Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos Review

At first sight, the interface looks a lot like the StarCraft interface with a new skin, simple and comprehensive. The bar at the top of the screen contains four buttons allowing access to the various game menus. The first menu, the quest menu, which is available on campaign and scripted scenarios only, shows current quests and their status. The next menu, the options menu allows access to standard options, such as the save screen and the ability to quit the game or restart the chapter. The allies menu, available in multiplayer mode only, contains the chat control, resource trading. Finally, the log menu contains briefing and dialogue transcripts. On the top bar there is also an icon displaying the time of the day, four numeric icons displaying the quantity of gold, lumber and food you possess and your upkeep status, which I'll come back to later. The bottom part of the interface contains the mini-map on the left hand side of the screen, with all the standard options, such as show/hide terrain, switch to ally/enemy colors and alert allies to a point on the map. On the right is the animated portrait of the currently selected unit. Moving to the right again is a dialog box that shows the unit's stats or icons representing all selected units, if you have selected more than one. You can still select only up to twelve units at a time, and though this may seem strange at first, you will find it more than enough.

I just ate a lemon!

Landfall...

The population maximum is far lower in WarCraft III than in StarCraft, 90 in comparison to 200. Units need to use resources in order to function properly, you must spend gold and wood to create them, and will need to keep up food production in order to continue to keep them. All units apart from workers take up two units of supply, which means that you will probably never have more than thirty to forty offensive units at a time. Moving to the right on the interface is a column that show the six inventory slots, however this column is used only by hero units. The command icons are typically located in the right-hand bottom corner of the screen, the only change being that there are now twelve in stead of nine of them. The two major novelties concerning the interface are the hero and worker icons which appear on the left-hand side of the screen. Heroes play an important part in battle, and as their spells and skills can overturn the situation in a matter of seconds, it is important that they are always easily accessible. Therefore, each of the heroes you possess (and you can have maximum three per game) is represented by an icon that appears at the left-hand side top of the screen and easily summoned by clicking it (or pressing F1-F3 keys). As soon as one of your workers becomes idle, he will also get an icon just above the mini-map. This icon can be used to quickly select him and give him an assignment. This useful feature has been seen in other games before (Age of Kings, Empire Earth), but this is its first appearance in the Craft serial.

One other interface improvement that has been introduced concerns managing groups of units. Once you select a group of units, the engine will automatically create sub-groups within that group, based on unit types. You can switch between these sub-groups by pressing Tab or Shift+Tab, or simply clicking a unit from the desired sub-group on the group interface. This will highlight the sub-group, and let you issue unit specific commands to the sub-group. Members of the sub-group will intelligently perform the task at hand one at a time preventing unnecessary loss of mana or resources. This feature seriously improves command efficiency.

I already mentioned that the gameplay focus shifted to fewer, more powerful units and heroes. Heroes are incredibly powerful units, capable of gathering experience-points and gaining levels, carrying and using magical items and modifying the characteristics of surrounding units. Heroes are crucial to any battle, due to their influence, skills and raw power. However, battles are also crucial to heroes, as it can bring them new experience, and in turn new abilities and improvements. Each race has one Warrior hero, one Mystical hero, or spell-caster and one Cunning hero, who has aspects of both.

However handy it may seem to have a large number of units all around the map at all times, you will soon discover that that is less than profitable. The problem here is that once your food consumption goes over forty, you start paying upkeep, in this case Low Upkeep. When your units start consuming more than seventy food units, you will have to pay High Upkeep to maintain them all. Fortunately, you cannot get to spend more than ninety food units at any time. Upkeep is basically the amount of money that is paid for unit maintenance and supply, and it is taken directly from the resources gathered by your workers before they even bring them back. Low upkeep takes away thirty percent of gross production, and high upkeep takes sixty percent. In practice, this means that if you have low upkeep, your worker will take ten gold out of the mine and bring seven home, if you happen to have high upkeep, he will still take ten, and bring only four home! This means that having a lot of units can deplete your gold mine in no time, leaving you with some forty percent of the gold you could have had. This feature makes the game a bit harder, but it effectively neutralizes some of the annoying "entrenching" strategies that used to be popular among some players.

Two of the four player races in Warcraft III are already quite familiar, and gamers who finished at least the Tides of Darkness, should be able to fully grasp both Humans and Orcs in no time. Those races have suffered a few changes, but at least, the resource gathering method and the two or three basic buildings remained the same. The undead and the night elves are new and very different from the older races, even in the basic concepts. They force the player to use a mixture of tactical solutions, (much like those used to create the Protos and the Zerg from StarCraft). Needless to say, each race has its own specific units and tech-trees (build X in order to be able to create Y), with some commonalities. For example, the headquarters buildings all have three stages of development, each of which enables you to build new structures and units, and research new technologies, and so forth.

Whenever you need to replenish your strength or mana, or buy mercenary units or magical items, you will have to visit the neutral structures. Neutral structures can be found both on campaign and multiplayer maps marked as yellow houses on the mini-map. Neutral structures include Life and Mana Pools, Mercenary Camps, Goblin Alchemists' and Goblin Merchants'. All these neutral structures are usually guarded by hostile creeps. Killing these creeps yields experience points for your nearby hero, but it will often grant him a magical artifact. These magical items that can be gathered from creeps' dead bodies or purchased from the Goblin Merchant can have different effect and longevity. Artifacts have different functions, some will permanently change a hero's primary characteristic when used, some will modify a certain stat when carried, and some are simply be carried and used at need.

We come in peace... es...

Now, AI is one point where Blizzard always stood out among the competition. Now when I speak of AI, I only refer to what I experienced in custom games, and not in the campaign, as most of the computer's behavior in the campaigns has been specifically scripted for each and every scenario. Custom games are the next logical step after finishing the campaign. They gradually introduce you to all races, the purpose of which is to provide you with some training before you log onto Battle.net and get some real combat against other players. AI will never be able to replace human intelligence though, so expect getting whooped soundly by better players for some time. Still, Blizzard did a pretty good job on it. There are two basic levels of virtual intelligence involved here. One is on the player level, and it is actually what we call a Computer Player, and the other one is on the unit level and decides what all units do, how they respond to commands, react to new situations, and find their way around the map. The latter is spotless. Path-finding, acquiring targets in battles and unit response in general work like a charm, making gameplay fluent and enjoyable. The player intelligence deals with determining strategies, tech-tree development and unit and resource management and it is almost as good. It will occasionally act like a real live player, trying to lure your units into ambush, mass attacking, and then retreating wounded units and replacing them with fresh ones. The computer only seemed to have had a hard time leading the Night-elves; I had no trouble in defeating the computer controlled Night-elf player whatever race I was playing. Still, bear in mind that the player AI shouldn't even be more than a "sparing" partner used for practice. If you want a real fight, go to the Battle.net... and even if you die, remember that "all the ladies dig rigor mortis"...

I laugh in the face of danger hahahaha!

This finally brings us to the main aspect of this game: the multiplayer mode. Blizzard did everything they could to make this element of WarCraft III as user-friendly as possible. The game engine supports up to twelve players per session on Battle.net or LAN. The excellent and easy to use LAN support will make WarCraft III the worthy successor of StarCraft as the ruling game on LAN parties. Players who prefer to play one-on-one through a direct modem connection will now have to establish a dial-up networking connection between their machines manually before playing the game. Battle.net offers everything we need and know from years of gaming on the net as well as many new and improved options. Several multiplayer modes are built into the logic of the game, they include 1-on-1, 2-on-2, and so forth up to four ladders. There is also quick anonymous match-making, free choice of player color, observation mode and extensive clan support.

Multiplayer games support resource trading and unit sharing for the first time in Craft games. Multiplayer sessions can last quite a long time, they can range anything between half an hour to forty-five minutes for tiny maps to four hours or more for the really large ones. One good novelty here is that there is no more rushing in the classical sense of the word. It is simply impossible to see the defeat screen after six minutes of play, which could easily happen in RTS online games, even without cheating. This is basically thanks to the fact that multiplayer maps now have a number of Creeps all over them. Creeps are, as I said, aggressive Critters which serve two purposes: slowing down the first attack, and hence destroying all chances for a rush, and acquiring easy experience points for your hero.

The players will at first have to battle it out on the forty-two multiplayer maps for two to twelve players included on the disk, and two scripted maps (for one and four players) displaying the power and modularity of the game engine and editor. And as if that wasn't enough, the game ships with a powerful, yet comprehensive and easy to use map editor, which will result in a plethora of user-made maps. There are rumors that Blizzard may introduce the Map-of-the-Week/Month program as it did for StarCraft. For additional information on gameplay strategies visit Marn Thunderhorn's Strategy Guide at http://www.battle.net/war3.

I never say "Ni"!

There you have it. This game is one in a zillion... a work of art. And whatever slight flaws it still may (theoretically) have, they will be, no doubt, corrected in the patches... and I have this feeling we will be seeing many of them. And not because the game is buggy or anything, but because of the good old Blizzard strategy to increase the replay value of its games by making them evolve. By issuing patches, Blizzard will be able to shift the unit and building price/power balance, and hence inducing the players to develop new strategies. You may as well be a FPS only gamer and still get loopy about it (as our EIC did), and if you are a FRP or RTS player you are sure to adore it. So, scrap up whatever you've got and get yourself a copy. Die-hard fans will probably enjoy getting one of the limited-number collector's edition boxes, which will include a book with high-quality prints of original concept-art, a DVD with all in-game cinematics, game trailers, the "making of" footage, an audio CD with game soundtrack, and of course, the game CD. I myself would be prepared to kill a reasonably large number of people to get my hands on it, so if you do happen to own the collectors edition, do pop by with it... alone... and unarmed...

Ni!