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Warcraft III Expansion Released, Reviewed
Vladimir Niksic writes "According to the official Blizzard site, Frozen Throne, the long-awaited expansion to Warcraft III is out. The review at GameSpy marks it 'another quality expansion that plays like a full game.'" There's also a review at ActionTrip which praises the new features which "enhance every facet of gameplay, great storytelling, [and] varied mission types", but notes the $35 price as "..a bit steep for an expansion pack."
One thing that struck me about this expansion was that the missions were in general a lot more interesting and varied. There were fewer of the plain "destroy all the enemy bases" missions, but they didn't make them all the standard "hero and some men, no base, only found reinforcements" RPG missions that were always the alternative either. For example, there's a mission where you have to assault an enemy base. You have a base, but no gold mine. You find gold in the enemy base to build reinforcements. You also have a squad of stealth assassin/saboteur type guys that you have to sneak around to defeat some of the base's defenses. Pretty cool.
That said, I found it rather easy... I have to replay it on the Hard setting.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
They raised the cap by 10 food at each upkeep stage (low upkeep starts at 50, high at 80, and unit max is 100). I'm sorry you don't like innovation :(
Give them some cash, as the binary versions are better than the source (they've got some propriatry stuff in there). Honestly, I paid a tiny sum about 6 months ago, and so far I've been able to play WCIII, Civ 3 and Counterstrike with no problems what-so-ever (then I've got Quake3 and Mutant Storm as native Linux binaries, but that's a different story).
Yes, official support would be nice, and it's a shame that only the likes of Carmack, UT developers and Bioware are willing to give us Linux gamers what we want, but the more noise we make, the more likely people like Blizzard are to take notice. They'd also start paying attention if TransGaming start posting profits of hundreds of thousands of dollars (so go pay them).
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
1. Blizzard won't go Linux for a long time. If you want to run Blizzards games on an *nix-based/like system, get a Macintosh (shameless plug, I know. But I'm just speaking the truth).
2. Blizzard will never, ever, never remove creeps, the harsh food-limit and upkeep. Producer Robert Pardo has said many, many times that those things are to stay and will never be removed from the game. If Blizzard removed the, what would the game be? Starcraft in a fantasy world with heroes and a fourth race? Not pretty in my opinion.
3. Open Bnet sucks. They're saying it's open source blah blah blah for good use for those with no internet connection yadda yadda. But all it's being used for is to play pirated versions of the games. It was used during the original Warcraft 3 beta, and it was in fact, used during this actual beta of the expansion set too.
4. 35 dollars is quite a low price. It's not much different than the price that was put on Starcraft's Expansion set Brood War. Nobody complained back then about the price -- gamers today are spoiled because of warez and expect everything to be put out for free. Sorry, but market economy don't work that way. Trust me that when I say that you will get value for your money, you will get value for your money. Thing is that Blizzard is a very different company from the other companies out on the market. They actually make GOOD expansions to their games with much content and thought behind them. They don't slap some small extra things in a box to spice up what was already big in the original, but they improve the flaws and faults of the original instead. Almost like a sequel in my opinion.
5. Ships will make a triumphant return to Warcraft 3, but that will be in single player only. However, there will still be ships in multiplayer in form of mercenary ships purchasable at goblin shipyards. So yes, ships are back! They did it to please you Warcraft 2-fanatics!
Last of all is the cool thing that Blizzard has basically added a fifth race to this expansion set. Not playable, but in the single player campaign they have their own buildings and have workers who mine gold -- and everything. Damn cool! Now if only somebody could do a hack or something...
Finally (just to add some more text to lengthen this post out), the departure of the recent workers of Blizzard have nothing to do with this game at all. Three of those were who worked on the Diablo-series while the fourth one worked for public relations. They have basically nothing to do with this game except that they happen to work in the same company, and do occasional voices for the games (Bill Roper, the PR-guy, did the Grunt voice in Warcraft 3).
Any more questions?
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?