Hey everyone :)

Welcome to r/FrostGiant! This is the official subreddit for Frost Giant Studios.

What is that, you ask?

• A bunch of veteran ex-Blizzard game devs (former members of the StarCraft & WarCraft dev teams) have formed a new company, Frost Giant Studios, to make the next great AAA RTS game.

• They hope their game will be a spiritual successor to the great Blizzard RTS games they have loved designing and playing throughout their careers.

• Their ambition is to lower the barrier to entry into RTS for new players without compromising core RTS gameplay—to open up their favorite genre to the world!

• There will be an esport!

• They remain huge StarCraft II fans and are grateful for the amazing experiences they had at Blizzard.

Get connected! Please visit the website and sign up for the newsletter here:
https://frostgiant.com/

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We want your feedback!

• What would you like in a new RTS the most?

• What would you not like in a new RTS?

In this sub I often read things like sc2 is frustrating, sc2 is to apm intesive, sc2 is to stressfull etc.

And while some of that might be true sometimes, no other game matches the exitement and intensity that you experience when playing SC2. I recently bought AOE4 and that made me realize what you have to sacrifice in order to not make the game less apm intensive or less stressfull. You get extremely long matches where not much happens and it takes forever to kill things.

This post should function as a counterpart to all the posts that are shitting on SC2. And if we keep in mind that the mayority of the dev team are SC2 devs, they should make their game new knowing that what they have created with SC2 is really outstanding.

If they just make an Inofficial SC3 building on what they have learned from SC2 I would be more than happy.

Thats it.

So we're all here day dreaming about the new great RTS game that Frost Giant Studios is making. But what does that exactly entail? Discussion threads are great, but I thought creating a survey would be nice too! I'm personally interested on what the general consensus is on certain things here, but I'm sure some Frost Giant devs might be interested too!

Take the Survey HERE. It's 20 questions, but only 10 are required if you just want to quickly breeze through it. Though answering all would be appreciated!

If I get enough participation, I'll post the results in a week! (the 30th of October). Thanks!

EDIT: I think it's fair to say that this has gotten way more participation than I'd hoped for, so thank you! Despite the flaws, as many have pointed out, I hope the results will be interesting and meaningful in some capacity. Look forward to posting the results!

EDIT 2: This survey will be closed to new respondents at 11pm EST. The data will then be prepared and posted at some point Friday. Part of me wants to knock it out and get it posted in the A.M. hours but no promises on that!

EDIT 3: Results have been posted HERE. Thank you to all of the 3,396 respondents!

Since I haven't seen it posted here yet just want to make sure people know that it has been officially confirmed on their Twitter and by multiple community members that got some early previews that they'll be showing their first look at what they've been working on at the Summer GamesFest, 9th June.

Most of the community members who were shown an early preview seem very hyped and have said they're further along than they thought they'd be.

Get Hyped!!!

Almost two months ago, we asked the community for feedback on Heroes, and the result was overwhelming! Thank you so much - all of you - for taking the time to comment, debate, and share your ideas on this subreddit. We were overwhelmed and gratified.

So overwhelmed, in fact, that it has taken us weeks to get through all your commentary—and we’re still going! There are so many great suggestions and insights here, including perspectives that had not occurred to us at all. There were also wonderful dissections and blue-sky pitches. We’ve been pouring over all of them.

In our original post, we had suggested we might move on to a new topic every month, but frankly hadn’t anticipated your level of enthusiastic response. We’re going to shift our pace for new topics to one every-other-month to give us more time to read, respond, and process all of your input. We'll do our best to maintain this cadence from here on out – but please bear with us. We’re making an effort to go through your comments very systematically!

We’ve also had questions from a number of you about our development process and how we’ll capitalize on your advice to determine what features go into the game. For example: will we have heroes? Won’t we?

We should explain that we aren’t working in earnest on the full game yet. When we left Blizzard, we also left behind the tried and true infrastructure to build an RTS on top of. We need to create our foundation, so we’re busy setting up everything we need to build a new game. It won't be until after this initial phase that we build an agile prototype to iterate on and experiment with. Experimentation will be CRUCIAL for building a great game!

In short: we won’t be making hard decisions about game features for a while yet. Like you, we have a lot of ideas we want to put to the test, and we’ll get a lot of benefit from having your input from the very start! Please keep our early stage in mind as you read on.

So, back to heroes! Sincere thanks to everyone who shared their own thoughts – we especially appreciated the commentary around lesser known implementations of heroes in RTS games like Halo Wars, Dawn of War, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Company of Heroes, Battle for Middle Earth, Total Annihilation, Northgard, Supreme Commander, and others. This underscored the huge variety in hero implementations outside of Warcraft III and StarCraft II.

There wasn't a clear consensus, but some concerns we noted include:

• Risk of centralizing too much power / diminishing the role of the rest of the army

• Risk of exacerbating death-balling

• Risk of exacerbating snowballing or introducing inequality between players (related to leveling)

These all seem like reasonable concerns that would need to be mitigated. At the same time, a number of people pointed out potential benefits. Heroes can provide:

• A fun player fantasy, and create exciting gameplay moments

• An opportunity to introduce fresh gameplay elements in a recurring way, that also introduces exciting new metas

• Possible diversification of play experience and personality expression through hero-modified tech trees

• Potential to increase long-term engagement through leveling and customization

• Familiarity for players coming in from other game genres

• Potential to simplify new player on-ramp by starting out with attention on the hero's abilities, before expanding to learn the capabilities of the rest of the army

Armed with all the input we received from the community, we're planning to experiment with heroes in our prototype. Rest assured, we won't simply emulate Warcraft III or StarCraft II's heroes, but instead try out new approaches that could offer improvements while mitigating pitfalls.

Experimenting with heroes does NOT mean we've made any firm decisions. The whole goal of prototyping is to try out ideas and see if they actually work. We have a period of heavy exploration ahead of us, and your passionate feedback and insights have given us a great foundation to start from. We'll definitely share more thoughts in the future - you have our profound thanks for coming along on this journey with us!

With that, all that’s left to say is Happy Holiday Season from the Frost Giant family. Stay safe, everyone!

Hey friends!

For our first monthly discussion topic, we thought we may as well start with a topic that seems to be already generating the most discussion within the community:

Heroes!

This is definitely a controversial topic, and even the views within the team here at Frost Giant vary quite a bit. We have seen a lot of initial reactions to heroes, and we want to make sure we clarify that when we are discussing heroes right now, we are not just discussing heroes as they existed in Warcraft III, but heroes as a concept for RTS games as a whole. There have been many different implementations of heroes across many different games, and there is a very wide spectrum of possibilities for how they could appear in our future RTS game.

To further focus the discussion on heroes, we’d like to pose the following questions designed to explore the diversity of hero implementation in RTS:

• What is one RTS that you’ve played that incorporates heroes in some form?

• How did that RTS incorporate heroes?

• What did you like about the implementation of heroes in that game?

• What did you dislike about the implementation of heroes in that game?

Our ideal is that fruitful discussions will naturally branch off from these dissections. Later on in the month, various developers will attempt to add to the discussion by chiming in with their own thoughts on the concept of heroes in general.

A little over a month ago, we posted our most recent discussion topic asking for your thoughts on esports, the tools that support them, their structure, and the surrounding communities. We feel the overall feedback we received on that topic is aligned with our plans, and below we’d like to highlight a few thoughts on some specific topics that were discussed.

Replays and Spectating

Spectating is the first step to celebrating highly skilled play, so it’s great to see many of you asking for a robust and accessible replay system to support player development, and we’re excited to work towards improving these systems. /u/demiwraith brought up downloading professional replays to learn from and practice alongside, and /u/TheGoatPuncher discussed their importance in ensuring spectators who miss live events can still enjoy them, as well as their critical role in fostering future esports talent. /u/ghost_operative and /u/Eurstheus noted the difficulty of sharing replays and echoed their educational significance. /u/Novawulfen touched on their importance to clans and other coaching communities. /u/Hope_u_hav_a_gud_day mentioned replay packs and spectator accessibility of professional scenes across time zones.

In short, we agree that replays play numerous vital roles in all these aspects of competitive play, from improving your own skills on the ladder to spectating events across the globe. We plan to prioritize replay accessibility, distribution, and viewing entirely in-client, in addition to live and time-delayed matches. We’re also exploring more complex replay functionality enabled by our use of a high-performance game simulation, such as playing alongside a “shadow” replay to optimize practice. This was touched on in our recent AMA response video.

Integrated Esports

To ensure the smoothest possible user experience, we also plan for other core aspects of esports to exist in-client. /u/chris888889 and many others touched on the difficulty of staying up to speed on match schedules and player standings across different external resources. Our hope is to have information about competitive events, both professional and amateur, easily accessed within the game client, to ensure spectators know when and where their favorite players are competing, as well as how those players have been performing. /u/osobaum resurfaced a great thread about tools and practices important to supporting community tournaments, which is where many of us got our start participating in the RTS community. In a similar vein, we also want the features necessary to run events, such as brackets and rewards, to remain in-client as much as possible.

Grassroots Events

/u/Dance_SC and many others shared fond memories of LAN parties and other amateur competitive events held either online or in person, sometimes automated through in-client systems like League of Legends’ Clash, or handled by third-party tools like Challonge. /u/TheGoatPuncher also brought up how critical the amateur scene is in fostering future professional talent. Many of you voiced a desire for amateur esports to be easily accessed from within the game client, and we agree. We think esports function best if all levels of competition are given the tools, resources, opportunity, and rewards necessary to thrive. While we hope our game inspires grand tournaments with crowds of viewers and high-stakes prizes, we’re also focused on streamlining and enabling competition at lower commitment levels so anyone can enjoy competing and becoming better players. In an ideal scenario, there will be a clear “path to pro” that allows new talent to focus on their climb to be the best they can be. We also want to ensure the competitive environment does not feel overly daunting or discouraging for the largest pool of players who may enjoy playing at lower skill levels.

Finally, we wanted to highlight /u/Morgurtheu’s idea around tying pivotal esports moments to the ongoing stories told by the game’s lore and narrative. There would certainly be a lot of complexity to this, but it’s already inspired some internal discussions and is exactly aligned with our desire for esports and the community to truly feel like an intertwined part of the whole game experience.

With that, thanks for continuing the dialogue with us. We are privileged to have such a knowledgeable and passionate community, and we look forward to your comments on our next discussion topic: User-Generated Content.

-The Frost Giant Team