Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos Preview

We never paid any heed to the ancient prophecies...

With still months to go before the actual release of the already long-awaited Warcraft III, here is yet another preview of the officially third part of the Warcraft saga.

The storyline of Warcraft III continues the story of the nations of Azeroth and Lordaeron after the (unfortunately) never published Warcraft adventure: The Lord of the Clans. After the numerous portals shaman Ner'zhul opened had destroyed the Orcish home world of Dreanor, and the ravaging horde had been conquered, the human alliance falls apart thanks to inside bickering and quarrelling. Without the strong leadership of the late Lord Lothar, tensions run high amongst the leaders of the alliance. The once proud Orcish clans have been enslaved. Thrall, a young orc raised in captivity by vile Lord Blackmoore, escapes his imprisonment and sets on a quest to gather the remnants of the renegade clans in order to raise a rebellion against the treacherous human wardens who unleashed their fury on the now subdued orcs. Thrall has both orcish strength and courage as well as human reasoning gained through years of living amongst humans. Once he united the clans and became their warlord Thrall concentrates on restoring the original shamanistic orc traditions and heritage and rejects demonic influence. As the two severely weakened alliances fight for existence, their oldest foe returns... The Burning Legion, a demonic force cursed to roam universe forever takes its third shot at Azeroth. Ten thousand years ago, it tried to consume the magic of Azeroth, but was defeated and cast away by some mysterious civilization. About a hundred years ago, it corrupted the proud orcish clans and united them into the horde. It sent them through the Dark Portal to scorch Azeroth and prepare the territory for the invasion. Now, it's here.

Zag-zag!

Bloody pigs.

Warcraft III was initially supposed to have six races, but there eventually turned out to be only five, four of which have been announced: Orcs, Humans, Deamons and the Undead. Blizzard promised to reveal the fifth race not long after E3.

• The plot seems to be mostly concerned with the Orcs, and their redemption and retaliation. They are on a quest to return to their ancient traditions and therefore use mostly physical strength and melee combat in combination with some shamanistic magic.
• The humans employ both a strong military force and powerful magic in the defense of their shining kingdoms. The humans concentrate their skill mostly on Technology. They are able to alter their environment and use armor, weapons, machines and domestication of animals all in the way of their technology.
• The Burning Legion is a nomadic army comprised of demonic beings and horrifying creatures, gathered from countless burnt-out worlds and dimensions. The Legion mainly uses its unstoppable melee fighters and the aphotic green fires of entropy itself as its primary tactical weapons.
• The Undead army also known as "The Scourge" consists of walking corpses, disembodied spirits, damned mortal men and insidious extra-dimensional entities. They employ necromantic magic and the elemental powers of the cold north against their enemies. The undead army is known for its ability to regenerate and recycle units upon the battlefield. This makes them a very persistent force.

Since the beginning of the project Blizzard insisted on the fact that Warcraft III opens a new genre of Role-Playing-Strategy. The new concept was meant to be concentrated upon heroes and their advance FRP way, while still retaining some of the basic concepts of the RTS genre. However, there were some major changes that occurred during development and caused the game to remain more a strategy than an adventure. The newly appointed head of project Rob Pardo stated that they would stick to the RPS idea, it's just that it will have a slightly different meaning than it did. The concept of heroes will remain, but their role will change a bit in comparison to the primary notion: Hero units are special units. They have the ability to advance in levels, collect items in a small inventory and confer special benefits to the units near them. Each hero will have different attributes including unique abilities and spells. Also, you can evolve your heroes over time during the game. When a hero levels, he will become more powerful through hit points and attack strength. The player will also be able to choose a new special ability for the hero. Heroes will behave like normal units, in that each hero has a command point cost. Heroes cost more command than normal units, so a player will have to balance how many heroes to use in his/her army. Warcraft III will still have an emphasis on fewer more powerful units than previous Real-Time-Strategy games, and the population maximum will probably vary from twenty to thirty depending on the race.

The designers decided both to use some of the units and heroes appearing in "Orcs and Humans", "Tides of Darkness" and "Beyond the Dark Portal", as well as introduce some new ones.

One of the most emphasized features of Warcraft III is that it would take place in a fully interactive fantasy world crammed with various more or less aggressive critters. Weather conditions will also prove to be of strategic value, as they will influence unit behavior. The concept of units on higher grounds have strategic advantage has been implemented. The resource model is still not solved, though gold is mentioned as a primary resource. There have been some talks about the possibility of a different resource model for each race. In any case the developers agree that the emphasis will be removed from resource gathering and base management in order to let the players concentrate on tactics.

As for the graphics, they are up to Blizzard's usual standards - most impressive. Blizzard released two trailers (available for download from their site) and large number of screenshots of the actual game. The latest screenshots contain a user interface highly similar to Starcraft UI - action covers most of the screen, there is a gadget top-right showing resource status and the bottom quarter of the screen will contain a minimap, unit portrait, unit stats and available commands. Skeletal and skinning animation technology used will allow infinite frames of animation resulting in fluid movement of all 3D objects. The game will support most resolutions in 4:3 aspect ratios.

Not much music or sounds could have been heard, but the music from the trailers does promise a lot.

The game will have built-in support for Battle.net and other standard connection types. Multiplayer mode will allow more than eight players per game. Blizzard puts a lot of effort into balancing the game in a way that all the races have an equal chance to win and to introduce questing to multiplayer mode without disturbing the balance. The "rushing" issue has also been addressed and the developers claim that it will be virtually impossible to rush in Warcraft III. A new ladder system is also being developed.

As always, Blizzard intends to provide a campaign editor with the game. This editor will however be far more advanced than the map builders in previous "Craft" games. The editor will have all the usual capabilities, plus it will allow you to edit all of the game statistics and edit in-game graphics - hence even enabling you to create new units or even a whole world.

Some editors proclaimed Warcraft III to be one of the biggest disappointments of E3 because of the Blizzard's tendency to stick to the winning format. Their greatest objection was that it basically looks the same as Warcraft II. Well, it certainly wasn't supposed to look like Need for Speed 2 (Thanks to all the Gods for that).

There hasn't been much talk about hardware requirements, but I remember a story about Blizzard developing a 3D software engine capable of working on slower machines (486? Pentium I? ).

From all I have seen I can but conclude that it's going to be a real gaming feast for all us Warcraft fans once it appears. Unfortunately, knowing how Blizzard sticks to its deadlines, I do not even want to think when it might appear (The not-yet-published Diablo II has been announced more than three years ago). And in the meantime, SC/BW and W2BNE still have their charm (even though they are in less than eight dimensions and have less than a thousand frames per second), so we'll just have to cope with them, hopefully until the summer next year.