Stormgate closed testing to start in July 2023

Frost Giant’s spiritual StarCraft successor set to start playtests

Marco Wutz | May 17, 2023

Stormgate closed testing to start in July 2023 /

Fans of real-time strategy games have their keen eyes locked on Stormgate, an ambitious project by Frost Giant that aims to become the spiritual successor to StarCraft. Founded by former Blizzard employees who worked on StarCraft 2 and Warcraft 3, the studio wants to provide a variety of single-player, co-op, and competitive multiplayer modes in combination with the crisp controls and smooth mechanics players of Blizzard’s RTS titles are used to.

Adapting Unreal Engine 5 to serve the project’s needs, the team has been testing prototypes for a while now, even bringing in celebrity fans like actor Simu Liu in for a small tournament. It looks like Frost Giant is well on its way to keep its promise that Stormgate will enter a more accessible period of tests in 2023: closed testing will begin in July 2023, the company announced.

Starting with a “very small pre-alpha phase” Frost Giant intends on slowly expanding the pool of players “into a slightly larger alpha phase” and then a “much larger beta phase.”

If you’ve already signed up for beta testing at Stormgate’s website, you’ll automatically be in the pool of considered candidates for all of these playtests. A first wave of invites for the July tests will go out “soon”.

Frost Giant announced that tests would continue “well into 2024”, so there’ll be plenty of time for interested players to get access before the free-to-play game’s launch.

Stormgate is confirmed to feature two different factions at launch: a high-tech human faction with mechs and a swarm of demonic beings that seem to be a mix of StarCraft’s Zerg and Diablo’s forces of hell.

Published May 17, 2023

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg