Stormgate, Frost Giant Studio’s free-to-play real-time strategy game, will rely on an episodic model that’s “similar to television shows” to expand its single-player campaign following launch.
Although Stormgate will release with “plenty of campaign missions,”this is only the beginning, according to Game Director and President Tim Campbell, who shared that multiple writers are currently working on building the game’s world and characters.
An episodic model also implies that the state of the game’s world will change as events unfold, which makes Stormgate, at least in theory, quite different from its peers.
“As episodic content is released, it will advance the ‘current’ or ‘present day’ state of the universe, bringing about changes to our world and characters,” Campbell noted during a Reddit AMA. “Nothing excites me more than building up a cast of characters that can change and evolve over time, reacting to conflicts that ebb and flow around them. I feel like there is so much great design space to explore in this way!”
The developer is “still figuring out the exact business model around campaigns,” but promises that “some portion” of that content will be free and available for all players.
A portion of the development team behind Stormgate also worked on titles such as Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2, the latter of which made the transition to free-to-play in 2017. Real-time strategy games have largely stuck to the traditional expansion format as far as post-launch content is concerned.
It will be interesting to see if Frost Giant studios will succeed with its different approach to telling the game’s story. Stormgate is set to launch in beta at some point next year.
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