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.
