By Harrison “Gobsmack” King

Hey team, your friendly neighborhood chef here! I wanted to give you guys an update on the latest since we released our Community Update to the public. There’s a lot of exciting things going on, so buckle in.

New Designs and Dialing In Balance

The holidays haven’t slowed us down, as we’ve released 5 updates to the PTR since we announced the Community Update on 12/18/2025, including one this morning! All the gaming and feedback from the players on the PTR continue to help us hone in on the balance outliers we need to be addressing still, and help us find the fun in the new units and rework units into their best selves. Recently, we updated the Navi, Carnivex, Archangel and Spriggan, and largely those changes have been well received!

We’re still finding ways to help each unit shine, and even some of those recent reworks might need more love, so keep giving us feedback. Right now we’re working on the Atlas. We have some cool ideas for QoL improvements that can help it be more effective when not paired with an evac, while still allowing that playstyle to be effective without becoming overpowered.

Ladder Map Pool Rotation

We’re aiming to switch up the maps in our 1v1 and 2v2 ladder pools this weekend. Stay tuned for an official announcement.

Community projects coming to the Custom Map List

We’re going to start adding maps to our custom map list beyond 1v1 and 2v2 maps, starting with Delirus’ epic 4-player Free-for-All map: Temple of the Lost Gate.

Adding these maps to the custom map list will allow players to try them out without first having to download them. In the future, look forward to more exciting community creations joining the pool, including UGC-type maps like Matterino’s auto-battler: Storm Wars, GameFriend’s Hearthstone Battlegrounds inspired: Autogate, and the ambitious MOBA developed by Senti and others: Stormgate Battle Arena.

Let us know what other maps you’d love to see included! We can’t bring all of them in, but we’ll definitely try and include the most popular.

Open 2v2 Tournament this Sunday!

For many of us, myself included, 2v2 has been the main highlight of the community patch. It’s been a blast grabbing a partner and coming up with strategies together to best other teams. (Maybe one day I’ll succeed at that.)

To highlight this exciting new way to play Stormgate, FrankSriracha and Algorithm0r are hosting “FAST4: Stormgate 4ever”. The latest edition of their open tournament.

Entry is free, so I hope lots of teams sign up and give it a try. Some of the teams that have already signed up have been hyping us up with team logos they designed on their own or with the help of AI. I wanna share these because it’s really fun and I can’t wait for Sunday!

TEAM FATALSTAR: NoveaStar and FATALBUNNY

Team LevelUp: Jayxp123 and GameFriend

Team GGauntsWithGGuns: Isma and Senegalo

You can still sign up if you want to participate:

https://challonge.com/tournaments/signup/fqQNGB3ma8#/signup/vgw4j30wrp

If you would like to donate to the prize pool, you can do so here:

https://matcherino.com/t/fast4

You can catch the tournament live on Sunday at 1pm US Eastern streamed by FrankSriracha, Algorithm0r, and more. Stay tuned for links to those streams.

FAQ

There are a few things I’ve needed to clarify over the past few weeks, and I thought it would be helpful to collect those answers and share them here.

Why not release our changes straight to the live client instead of a PTR?

A lot of people have expressed understandable concerns about splitting our small playerbase between two versions of the game, and would rather we just bring out changes straight to the live game.

While I understand this point of view, there are unfortunately some big roadblocks ahead of our release to the live client, and that is a major reason we need to take this approach.

We have 4 major roadblocks to bringing the ptr changes to live:

• We need all our new strings localized
• We need to ensure our AI opponents still work properly with all the changes
• We need to make sure nothing we've changed breaks other game modes (this isn't a major concern but we still need to know)
• We need to get design and balance in a bit more of a stable place.

Perhaps we could not worry so much about point 4, but the other issues throw cold water on the idea. Releasing what we have to the live client would be a terrible user experience for a lot of players. The stuff we've released is good enough for PTR, but would be unacceptable for a live release.

We’ll be working to make progress on all these issues and more in the meantime. We don’t have a firm date set for releasing to live, but I’m tentatively aiming for mid-February.

How involved is Frost Giant in this patch?

I’m thrilled that the excellent team of Community Members is getting praised for their hard work on the Community Update. They absolutely deserve their flowers. They’ve put in a ton of effort over the past four months, and without their dedication and passion, this update would not have been able to happen.

However, while propping up the community’s contributions, I’ve seen some people downplay the efforts of my peers from Frost Giant, and I want to make sure they get kudos as well.While our community implementation team rocks, there have been a LOT of contributions that we’ve made as well.

There are many more contributions than just those listed below, but here are a few notable ones:

• Chris Culp is behind all the visual and audio improvements and new map features like the Voidheart Shrines. He is also the main person pulling changes from the community in and putting new builds onto Steam.
• Eleazar has done a ton of things on the UI engineering side, honestly too much to count. Two examples: fixing the ctrl input drop bug and adding the autocast toggle.
• James Farris is the mastermind behind the map editor and made the newly released alpha data and trigger editors possible.
• Austin Huddleson and Eric Tse basically are fully responsible for the ptr even existing and Eric made 2v2 happen.
• I'm the lead designer, and all changes to Versus have come about as a team effort between me and all the implementation team. We’ve spent hundreds of hours going back and forth on ideas for new abilities, balance changes, and more. Additionally, I manage this whole project, assigning tasks to my Frost Giant peers and my team of community implementers. I handle promotion, help with map design questions, and best of all, get to hang out with the community all the time.

Thank you and stay tuned!

We’ll have more updates coming in the future. Thank you again to everyone who has participated in the Community Update. This wouldn’t be possible without you. I’m so excited by what the future holds!