Slashdot Mirror
Warcraft 3 Not Until 2002
Thomas M Hughes writes "Blizzard said a few weeks ago that Warcraft 3 won't be ready in 2001. While Blizzard has never been good at meeting its release deadlines, usually its a good idea. They tend to put out decent games the first time and not have as many huge fixes, just small tweaks. " They've put the announcement in the FAQ.
Who is actually surprised by this? Did anyone actually expect Warcraft 3 to ship Q3 '01 when not too long ago they had only finished two of the races in the game, and hadn't done any unit balancing or multiplayer work? This is fine with me. I asked a Blizzard employee at a game convention years ago: "When will Starcraft ship?" He said, "When it's ready."
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Considering the amount of hit games they have put out, I'm sure they have a sizable warchest of dough.
The only thing that comes to mind in terms of failures for Blizzard is Warcraft Adventures, which was supposed to be some animated Warcraft adventure game where you play an Orc slave. I forget exactly what happened, but the game was canceled.
But otherwise, all of their other games have been amazing fun and were devoloped for both Windoze and Macs.
Are there any plans to port a Linux version?
We are currently developing WarCraft III for the PC and Macintosh and have no plans for versions on other operating systems.
We need to put pressure on blizzard for some linux releases. Not that it was a suprise.
I'm a really big fan of everything blizzard and War3 is something I can't wait to get my hands on. Still, I prefer that they release it 6 months late (or im this case, it's been like what, 2 years ?) and have a really stable game.
I've been playing max payne lately and while it is a great game, it's buggy as hell! They can take all the time they want, as long as they release it stable.
Anyway, blizzard is just like 3drealms : Release date ? What the hell is that ??? I think they've confused "release date" with "hype date". Can you say Duke4ever ?
IP Therefore I am.
Have to disagree with that. Normally, with games like WarCraft and StarCraft, Blizzard has been pretty good updating frequently after the release with small fixes.
But the Diablo series has had it's share of problems, the first with the hacking of the file on the local hard drive to boost your stats (which Blizzard never really fixed), and the second with being published clearly when the servers weren't ready to handle the load. Most disturbing is that many of these companies promising "massively-multiplayer RPGs" create 200,000 CDs for launch and then get surprised when more than half these users end up on their servers. It's a real problem, as countless editorials in gaming mags demonstrate.
If you're going to sell 200,000 CD's, make sure your servers can handle 200,000 users. If you're waiting to release a game "until it's done", make sure it's actually done when you release it.
They tend to put out decent games the first time and not have as many huge fixes, just small tweaks.
I guess Hemos hasn't checked out the Battle.net message bases lately. Maybe after he reads his first 500 messages complaining about the endless delay for the upcoming huge patch that will fix the dozens of current bugs he'll alter his position.
And we're not talking about tweaks here. We're talking about bugs that allow certain users (druids and barbarians, I believe) to crash any other user. There's also a nasty bug that allows the stealing of entire accounts, though that won't work on all servers. These bugs have been exploited for weeks and there hasn't been any response from Blizzard. I wish they would issue some small tweaks instead of telling people to wait for the mega-patch.
And then there's the class balance issues. A lot of people think that the expansion set, along with the 1.08 patch for the normal game, have pretty much destroyed all gaming potential of Diablo 2. I don't hold quite as extreme an opinion myself, but then again, I play a sorceress, the class most people think is dramatically overpowered. If I was a warrior, trying to hack my way through hordes of "physically immune" (what a concept, what is this, DC comics?) monsters, I'd probably have a different opinion. In fact, I doubt I'd even bother playing the game.
At least they're honest about it. It's not like thay're pushing the schedule back a couple days, on a weekly basis or something. You have to admit that's a point in their favor. It's hard to find companies with this level of integrity.
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
The lack of a recent Blizzard release has crippled the traditional college LAN party. While you can depend on a Blizzard RTS game to get off the ground quickly and finish within a couple of hours, most other strategy games either are twitch fests that finish before you can get comfortable with your laptop teetering on somebody's mini-fridge or Sim Base extravaganzas that take all night to resolve.
Starcraft can only last so long, and people are already going back to Warcraft II . . . good, balanced RTS games that don't require everyone to have a copy of the CD are quickly running out, and we're left playing dusty games, crappy RTS games, or ughh . . . first person shooters.
I want a quality Blizzard release as much as the next person, but the sooner the better . . .
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
I have been a fan of RTS games since, well, Blizzard practically invented them with Warcraft on the Macintosh.
But the big downfall of RTS games, and why I think many people hate them, is that as the genre has progressed, the interfaces have not. Ultimately victory comes down to not managing resources or having brilliant strategy, but being nimble enough to control the interface.
Take StarCraft, for example. To control your troops you assign them to hotkeys. The problem is that when you mix unit type within a group, you lose the ability to give them advanced commands. So you have to assign separate hotkeys by type and you end up using five or six of them just for one attack.
Unit grouping is another factor. You can carefully arrange your troops in a formation that gives them the advantage, but when you order them from point A to point B they arrive in one big jumble. Often times, unit will arrive at a destination one by one and get slaughtered.
The question I have...how hard would it be to develop some kind of basic programming language for these type of games? In StarCraft, Reavers cause an enormous amount of damage. I would want my characters to attack them first, overriding any previous attack orders. Or, for Zerg troops, if their health dips below a certain point, automatically burrow.
I know there are free software version of many strategy games in the workd (like FreeCIV) but are there projects attempting to recreate open source versions of RTS type games? So that this type of functionaly could be added?
And to Blizzard if there are any employees reading, why not work on this as a nice standby to WarCraft III? It should be very simple to develop a way of giving commands from scripts instead of point and click.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
All of their other titles have relied on 2D (even Diablo 2, which is 2D and enhanced with 3D). StarCraft ran well even on non-bleeding edge gaming hardware. I have always loved their attention to detail in performance. They are the anti-Funcom (anyone who plays Anarchy Online with its 1FPS in towns even with a GeForce 2/3 knows what I mean). People who knocked Diablo 2 for its lack of "revolutionary" graphics were missing the big picture, IMHO.
Total Annihilation was an impressive 3D RTS in its time, however when the units filled the screen, performance fell through the floor. I'm optimistic that Blizzard, in committing to 3D in WCIII, will find a way to avoid this.
Still searching for my Inner Adult...
Death
Taxes
a Blizzard or 3D realms game that's "Just around the corner!"
There are books written about how doing this fails to help.
If it was anyone else I'd be complaining, but Blizzard stuff is usually worth the wait.
I am personally fine with waiting for complete, mainly correct, runnable, optimized and fun game rather than a piece of cruft. The gaming industry has a habit of producing alot of junk at the expense of quality. So far as I am concerned, get it right, and I'll be a dedicated customer for life. Companies like Dynamix, Id, and Blizzard do their absolute best to produce games of quality - for that I thank them and always purchase their games. Think about it too...some other game developers will release a decent game, then lock it up so it can never be expanded to enhance the game in the future.
Much like Aliens vs. Predator - GREAT game - but it just stagnated after a while because the game was locked very, few mods etc and I stopped playing it.
Not that I didn't like the game, it just died. I can't say that I have had that experience with any of the above mentioned companies. I play their games often, I purchase their products gladly - because they make great games period! They seem to have balanced the marketroid interference with quality products in an intense, horribly stressful, fast paced, and unforgiving market. Gamers are the worst critics I think you'll all agree...
I am a programmer by trade too - and you couldn't drag me kicking and screaming into the gaming industry - I'll stick to developing scientific applications for Linux thanks very much! But I have an enormous amount of respect for these developers...so hurrah!
When Warcraft 3 comes out it will kick ass and I'll be playing it for years...heck I'm still playing warcraft2!
This is how software is SUPPOSED to be written and released. You work on it until its ready. Until its perfect. Until everything works exactly the way you want it to, with no flaws. THEN you release a beta test to find those issues that nobody in the development or testing team could find. If designed correctly, most flaws will simply be specific hardware issues that weren't completely tested in house or balancing issues with gameplay. But I played Starcraft and I never saw any major bugs.
Keep up the good work Blizzard.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
At least Bioware will be releasing Neverwinter Nights for Mac and Linux as well as Windows. Too bad the module creation tools will only run on Windows though. I was hoping Loki would do a port of those. Guess that's not too likely now.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
That's under the assumption that more manpower is the solution. There is a happy medium where manpower and output are @ their best. When you add more and more developers you may even hit a point where you are counterproductive IMHO.
How is that so? Max Payne has never crashed on my Pentium III 600 Mhz system. This is not a high-end system either. It is using Windows 98 (original), a Matrox G400 video card, 256 MB, etc. It is a great game, but very little replayability unless the addons/mods are good.
What symptoms are you having?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
There were also huge problems with Battle Net when starcraft was released. Battle Net now is MUCH better than it used to be.
Another thing going for Blizzard is they don't drop their games quickly. Starcraft, which was released around 3 years ago now, is still supported, and they recently released a new patch to fix some issues. Diablo is still being supported too.
Too bad they don't seem to like Linux since Blizzard seem to be one of the few game companies that give a damn about their customers, and aren't just out to ship product.
How does windows force you to use proprietary software? Just because the 'free software' crowd doesn't write software that actually works under windows?
You can get GCC for windows (and it works well). THere is no law against developing free software for windows. Poeple just *aren't doing it*
Yes, I know, it's wonderful that Blizzard is waiting until the game is stable and perfect and bug-free. Good for them. But while they work on this one game, other developers are working like mad trying to shove out the most graphically intensive games they can, as quickly as they can. "Damn the bugs! Full speed ahead!"
The problem this could create for blizzard is that when Warcraft III is released, it will look graphically dated compared to buggier, less fun games that came out a month before and only spent a year in development, thus working with newer hardware and software right from the get-go. Consider Daikatana, for example. Yes, I know it had a bunch of issues above and beyond crappy graphics, but just consider those graphics for a second. Why did Daikatana use the old, Quake II engine? Because when they were starting work on the game (actually, a little after they started work on it) that was the best engine available. By the time newer hardware and software came out, there was already so huge a committment to QII engine, and so much more work to do, that it just wasn't possible to move to a better engine. This "engine lag" is a risk all games with really long development cycles run, and games like Warcraft III and Duke4ever might fall prey to it. Admittedly, a lot of games with long dev cycles are very successful, but many aren't.
If warcraft II suffers from engine lag, will it still be attractive to the average (not hardcore) gamer? I don't know.
I'm the stranger...posting to
That last line should read: "If warcraft III suffers from engine lag, will it still be attractive to the average (not hardcore) gamer? I don't know."
I'm the stranger...posting to
FYI: Hellfire wasn't released by Blizzard.
If it takes longer to release a good game then that's fine, but the thing I'm a bit burned on is the fact that all the people who purchased warcraft II now have fast computers and it's not playable. You have to re-purchase the game as the battle.net edition to fix the mouse and scrolling speeds. Shouldn't that have been a free patch? Why on earth should I have to buy it twice?
Granted it's an older game, but there nothing as fun as marching into a village with an army of trolls throwing axes. New Troll here! Who you want me kill?
I should go download it from a warez site to show my disaproval.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Yeah, I was worried about the system requirements but it turned out to be decent. Sure it is not smooth as Quake 3 Arena, but heck it runs and is playable! Odd. I assume you tried clean boot too? My problem is Half-Life that locks up rarely and without warnings. Odd, huh?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It's very odd, but I feel RTS is a rare genre which has actually peaked and is now in deline. Total Annihilation had an outstanding user interface, and units did largely what they're supposed to do. And there were no artificial 12-man limits on the number of units you could select.
For instance, you could send a building bot around the base on patrol, and he'd automatically reclaim metal, energy, repair units, repair buildings, help build units, or help build buildings, depending on the availability of resources. It's not just about flexibility but about sensible heuristics and testing and balancing, all fields that have been badly overlooked.
I played Kohan, and it's a wonderful first title, but neither it nor anything I've played in a very long while comes close to TA.
TA has its flaws, but I have not seen its equal in RTS for years now, and the fans are *still* generating new units, new maps, and even new games out of TA.
Check out http://www.planetannihilated.com if you want to learn more.
I would love to see someone make a new RTS that learned all the user interface and most of the heuristic lessons from TA along with the matchmaking and community support lessons from Battle.net, but I feel that right now, we're in a rut where alpha-blended 3D accelerated special effects and enough camera angels to rival a porno DVD are being prioritized over the real design issues.
I've been to the past 3 E3s and seen Warcraft 3 at each one. First time, it looked pretty badass. Losta units, full 3d. Second time, it looked ok. Less units, still 3d. 3d wasn't as big a deal anymore, since basically every development RTS was going 3d. Last E3, it looked pretty bad. Even less units, smaller maps, and the gameplay was pretty horrible. To picture the gameplay, take Warcraft 1, make it 3d and really pretty, and then reduce the amount of units on the screen to about 4, and throw in some super unit that destroys everything and never loses health.
Ensemble Studios' Age of Mythology looks about 50x better then War3. Empire Earth, created by Rick Goodman, lead producer of Age of Empires (tm)(c)(sm), looks better then War3 as well. By 2002, War3 will be old hat. Hell, its old hat now. I'm not holding my breath for it and I don't suggest you do either.
.agrippa.
Linux: When will 2.4 be ready? (Linus: When it's done.)
Warcraft: When will WC3 be ready? (Blizzard: When it's done.)
Random console gamers: When will the Dreamcast be done? (Sega: As soon as we drop support after the initial sales and make plans to screw over our fanbase.)
:) Sorry. Had to get my whack in on Sega.
But seriously, waiting is a good thing. Although most consumers are idiots who dance around, leaving puddles on the floor like an over-excited puppy, and screaming at companies for a release..
Well, they shouldn't. That causes management to say, "Hey! Shipshipship! MONEYMONEYMONEY! Bugs? Isn't that what 50 mb patches that people on 56k's can download easily are for?!"
Honestly, I wish more software (Both gaming and 'normal' software) (And hardware, in terms of consoles) would ship when it's ready instead of trying to meet release dates.
Wait for a game thats late than play one that was pushed out the door.
Blizzard is constantly late on games. Some people rake them through the coals for it. Thats a load of crap. There are very few producers out who each and every one of their games have met huge acclaims.
They consistantly produce the best games out there and I'm glad they take the time to make sure its a winner. Late releases are frustrating, but at least with a Blizzard game I know when it finally comes out I won't be disappointed.
VENI! VIDI! VICI!
A lot has been said over the years about the virtues of mixing genres and some of it is just hype, but when it comes to RTS's, I consider it the solution.
Battlezone is another game that acknowledged that solution (and before Shogun did). It managed to revolutionise the RTS genre by throwing in elements from FPS and Arcade genres. Too many RTS games look like just a new skin someone hacked for the Warcraft interface. I give a great deal of credit to games like Battlezone and Shogun that threw that interface away altogether.