They say it's tough being #1. Well,
apparently, it's not THAT tough. Blizzard's been on top
of this whole RTS genre since wayyy back when.
There hasn't been a game that they've released that
hasn't been financially successful. And that trend
continues in a big way with Warcraft III.
That being said, I'm getting really tired of
real-time-strategy (RTS) games. They don't seem to offer
anything new anymore, and the innovations I did like
don't seem to be getting expanded upon.
The biggest changes from War II to War III is that there
are more races now. Count' em, *4*! Whether or not this
is a good or bad thing can't be really measured. There
doesn't seem to be a huge gap in play balancing, but the
fact that there are so many different factions to play
as doesn't seem to bring too much to the table.
(Note: I have not played multiplayer yet, that type
of thing never really appealed much to me. I get a
bigger kick out of playing these types of games with
friends. Multiplayer online games are usually FPS
affairs for me.)
Where they would come into play is that they give you
all sorts of different personalities to play as. In
Starcraft, you had your different "Hero" units like
Kerrigan, and it was cool to follow their trek through
the storyline.
I'm not as attached to the characters in War III, Prince
Arthas is a complete loser, as is the guy from the dark
elf campaign who can't get through a single mission
without turning evil.
The graphics look really nice for Warcraft III,
although, there is a definite variance in quality from
character to character. Medivh looks really, really
cool. Arthas and Jaina don't. I'm also kind of annoyed
by the utter disregard for lip-sync on the characters.
Why bother having their mouths move if they don't
correspond to anything? Honestly, it adds nothing.
For the most part, the voices and sound are done well,
nothing that I can really complain about, which is good.
I'm not the kind of person that really gets floored by
the music in these types of games, and more often than
not, I'll run MP3s in the background to listen to my own
music.
What I would have liked to see, and something I haven't
ever seen out of an RTS game is measure of consequence
from your battle.
Every single game I've played has gone like this. Lose 1
battle and you lose the war.
This isn't realistic, nor is it good game design. Losing
a battle should put you in a more dire predicament, but
there's nothing that makes less sense than fighting your
way to the last vestiges of the enemy stronghold, losing
that mission, and then having the enemy take over the
world.
I would have liked to see some branching on Blizzard's
part. Something where when your characters are
disagreeing with each other, you could choose to side
with a different group of people. Or decide not to be
evil. Something like that. But you can't, and hence I
was very, very bored with the storyline towards the end
of the Human campaign.
Blizzard's addition of Heroes to the game, making them a
focal unit, as opposed to the guy you had to keep
protected in your base or they would end your mission,
is kind of neat. I would basically play my RTS games
this way anyway, with single units of mine racking up
unheard of amounts of kills.
Unfortunately, this often came at the cost of me not
watching over my base, and getting wasted by
non-computer opponents.
But in this game, it's possible, for example, in the
Human campaign, to build a wall of defenses, and
literally kill every unit on the map just using Arthas,
waiting for him to regain Mana and subsequently making
him invincible.
I wished the other units besides the ones given "Hero"
designation would have benefited from racking up the
kills, as was the case in Total Annihilation, but no
such luck. Unlike Starcraft, the number of units killed
by each of your units isn't even tracked.
What results is a very un-palatable type of gameplay,
for you can now play any of 3 ways. Forego the
development of the hero and win with the standard
overwhelming arms strategy.
Or, you can rely nearly solely on your hero, having him
gain levels when Blizzard hasn't capped his experience
on a certain mission, and letting him run wild at level
10.
Or combine the two. This adds another dimension of stuff
for me to manage, and in real time, this basically isn't
happening for me.
So instead of feeling like a triumphant upgrade, the
addition of Heroes to me, feel rather slapdash.
Combine that with my general un-enthusiasm over the main
storyline, and I end up feeling a bit disappointed with
Warcraft III as a whole. (Especially that end
credits/outtakes sequence. That was TOTALLY LAME.)
A lot of other people seem to enjoy it, and to each
their own, all I'm saying is that the genre seems to be
a crumbling niche, kind of like the American music
industry...someone's gotta innovate, or they're going to
all end up out of work.
7.9
