Stormgate closed testing to start in July 2023

Frost Giant’s spiritual StarCraft successor set to start playtests

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.