Here's one of StarCraft 2's key developers talking about upcoming RTS Stormgate

Can it be 2023 now? Stormgate, a new RTS from former Blizzard devs who worked on some little old games like Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2, is one of those games that makes me want to freeze myself in time for a year so I don't have to wait to play it. Without the ability to bend spacetime to my whims, I'm just going to have to settle for listening to Stormgate production director Tim Morten talk more about the game he and his team are cooking up.

Morten stopped by the PC Gaming Show to talk to longtime StarCraft fiend Day9 about Stormgate and his studio's goals in making a new, modern RTS. One of the big ones: making it easy for players to build their own maps, missions, and mods, using the same tools as the developers, and making it easy to share them, too. Morten also talked about building esports tools like tournament play "directly into the client."

"Historically there have been all of these other ecosystems that you have to jump out of the game, go through sign-ups," he said. "Even if you're not a top grandmaster, there's still an opportunity to be best on your block or best at your company or best at your school. We want to facilitate esports all the way from the grassroots level to the pro level directly in the client."

Stormgate is keeping the classic 1v1 competitive format that RTS players have been into for years, but it's hardly the only mode they have in the works. Stormgate's whole thing is trying to make the RTS more social. "We've got the hardcore 1v1 that players love, but we've also got new cooperative modes that really enable players who haven't tried real-time strategy before to come in and try this genre," Morten said.

Stormgate will be playable in beta sometime in 2023, though we'll probably have to wait longer than that to play its campaigns. You can read much more about Stormgate in a feature I published Friday, which includes more quotes from Morten and his co-founder Tim Campbell about their grand plans for the RTS.

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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).