By Alexander Lee
In a bid to rejuvenate the real-time-strategy genre, veteran Blizzard game developers Tim Morten and Tim Campbell have founded a new studio, Frost Giant, whose goal is to produce an RTS game accessible to a wide audience. The pair has years of collective experience in the genre: Morten, a former production director at Blizzard Entertainment, was the brains behind the "StarCraft II" transition to a free-to-play live-service model in 2017, and Campbell was the original lead campaign director for "Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne."
RTS games were the first modern esports titles. But in recent years, the genre has developed a reputation as the domain of die-hard superfans and is notorious for a high barrier to entry. In an era of competitive gaming dominated by multiplayer online battle arena titles such as "League of Legends" and first-person shooters such as "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive," more complex RTS games such as "StarCraft II" have seen a relative decline in viewership and player numbers.
The formation of Frost Giant Studios comes at a significant moment for RTS fans. On Thursday, Blizzard published a blog post informing "StarCraft II" players that the company would no longer be producing new content for the 10-year-old RTS title. "We will continue doing season rolls and necessary balance fixes moving forward," wrote executive producer Robert Bridenbecker.
In other words, future updates will focus on competitive balance changes rather than new narrative or single-player content - another development that threatens to alienate inexperienced users in favor of the hardcore base. The blog post left many in the scene with a bad taste.
"The worst part about the post was the post itself," said Joseph "Future" Stanish, a top American "StarCraft II" player representing Alpha X. "It gives this negative image about the game and the state of the game. But I think, realistically, this was pretty expected. I don't think it changes anything about the sustainability of StarCraft."
Despite the doom and gloom surrounding Blizzard's announcement, the StarCraft scene is very much alive. In South Korea, StarCraft remains the de facto national pastime; elsewhere, prominent esports organizations such as Team Liquid and compLexity Gaming continue to field "StarCraft II" squads. Last year, Blizzard's StarCraft World Championship Series doled out over $2 million in prizes.
"There are a lot of really young StarCraft players," Stanish said. "There's actually a lot of new blood coming into the scene, especially within Europe."
Blizzard has not been forthcoming about its plans for the next entry in the series, though Stanish is confident that the company will support the competitive scene for at least two more years in the form of a new circuit administered by ESL and DreamHack. On the other hand, Frost Giant Studios is transparent about its next endeavor: to build a prototype of its next-generation RTS game for gameplay testing and consumer research.
Based in Orange County, Calif., Frost Giant is backed by $4.7 million in seed funding from a group of investors that is led by BITKRAFT Ventures and includes prominent industry players such as Riot Games. The studio has hired eight full-time employees, seven of whom came directly from the "StarCraft II" team. "Technically, all of us had worked on 'StarCraft II,' " Morten said. "But we think of Tim more as a 'Warcraft III' guy."
The crux of Frost Giant's development strategy is Morten and Campbell's willingness to take feedback from everyone involved in the RTS scene - pro players, casters, and casuals alike - as they try to bridge the gap between new players and the RTS enthusiasts who have embraced the genre since the 1990s.
"We're not setting out to water down or dilute the experience of playing real-time strategy," Morten said. "But at the same time, for a new player coming in, it can feel very unfamiliar. Most other game genres, you control a single character, and you see that character in the center of your screen when you start the game. For an RTS, you launch in from a completely unfamiliar camera perspective. You have to figure out a tech tree, you have to figure out a strategy. To us, the big area of focus is thinking about that on-ramp, thinking about how we provide an onboarding experience that makes players feel more comfortable and less intimidated."
Morten is interested in updating the tone and aesthetic of RTS to match the preferences of the modern gamer. A self-described StarCraft fan, Morten enjoys the comic-book-like visual style developed by Blizzard art director Sam Didier. "But at the same time, we're definitely looking at trends," Morten said. "You know, the popularity of 'Fortnite,' or 'Among Us' or 'Fall Guys,' for sure."
The fortunes of RTS have risen and fallen numerous times since the 1992 release of "Dune II," and the genre has persisted doggedly through it all. Although Blizzard is no longer releasing new content for "StarCraft II," the beloved title and others like it are still enjoyed by millions of players across the globe. But the worldwide population of video game players has grown exponentially over the past few years, and the popularity of RTS has not expanded accordingly. By adopting a user-friendly attitude while retaining the complexity and technicality that form the genre's core, Frost Giant's next RTS title might be the first step toward bringing real-time strategy to a new generation of gamers and esports fans.
"There's an opportunity for us to think deliberately about what we want the play experience to be at the highest levels of the game versus the lower levels of the game," Morten said. "I think there are a lot of things that we can do better."
The Washington Post