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First Warcraft 3 Reviews Trickle In
Mortin writes "Several reviews of Warcraft 3, set to be released on July 3, are up at Icrontic, Tweakers.com.au, and of course IGN. Looks like Blizzard has yet another killer game on their hands."
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Are you sure it's supposed to be released on July 3? I mean everyone I know has it already.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I've been playing the Beta since Spring. It's wonderful. I've got the Special Edition on order from EB. I've got it ordered for one day delivery. I've got.... I've got no life do I?
Having played for a couple weeks now I must say I am pretty damned impressed with what Blizzard has done with the game. It's not revolutionary or anything like that, but the single player campaign is just pure fun. The storyline is great, the battles are great (Though mostly easy up until the last one), and the cinematics are beautiful. The new hero systems is pretty neat as well, it adds a completely new dimension to the genre. I wasn't impressed with the beta multiplayer on battle.net so I'm looking forward to getting a real copy and seeing how it performs. Now the wait begins for Worlds of Warcraft...
Yes, but isn't it up to the individual to make up their own mind? Being presented with both sides of the issue is the only way to ensure that you have the ability to make an educated decision.
/. isn't the best spot to go for pro-Microsoft/big-corporation news, so I know my point is kind of stepped on that way...
Conversely,
The evidence is in the players. All the rts hardcore players have played in the beta and have quit. Why? Cause the game lacks a lot of depth due to a lot of built in "features". Like for instance, creeps. The idea of AI controlled units around the map for you to attack and guard things such as mines and shops might sound good. However, creeps has an adverse side affect. It gives experience to your heros and gives you gold (Heros are another new concept, which is a big buff unit that can gain experience, level and have very powerful abilities and spells) . How is that an adverse side affect you ask? Well, it turns out, early on in the game, you *HAVE* to go creep hunting to give your hero that experience edge. Heros have the ability to turn the tides of the battle and a level 1 hero is much weaker than a level 3 hero. Right now, I rarely engage combat with the opponent until my hero is at least level 3. After creep hunting for a couple hundred games, it gets mundane and boring. Some people brush this off as "another resource" to get. However, this resource takes the first 10 min of the game. Before in previous RTS games, the focus of resource gathering was maybe the first 1-2 min of the game. Another big flaw many players see is upkeep. Upkeep is another new concept by Blizzard which cuts down the amount of gold a peon will bring out of the mine. At 30 units, you enter low upkeep which reduces gold to 7 and at 70 units, you enter high upkeep which reduces gold to 4. Blizzard implemented this because they didnt want 200 zerglings running around on the map. However, many players despise this limit saying low upkeep is annoying and they never really enter into high upkeep, which defeats the purpose. This also affects expanding because the extra peons cuts into your upkeep. Oh, that reminds me, 5 peons *MAX* per mine. These are two of the most controversial ideas that Blizzard has brought in. There are others as well. Many players complain that these limitations limits the depth of the game. IMHO, the game is fun and interesting. The 3D is done pretty well. However, it's not a Starcraft. Starcraft has depth and it's a very strategic game. It captivates players even today (I think it's been out for 4 years?). Will I buy War3? Yes. Will I be playing it after 6-12 months? Prolly not.
if you know where to look. I've uninstalled it, and tossed the disk. Reasons are,
1) It won't play smoothly on a P3 500 laptop (with 384 meg of RAM and an ATI Rage Mobility). Blizzard usually tries to get the low-end of the market. Not any longer
2) In the past, Blizzards games were evolutionary (but not revolutionary). This one is not even that. It's just another Real Time Strategy game, but with heros. Warlords Battlecry 2 did the same thing, and I bet there are others.
3) This thing is selling for $90 Canadian (about $60 US) even in the "no one beats our prices" electonics stores.
Screw it. If this game had come out 5 years ago, maybe. But Starcraft is better, and so is Age of Empires 2.
These posts (posts involving lawsuits against hackers) are always riddled with persons who want you to boycott these products, be they games, CDs or Movies. Personally I like games, CDs and Movies. However I don't like the tactics being employed by The RIAA, MPAA, or Vivendi any more than the next slashdotter. What I propose is not a boycott, but to give an equal or greater amount to the EFF Whenever you purchase one of these items. That way Every dollar you contribute to Evil is equally matched by one for Good. So At least your not contributing to the net evil.
Just my $.02
All they did (showing some of that wonderful Blizzard Creativity) was take the main character from Diablo, and put it in the middle of Warcraft. The trouble is, the heros are so essential to the game, and so hideously overpowered the rest of the characters are reduced to sideshows.
Warcraft III is designed to be a quick and dirty game where the fights are over in 30 minutes or less. Gone is any hope of a epic back-and-forth fight, it's a lets get the game finished as quick as possible.
The first person to lose their hero has lost the game in 90% of the cases, because their hero is out of the game for 2 minutes, while the other hero is running around levelling up and getting more items.
In order to get the game over as quick as possible, the game is exaggerated - if you lose, you come into the next fight at a disadvantage. If you win, you are more likely to win the next time, because the game is adjusting the hero's strengths. Add to that the Upkeep rules and the game is saying "You will play me this way or not at all - I will not let you deviate from the designers vision"
Strategy games should not do this - It's like playing a game of chess where when you capture the oponents pieces you get to put them on your side. Fun ? Maybe once or twice for the low-attention span crowd, but it's not strategy.
Personally, I'd look to a company that doesn't have a history of screwing over the open source community, or trying to steal your personal details from your system registry - say Creative Assembly, who will be releasing the latest Total War game in the near future - Medieval Total War which is more a computerised table top wargame then anything else.
Let me spell this out for you: this article is about Warcraft 3 being a killer game. The bnetd project has nothing to do with it.
It's obviously possible to think Blizzard's actions against bnetd are wrong, and think Warcraft 3 is a killer game at the same time.
What you seem to be proposing is that Michael should lie or omit the truth about Warcraft 3, because he disagrees with Blizzard's actions against bnetd.
Keep in mind, this is all just opinion. :)
:)
:) And I'll definitely want to see how they do StarCraft 2; I'm hearing rumors of another race that is a mix of Protoss and Zerg...
As a huge fan of the first two games (especially the first one), I'm somewhat disappointed with this one. It actually kind of bores me. At its core, WarCraft 3 seems like just a mixture of StarCraft and Diablo, like they just decided, "Hey, we'll mix our two biggest money-makers to make a mutant third one." StarCraft kept my interest for a while, but Diablo absolutely bores me. And now I'm running around in War3 doing little pointless sidequests and investigating towns and building experience levels and gaining inventory items...whatever happened to the big, massive battles? The game is party-based now!
Maybe it'll grow on me, who knows. I never really liked the storyline to begin with once I heard it, but playing the single-player campaigns, I'm even more turned off. A large amount of characters just talking, not very many cinematics (as in, stuff not done in the engine itself), and some downright cheesy stuff (for instance, the meeting with Jaina made me roll my eyes...and peasants running up to me, "My lord, legend tells of a *whatever pointless thing you should get that your character will say "Hmm, that could prove useful" about*). I feel like I'm just running around exploring more often than I'm planning attacks or doing any other war strategy. As in WARcraft.
Worst of all, the graphics retained their cartoonish look of War2. I loved War2 and tolerated the comic book look as just the theme of that particular installment, but the goofy humor and looks still exist in War3, and I'm kind of tired of it. Especially with the Orcs, who used to seem so badass and evil in the first game.
I miss the building tension of seeing the first few troops of a huge army slowly marching toward your base. Where's Bill Roper's "Yes, my lord" gone to? What about a recognizable war theme instead of the more ambient soundtrack of this game? Stuff like that. Maybe I'm stuck in the past, but it seems like Blizzard was concentrating so much on changing the gameplay and throwing so much stuff into it to make it different (heroes, hiring troops from the huts, running little sidequests, and more) that I miss the old classic simplicity of just two sides building bases and sending troops after each other to win instead of following some story about how the Orcs just happened to have revived themselves as a culture and, oh, by the way, some firey things are suddenly coming down from the sky to kill everyone and the dead are rising and the Night Elves are coming out of the trees. I guess I was hoping for just one last, huge, epic battle of Orcs and Humans, with all the neat little gameplay enhancements but without all the pointless features and unnecessary races to bog it all down. Though I'm sure a bunch of you disagree with me already.
At least there's Red Alert 2.
I'll go ahead and give War3 another try, promise!
I think Penny Arcade said it best - back in 1999!
Experts agree: everything is fine.
Finished the single player last night, although I'm not entirely sure why.
The maps are effectively all very simple mazes. There's so much blocking terrain that the amount of actual usable space is small, even on the big maps. Defensive towers are so cheap and effective that your "strategy" on most maps is just to build 8-12 towers on each of the two or three very obvious approach routes (that might as well be signposted "Very Obvious Approach Route") and massacre the desultory trickle of understrength AI attacks. A small flying squad of infantry (or flyers) to deal with the token seige engine in some attacking groups, plus a patrolling group of repairing peons, and you're impregnable for all practical purposes.
And this works on every map. Every single map. The "game" is just wandering your hero around, hoovering up goodies and picking fights until he stops levelling. Then you can pretty much take the enemy down any way you like. Grunt rushes, creeping artillery barrages, suicidal hero charges, it's all good, and it all works, as long as you concentrate on taking out buildings instead of wasting time engaging the enemy.
The AI is as pathetic as always. It's actually sad watching the small groups of mixed troops going down in the meat grinder of your tower fire, and the sallies are even worse. If you want to know one of the actual "tactics" for a base assault, it involves sending in a couple of units to snipe the enemy base. The enemy sallies everything out to engage them, then you just rush your actual attacking force right past the melee into the heart of their base and smack their town centre. Works. Every. Time.
On the special quest maps with no construction, it's (if anything) worse. Because your hero regenerates faster than any enemy, and because their AI's are crippled so that they only pursue you for a short distance and then return to their home, you can defeat all opposition with hit and runs. There's no skill involved, only patience. The only troops that are actually beneficial are artillery; the infantry you get gifted (generously) on these maps are largely irrelevant, as your hero can solo them. The plethora of healing wells scattered around just imbalance it further. How come the enemy never uses them?
Multiplayer isn't a bundle of laughs either. There's none of the StarCraft distinctiveness among the races. They're all fairly generic, and the Night Elves are pretty obviously an "oh yeah" addition that serve no purpose. The single player Night Elf campaign really does seem tacked on and anti-climactic.
Because of the unit limit, you have to choose between trick supporting units or combat units. Guess what? 10 powered up combat units will beat any combination of combat and support units, because the support units are feeble, and their effects are either underpowered or require too much micromanagement, and they go down before they can make a difference. Sure, that sorceress might polymorph one of your grunts into a sheep, but then your other nine grunts will smack her, both sides have lost a unit, your grunt will recover, and you still have more total hit points. In fact, most battles are just meat grinders where the winner is the side with the most total hit points. "Tactics" means using "attack" rather than "move" to get in some first strikes, and then the old saw of concentrating on one enemy at a time. Forget flanking, forget advantage of terrain, forget posture, it's just grind, grind, grind. Take out the peons and the town centre, and you've won, as always. Heck, if you're human and you're getting bored, ring the alarm bell, turn your peons into pathetic militia, and just make it easier for your opponent to snuff them as they charge mindlessly into combat.
In other words, we've seen it all before, and better. The graphics aren't even anything to write home about. You'll only ever view the game from one angle anyway, with the units on mostly level ground, and so they might as well be pre-rendered. You'd lose the lighting effects, and that's about it.
Sorry, I am sadly disappointed in Warcraft III. The engine and gameplay have evolved not one bit from StarCraft, unless you count the multiplayer Hero Rush (either to attack, or to loot and level). All the work has gone into the graphics and the token humorous unit poke-poke responses. To give you an idea of how derivative this is, they even lift sounds straight from Diablo.
This is a sequel by the numbers. Stick to the same old formula, give people what they know they like, sell to the same market, don't introduce anything that would require actual strategy or tactics like unit posture, significant terrain advantages or bonus damage on enemy that are in "move" rather than "attack" mode. Oh no, just keep on churning out the same old same old, and keep counting the profits. Bah.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.