Slashdot Mirror
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
Warcraft III runs on Windows 95/98/2000/NT and Mac OS. My setup was easy as pie, which was surprising since I run WinXP. And, on a side note, I was running it on a LCD screen and had no problem. Blizzard has an effective video setup that allows you to customize the game to match your hardware by changing the resolution, model detail, animation quality, texture quality, particles, and lights. This is especially helpful if you're running on an older machine and still want your game to run fast. The sound setup even allows you to have Dolby Surround!
I'm always disappointed that Blizzard's betas only let you play multiplayer, but that's life. In multiplayer mode, I found my abilities only let me get about 30 minutes into the game before I was demolished by the hard-core players. Maybe it was me, but Warcraft III seemed to have a faster pace than the previous two releases. The pace is a double-edged sword, because some players like their video games to be fast paced while others like to take their time. I think Warcraft II is somewhere in between Urban Terror and Civilization III. So, until I can take it low and play in a single player campaign mode, I'm counting the days until Blizzard releases Warcraft III 1.0.
Most important, if you're looking forward to the game, be assured: the gameplay is cool. This time you have a choice between four races: Human, Undead, Orc, or Dark Elf. Your race really doesn't matter in multiplayer mode; winning basically comes down to building everything up quickly and creating a massive army with which to crush your opponents. Or in my case, getting crushed.
This is where one of my favorite features comes into play. When enemies are attacking you (or your allies), the map flashes, letting you know that there is a throwdown and you should send in backup. Features I'm looking forward to in the upcoming release include: LAN games (five laptops, five six-packs, you know the drill), the single-player campaign, map editors, and polished cinematics. I realize that cinematics may not really be a game feature, but I can down a tub of popcorn when I'm watching Blizzard's cinematics, they're just that cool.
Warcraft III gives new meaning to strategy RPGs. If you like to play pure strategy games where your only goal is to be the last one standing, this game is for you. If you like games where you can take a character, build him up, and watch the character grow over the life of the game, this game is for you. Warcraft III is a successful cross between the two genres. You can build your basic Orc Grunts and go fight the enemy, but you can also build Heroes. Each class has different Heroes with which you can gain experience, attain new levels, and learn new skills. Warcraft III even lets you carry around an inventory!
I think the biggest improvement that Warcraft III has over its predecessors is Blizzard's ever more impressive graphics. With a decent video card, the graphics are crisp and clear. Nowadays, 3D is the name of the game, and Blizzard again comes a step closer to reality with this strategy role-playing game.
Most important, if you're looking forward to the game, be assured: the gameplay is cool. This time you have a choice between four races: Human, Undead, Orc, or Dark Elf. Your race really doesn't matter in multiplayer mode; winning basically comes down to building everything up quickly and creating a massive army with which to crush your opponents. Or in my case, getting crushed.
RTS is dead. Its all about who's the 1337 D00D that can build up his army faster and rush the enemy. Adding 3D and new races isn't helping. You need to force strategy on the opponent. Games like Conquest:Frontier Wars is a game thatforces stratgy on the player, and removes the micromanagement. That needs to be done to bring RTS back to life.
I'm afraid WarCraft3 is nothing more than an upgrade of Warcraft2. Sure, its pretty, and will entertain for about a week, but it'll all come down to who can rush faster.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Like MPAA bad! - New Bladerunner DVD good!
This is Slashdot, the great virtual melting pot of opinion, don't expect it to make sense.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Blizzard has always been a company that's lagged a bit behind in making use of new computer power, ie they lock you into a specific screen resolution, limit the options for tweaking eye candy, and for a long time would only make games that used sprite animation.
:p
I always feel cramped playing blizzard games in their enforced low resolutions, to the point where I really don't enjoy playing them. The control panel takes up too much screen space, the buildings are too large, and I end up fighting with the interface when it comes to getting done the things I want done.
In other words, does anyone know? I notice the faq says they're upping the available resolutions.. but that doesn't say much as you could have 1600x1200 and still have a graphic rendered to take up one third of the screen.
If the game doesn't provide zooming out and camera rotation, ala Myth, count me out.
uhm, have we forgotten? what about all those calls for boycott? large company crushing opensource and using the DMCA?
From the WC III FAQ: 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.
Would have been nice to know if was going to be available under OSX or Classic. Perhaps I just missed where it was listed??
I too am a beta tester... I was an avid Warcraft 2 BNet player and am now an avid Starcraft BNet player. I thought that Starcraft brought an enourmous amount of innovation to the RTS scene, and thought that Diablo was an incredible game with potential. Now that I have played those two to death, Diablo II and Warcraft III seem to be the same game all over again, yet with even more detail graphically only. But one must think... what sort of game would Blizzard need to develop to avoid being accused of re-hashing or re-packaging? I cant think of anything... Other than a change of theme perhaps. Just like Hollywood, the game Industry is running out of ideas.
Look at the previous blizzard stories. Slashdot editors didn't really express any strong opinion about the case. As for the readers who post the comments ... do you really except 300,000 people to have the same opinion about a game
Do you have anything to back up this opinion or do you just not like Vivendi Universal Publishing cause they're french?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I know I can't be the only one that refuses to play RTS games until they come up with a decent AI for your forces? For me, the real question about the beta is what your forces do when they are finished with their assigned task? Do they stand around waiting for another order, or do they do something intelligent?
;-)
Until RTS games have decent enough AI that when your grunt is done building that fort you assigned him to build he goes and either returns to his previous job or starts doing some other productive job, I won't play them. I don't want to micromanage a bunch of grunts, that's my boss's job
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Lacking, to say the least.
"winning basically comes down to building everything up quickly and creating a massive army with which to crush your opponents. "
Yawn. Boy how original. In 1984.
Hmm, theres combat, and that part of the screen flashes, gee just like every other RT strat. game.
Yawn.
Has Dolby Sound, could be cool, unfortuanatly a very small percentage of there payer will have a speaker set up for this. I'd hate to think the game took so long to develop because of this.
Detects your hardwaye, now thats new. oh wait, no its not. Yawn
"Warcraft III gives new meaning to strategy RPGs. If you like to play pure strategy games where your only goal is to be the last one standing, this game is for you. If you like games where you can take a character, build him up, and watch the character grow over the life of the game, this game is for you. "
didn't you say its all about building up fast earlier in your review?
How where the graphics? did you need to look up anything in the manual, or was the interface intuitive? did you try it with different settings, on different machines? in which way is it better or worse then WarcraftII?
When Considering the reputation of Blizzard, and comparing it to the reputation of Slashdot, I'll believe the reviewer just isn't any good at doing a review and assume Blizzards game is going to be good. Mind you, thats only because I've enjoyed their *Crafts series so much.
Although I couldn't stand Diablo.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Granted it's only multiplayer, but the gameplay is only glossed over. So what happened during those 30 minutes you played? How was the networking? Was there lag? What about the interface? Argh... this review was written by Brittney Spears. Damn it... Where's my -1 voting button when I need it?
While I'll admit that the review reads much like the marketing copy they call game journalism these days, I have to disagree with your (terse) assertion that one can't both be quite thrilled with a game and be less than thrilled with said game publisher's corporate policy.
I'd reckon that were one of the Bnetd developers to get a beta (not so hard to imagine, come to think of it), and review it, it would be just as positive -- the guys really have to love the game francise to invest their time and energy in it as they have.
Besides, love the game but hate the seller? There's an age-old (well, at least as old as Cat-Fur and Ascii Express) answer to that one...
t.
:wq
I think FPS are the ones that will start innovating, now. The mod community is very large, and "adding another feature" is being done faster than game producers can think them up.
Modding is our friend in video games. It requires that the next game you sell needs innovation. Otherwise, you'll just be beat-out by a mod.
I'm surprised Wolfenstein and Metal of Honor are selling copies with mods like Day of Defeat for halflife. Same "general" idea, but the mod is free if you own halflife (if you don't its only like $5.00!).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Don't you people have _ANY_ pride!?
You bash the DCMA, SSSA(or whatever it is called) and all the others, but then you don't boycott blizzard for killing bnetd?!
You even write a god damn review!?
Does no one remember The Art of War series?
Imbalanced units contribute to this problem as well. One of the hero units can summon, for no cost other than mana, treants which are more powerful than non-upgraded base melee units. He can even summon more than one at a time after he levels up again. If you know the map you can perform a treant rush with a level 2-3 hero, 3-6 treants, and 2-3 archers before *ANY* non-nightelf opponent can have more than 5 of their base unit produced, and thats assuming they devote ALL their resources to purely anti-rush base unit production which really hurts them in that they cant devote what is needed to the early game resource gathering and expansion.
Funny you should mention that. I wrote a (albeit very rough) open-source real-time chess game as a project in college. Its sort of a spoof on RTS games.
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
Wow, looks like the /. crew is at it again.
The way I see it is this...Blizzard is arguably one of the top software gaming manufacturers worldwide. The gameplay might not be a huge improvement over SC and WCII, but there is a change in the hero char. aspect, inventory, and from what most of the review sites say, less need to mindlessly gather resources.
I know that the company is backed by some shady roots that throw the DMCA around like it's thier own personal problem-solver. Does that mean I'm not going to buy thier game, No.
I'm a gamer, and I support Blizzard. They make great games. The simple fact that it seems everyone is missing is that BnetD and the like are putting out a software that has the direct repercussion of cutting into Blizzards profits. Why that is being overlooked is beyond me. Sure they engineered it from the ground up (or so it's being said), but the fact still remains that BnetD is a pirate utility promoting NOT purchasing a full licenced version of W3.
If any one of you owned a business which produced a software, and some outside source put up a utility that basically let any jackhole on the web download an ISO of your CD-ROM and play it multiplayer (which, let's face it, is the entire premise of these types of games) for free, effectivley pissing on your bottom line (monitarily that is), you'd be irate to, and find any legal loophole there was to shut them down. Blizzard did just that, and I say Bravo.
BnetD asking to use Battle.net's CD-Key verification was a total farse. Blizzard saw the fact that if they opened up that kind of information that it could be much more easily exploited...who knows how secure the BnetD guys really are...would you risk your couple hundred thousand dollar investment on it...hell no you wouldn't. Do you know how easy it would have been for BnetD to just overwrite any CD-Key you typed in with a valid one and send that to Battle.net for obviously successful verification?
Think it through guys, they are protecting thier investment and any one of you would do the same think if you had that kind of money riding on it.
Bottom line...Blizzard makes great games, to continue to do that, they need to make money. To make money, they have to shut down those out to exploit thier product for free.
Sorry for the rant, but that had to be said
-Grover
I am leaning toward the idea that it is more Vivendi than Blizzard.
Blizzard has recently been practicing the "good fight" by using technological rather than legal means to try and slow down the crackers. One of their patches took a week to crack, and another one took only a day but it was rather funny since the game found out if you were playing a cracked version and generated invincible hostile monsters in your base.
I also don't think Blizzard would have been just so plain inept in their action if it was their own. Vivendi managed to legally attack all the wrong people while missing the Warforge team that actually made the Warcraft III beta playable. Eventually it seems that someone from Blizzard came to IRC and talked to the leader in a civilized and normal fashion. I don't think the details of this conversation ever came out but it is the opinion of some that they came to some sort of private agreement, which certainly seems possible.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
You can rotate the camera if you know which of the game's files to edit :P.
You need an MPQ extractor and you edit ui/miscdata.txt, you can make it so the games zoom in functionality will rotate instead.
I think it would cause errors if you actually tried to play it like this with other people though.....
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.