Almost a year after launch, Frost Giant’s StarCraft wannabe has finally added the feature it’s named after: ‘We called the game Stormgate, yet we didn’t actually have any stormgates’

Cards on the table, I did not like Stormgate when it launched. I did not like its vibes. I did not like its aesthetic. I did not like its story. I did not like how it felt beneath the fingers. I did not like the paltry number of (bad) singleplayer missions it offered before asking you to pony up cash. It felt like a Blizzard game with none of the polish, satisfaction or clarity of vision that makes the best Blizzard games what they are.

What I do like though, is any developer that makes a concerted effort to improve its game, and Frost Giant certainly appears to be doing that. Back in April, the studio overhauled Stormgate’s wayward campaign, rewriting its entire narrative and mission structure. Now, Frost Giant has just added one of the community’s most-requested features, the very thing the game was named after—Stormgates.

“We called the game Stormgate, yet we didn’t actually have any Stormgates,” Frost Giant sheepishly admits in a recent Steam blog. “But that changes now, because we’re about to deploy a feature so obvious, so long-requested, so in-your-face fun that we had to name the whole game after it.”

In the game, stormgates are essentially dimensional rifts generated by “massive arcane storms” that will appear “at key locations” on the game’s 1v1 maps. Players can dispatch units to crack these gates open and received randomised rewards. According to Frost Giant, these are not “your typical ‘+2 to Exo’ type bonuses” instead designed to radically reshape the battlefield. Examples include:

• Soulforge Relic – (Tier 1) Use Dark Creation to clone a friendly unit. Totally balanced.
• Sky Hunters – (Tier 2) Rock golems with stuns and a taste for air units.
• Void Prowlers – (Tier 2) A pack of shadowy, cliff-hopping, gap-closing murder-beasts.
• Swarm Mother – (Tier 3) Relentlessly spits out groups of Swarmlings.
• Stormcaller Relic – (Tier 3) Opens a Dimensional Storm that damages everything passing through its spiraling vortex. Sure, why not?

It’s been a while since I played Stormgate, but these certainly sound powerful in an RTS context, and Frost Giant claims they have an enormous effect on match strategy. “In testing, we saw players evolve their whole playstyle around stormgates. They rerouted pushes, split armies, even coordinated 200 IQ stormgate snipes while simultaneously defending a flank.”

Frost Giant ultimately intends stormgates to replace ‘creep camps’—small outposts of AI enemies that periodically respawn. The reason for this is straightforward enough—the community didn’t think they were fun or worth dealing with for the rewards they offered. Thus far, Frost Giant has removed creep camps from Stormgate’s three “ladder” maps, though they still exist in other maps for custom games.

Clearly I’m in a minority here, but it never occurred to me that Stormgates were supposed to be an actual feature within Stormgate. I may have been distracted by Stormgate’s many other problems, but I figured it was just a cool name like StarCraft—which is not in fact about the crafting of stars—justified through the story. But I’m glad Frost Giant is listening to its community and taking some big swings to improve the game. Stormgates are apparently playable in 1v1 now, with the feature coming soon to other modes.