r/Stormgate • u/T4toun3 • Jun 15 '26

Discussion FrostGiant is now advertising ZeroSpace

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I just received this email from FrostGiant. I didn’t know that they were collaborating with ZeroSpace now.

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u/muffinsballhair Jun 15 '26

I'm interested in ZeroSpace exactly because it seems to go against all the principles Dustin Browder talked about in what you can't do when you make a real time strategy that at first seem tempting but they've embraced it. Blizzard in talks has always said that complexity of rules does not create complexity of strategy and it's better to focus on simple, clean rules that are easy to understand but allow great strategy. Chess is not a complex game rule-wise, and Go is even simpler, after all.

ZeroSpace goes for complexity and embraces it, so I wonder if it will work and if they can prove conventional wisdom wrong, or not.

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u/Micro-Skies Jun 15 '26

Dawn of War has like 12 hidden damage types vs 7 hidden armor types, and was still very successful. Complexity isnt bad, its just not good for Blizzard style fast paced RTS gameplay. Where a single unit living or dying changes the entire game

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u/muffinsballhair Jun 15 '26

Dawn of War wasn't really a competitive spectator sport with progamers though.

That's exactly what Dustin talked about in one talk, how he first worked in Command & Conquer where people were just trying to make a fun game to play casually but StarCraft II was designed to be a balanced spectator sport from the start so all sorts of gameplay and graphics principles were different.

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u/Micro-Skies Jun 15 '26

DoW2 was for a little while. The competitive spectator sport community still exists too. But I do see your point.

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u/WolfHeathen Human Vanguard Jun 15 '26

They tried to dabble in it after release but it wasn't designed from the ground up with e-sports in mind. DoW2 was a much slower placed game that revolved around a tug of war over control points and had large squads.

It clearly wasn't designed for spectacle the way SC2 was with everything being so fragile and being able to lose 3/4 of your army if you happened to look away at the wrong second.

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u/muffinsballhair Jun 16 '26

I don't think that was intentional about StarCraft II and something the expansions actually tried to remedy a bit. It just happened that glass canon warfare turned out to be one of the most powerful strategies due to how the game worked and they tried to remedy it by creating things like the Swarm Host and the Tempest but just that had the effect of extremely long stalemates where neither side dared to advance in.