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Beta Sign-Ups for WarCraft III
Alcachofo writes "Blizzard Entertainment has announced the long waited Beta Sign-Ups for their newest game: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. Individuals residing in the USA or Canada will be able to register for a chance to be one of the 5,000 players chosen. The beta signup is scheduled for a 24-hour period, beginning on January 7th at 11:00 p.m (GMT -8) and ending on January 8th at 11:00 p.m (GMT -8)." I couldn't even
count the number of great hours of fun WC2 provided us back in the day.
What an absolute classic. I wonder if WC3 will be reboot worthy.
the pace that wine is going, you wont need to.
I'm betting that by the time it comes out as a retail product you'll be able to run it under wine or the special mandrake version.
You'd be suprised at how many games and apps actually run nicely under wine.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
From the last time I looked at the game specs, it should be interesting.
WarCraft 3 looks to bring something to RTS that hasn't really been seen since Star Craft. Different races (4 in warcraft 3!) with completely different buildings, units, and strategies.
Hopefully they'll make the game as balanced as starcraft, and, hopefully, longer lasting online than starcraft (it takes less than 15 minutes for most starcraft games, unless you are super-defense).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
- Civilization III
- Halo
- GTA3
- Final Fantasy X
- Super Smash Brothers: Melee
- Pikmin
Not to mention the countless TV programs, and...They say that Truth is the first casualty of war. I say that sleep is the first victim of Beta testing...
Though I really enjoyed both SC and WC(I & 2) it will be nice to try this out. I'll be picking it up the day it's released, though hopefully I'll make it as a beta tester and get some experience before the rest of the world :)
As always Gamespot has a good preview including screenshots
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Do I need a 64MB water-cooled graphics card? Will it require an as-yet unreleased 3 GHz processor due to the wealth of debug code? Will the silly arsed Mac users of the world (such as myself) be able to participate? If not, do they ever intend to release a Mac version?
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
Looks like January 7th is shaping up to be a great day. Apple's dropping hype bombs about the Jan 7 Macworld keynote, and now this.
Spectacular.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
hmmm beta testing... now a really neat idea would be if they included source code with the test, that way we could fix any bugs we find instead of prolonging the testing phase...
Ah hell, who am I kidding, I just wanna see the source code... and the damned NDA they make you sign would prevent me from having any fun with it... bah...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Please choose me to be a beta tester. Not only have I purchased about 6 copies of Warcraft 2 (For me, for friends, more for me after first two copies were stolen at a lan party, one more for battle.net), 1 copy of Warcraft 1, the Warcraft Battle Chest (Just cause) and Starcraft, and the Starcraft Battle Chest but I have an unhealthy addiction to strategy games. I require little sleep, and have submitted a bug report for starcraft already.
I promise to give you my first born child for a chance to be a beta tester.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Typical of Blizzard to hype their games years in advance, but they always end up producing classics. The betas always signal that the going gold is coming fast. I will definitely sign up for this one.
By the way, a great site to read up more on War3 is here.
As much as I loved playing Warcraft I/II, I fear that they really have to got some new great ideas. When these types of games were introduced to the public, the game concept was new and fresh and with the help of coax ethernet it gave a new dimension to the PC games market. But now we have seen so many games since, most of them "updated" version with better graphics. So one hopes that they have managed twist the gameplay just enough to have us oldtimers excited again(it seems to require more that just fancy attributes these days). If they fail at that, there's always a new crowd that haven't the pleasure of the old games and are ready for this.
Well, not that there's a WC3 beta signup, that rules! But these things are always limited to the US and Canada, what about us poor UK peeps who play the games as well? Can't we get a look in :(
Have you ever actually played SC:BW? There are many, many strategies that work. The thing that makes the game so interesting is that there is no such thing as a "winning" strategy: against a good opponent it comes down to economics (do more cost in damage to your opponent than the cost of your units) and risk-taking/luck.
Believe me, every time I've seen an "unstoppable" build order, strat, etc it's been fun for a bit figuring out a counter...but there always is one.
I've already seen a few simple questions that are answered in the Warcraft III FAQ. Some highlights: Yes, there will be a Mac version. No, there won't be a Linux version.
From the looks of things, WarCraft III will continue the age-old tradition of requiring decent hardware to run well. Fortunately, they apparently are making a full-featured map editor (probably similar to Starcraft's, which was VERY impressive, unlike Civ II/IIIs).
Also, they finally are providing high resolution support, while still (somehow) maintaining lower resolution support for those of us with not-so-good video cards.
Looks like it's going to be another addicting Blizzard game for me, but I'm glad it won't compete with my Civ III playing time for awhile.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
"I wonder if WC3 will be reboot worthy."
Uhhh, is that anything like being "sponge worthy"?
-Derek
I wonder if WC3 will be reboot worthy.
I see some posts have touched on the "reboot to Windows" aspect of this. Has anybody else noticed that, with most Windows games, you also have to reboot when you're done? My girls got at least one game this Christmas (Tony Hawke 2) that causes more strange stuff than even the average Microsoft Windows upgrade.
I think we need a Linux box for serious stuff and a Windows box to play with. But a Playstation would be cheaper.
... aspect of WC II.
Clicking on a character multiple times of course!
Click 1 starts with Zug Zug.
yes...
what?
stop bothering me
don't you have anything better to do?
I would not do such things if I were you
my tummy feels funny
BURRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP@#@##$@#$@#$@
Say hello to my little friend...
I spent more time clicking on characters then playing.
I know a guy who has a brother whose girlfriend has been sleeping with someone at Blizzard in an attempt to get him on the Beta list. She said that there is a typo on the Beta page and signup really isn't until the January 9th.
/.ers I am passing on this invaluable piece of information. So none of you should waste your precious time trying to register on the 7th. Spend that day downloading patches to your favorite OS, or go see LOTR for the 12th time. Don't go anywhere near the Blizzard site.
That's right, as a service to all of my fellow
I appreciate... uh, I mean Blizzard appreciates your support.
Just when I was getting excited to reclaim those 7 gigs that I have Win 98 installed on....Someone had to remind me that someday there is going to be another Warcraft. This folks is the type of thing Linux needs to "make it" on the desktop. Right now we have 15 office suites that introduce 400 new file formats and 20+ games that they have ported from the cut-out bin. Can you imagine if you could get Blizzard games for Linux on the day of release....That would be a good day.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
"However, now that they have added 3D chip features, Warcraft III will probably need either a decent video card (Geforce or greater) and/or a relatively fast processor (600-700 Mhz+). Of course, these are guesses."
t ml):
The system requirements are listed in the FAQ (http://www.blizzard.com/war3/faq/faq-features.sh
"What will the system requirements be?
It is important to us to make our games playable on as broad a range of machines as possible, and we do not see WarCraft III as an exception. We are planning on having a requirement of a PIII 400 system with a 3D accelerator card and 64megs of RAM. Currently, we are working on game performance and should be able to give more concrete information soon."
Since they are requiring only 400 Mhz and 64 MB of RAM, they most likely will not require a Geforce+ card to run this. That's a relief for me! Whew!
No, just "Luke"
You'll find I'm full of surprises
Noooo!!!
Z-Z-Z-Z-ZAP!!! "Ouch!"
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Let me be the first to point out that the signup times are NOT the ones posted on the front page. The time are really from January 17th at 11:00 p.m (GMT -8) to January 18th at 11:00 p.m (GMT -8). So don't even try on the posted 7th, because nothing will come of it. Don't try. Please.
Are you ready for...Mini-Austin!
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It is a reference to the TV sitcom "Sienfeld". I will attempt to explain it, but it could never make it as funny as the original.
Elaine uses the sponge as her preferred method of birth control. There is a shortage of sponges, so she (and all women in that episode) start using very strict criteria to determine if a man is "sponge worthy".
I know it doesn't sound very funny now, but it made a great sub-plot.
-Derek
*click*
"This is NOT "Warcraft In Space"!"
*click*
"It's much more sophisticated!"
*click*
"I KNOW it's not in 3-D!"
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
A little offtopic but..The sound editor for WCII was fun for loading monty python bites for my extremely addicted frat brother in college. He would camp out in front of my computer almost everynight for hours, evuntally I "crashed..wink..wink.." my computer and lost the only copy of the game I had. The next day he bought another copy from Best Buy. Also If you didn't know you can play the WCII CD in the cd player and hear the background music.
"Get them before they get....
All about me
Hmm. I looked at the screens and the first thing I thought was - someone's been reading too much Lord of the Rings recently.
...
I mean, they added:
magical cloaks
rings
spell books
Oh, yeah.
Now if I could just locate that nice ring I got for my birthday present
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The FAQ provides the answer: no. There WILL be a unix version...for Macs, but that doesn't do linux a lick of good (nor *BSD flavors either).
I have given up asking game companies to release linux versions. They simply will not do so - they do not want the user support headache and do not believe the effort will be made up for in sales (see id Software's failed attempt at boxed linux games).
Instead, I ask game companies (that are not owned by M$) to consider producing and releasing an unsupported linux game binary for download - like id Software does now (and before their failed boxed game trial). It allows them to produce a simple binary with little extra effort on their part and it doesn't require them to provide customer support for it. That is left to the community or the goodness of company coders providing information/support in newsgroups on an ad hoc basis.
Seriously, it is much more like that at this stage of linux user-hood that one could convince a company to release a near-painless unsupported linux game binary than to try to convince them to release a full-blown, supported linux version of some game...barring a deal with Loki, that is.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I always liked that the sheep go "Baa! Ram! Ewe!" myself. A nice touch.
You must have given up too soon. If you continue clicking the sheep (or seals or whatever the other maps' animals were) they will eventually explode.
Blizzard has a history of making games that don't need the latest in processor / vid card to run. I ran the beta and release of Diablo II (spring / summer 2000) on my P200 / 64MB / Voodoo2 card. That was below minimum requirements. DII did have some compatibility problems that left people with much faster computers with bad framerates and other problems, but that isn't exactly a performance problem. IIRC Starcraft asked for a 75 MHz or 90 MHz Pentium in late spring of '97. That was about the same time the Pentium II was coming on the market. And indeed, Starcraft played well on the P90 we had at work. Didn't play the original Diablo when it came out (early '96?), I think that required a Pentium. That may have pushed the requirements a bit. Warcraft II? Don't remember the requirements, probably any 486 would do well with it. It did get choppy if you had all 8 players maxed out to the population limit and only 8MB of memory but that was pretty rare, smaller games performed just fine. Warcraft I? Again, probably a decent 386 would handle it OK. That was a while ago... I think Blizzard has done a great job of releasing games that perform decently on 2 year old hardware. While a PII 400 is huge compared to its predecessor, it isn't much compared to a new 'budget' computer today.
Bleh!
A significant problem with this sort of beta testing procedure is that other countries are likely to get shafted on the network play aspect.
If the only reasonable network play is going to be over the Battle.Net servers, and they are only testing the game with people who live on the same continent as the best connected servers, then clearly they won't be examining the game's performance under higher latency conditions.
Unless they pop well-connected Battle.Net servers all over the world - and they certainly did not for Diablo II - then they are effectively saying they just don't care about their foreign market.
Which is probably true, just not very pleasant.
if you want to fix bugs in W3, send blizzard your resume. The ratio of open source / closed source games should tell you how successful that development model is.
If I send Blizzard my resume, then I would end up working for THEM, hence defeating the purpose.
The reason I suggested letting us (the testers) fix the bugs is because Blizzard will rate most of them as low priority, or simply overlook them. As a tester, I can concentrate on fixing one issue. OTOH if I worked for Blizzard, they would then tell me which bugs I could and couldn't fix, letting them slip through...
I do however agree that very few companies have had success with open source game dev... but it could happen...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.