Real-time Strategy games are very busy games to play; you’re constantly micromanaging everything, and then you’ll have to address something new that popped up. Stormgate, which was previously announced earlier this year, is yet another real-time strategy game coming to the market but has an exciting twist up its sleeve.
Remember back in August when we covered Dragon Ball FighterZ finally receiving rollback netcode after four and a half years? Or how about Guilty Gear Xrd getting its rollback beta back in October? Stormgate looks to incorporate that technology by using an engine that has rollback as part of its infrastructure.
This is a rather interesting overlap with the fighting game community, as the idea of rollback netcode has been a sore spot for the community for the past couple of years. Persona 4 Arena Ultimax’s remaster shipped without it, and online play was particularly dreadful until August. Anyways, back to Stormgate, Frost Giant’s Chief Architect, James Anhalt, offered some comments on the rollback implementation.
He said, “Rollback allows us to reduce the lag a player feels playing the game over the internet. Rollback works by allowing us to simulate the game, even in the absence of player input. And if we receive input later, we can roll back to that time that the input happened and then simulate forward really quickly to catch back up. It'll be the most responsive RTS game I've ever worked on, and I've worked on a few great ones.”
Anhalt has been seen in several Blizzard projects, working on the online play for Diablo 2, World of Warcraft, and Warcraft 3, before eventually becoming a lead engineer on Starcraft 2 and its expansions, so it’s not like he’s relatively new to online structure and programming. We’ll continue to update as more information on Stormgate is released. Stormgate is currently in development and is set to have an open beta sometime next year.
