your controls precisely as you want them. Whereas Stormgate’s intelligent hotkey mannequin is pretty intuitive for a newcomer, everybody at all times has their very own private rhythm for the way they prefer to play, so this can be a large enchancment to total high quality of life.

You can even now set up your management teams. There’s the flexibility to arrange user-defined automated teams and decide which models are assigned to them as they’re skilled. In case you, like me, have at all times had a specific choice for which key you utilize to pick out all of your melee models, or maybe fancy a separate grouping only for transport autos, now you can also make that occur.

The ‘choose all military’ hotkey has been reworked so now you can pull models out of the group to ship them on a unique job with out by chance reselecting them instantly afterwards. There are additionally new, bindable hotkeys for options equivalent to eradicating a unit from a management group, ‘stealing’ a few of your forces from one group to place in one other, and rapidly biking via your entire important base buildings.

New ‘flocking’ conduct for flight models will imply they group up as they’re transferring after which unfold out at their vacation spot, somewhat than making an attempt to awkwardly path round one another. This feels loads nearer to the best way StarCraft flyers work, and I’m very glad to see it. Unit turning and projectile conduct has additionally been rebalanced. Multiplayer video games will now enable gamers to pause the sport as much as 3 times every in case of emergencies, and the post-game versus display affords a variety of detailed stats and graphs to examine your efficiency.

Stormgate replace 0.3.0 is out now. You’ll be able to learn via the complete patch notes courtesy of Frost Big Studios. Campbell provides that the staff is “full pace forward on each a marketing campaign revamp and faction updates,” so there’s loads to stay up for sooner or later for the free Steam recreation.

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