#WARCRAFT 3 REIGN OF CHAOS PC#
#WARCRAFT 3 REIGN OF CHAOS PLUS#

While the advancement of the campaign is completely linear, the missions themselves follow Starcraft's trend of unpredictability. Night elves' structures are all living trees that can be uprooted and fight when the base comes under attack. The undead are restricted to building on blight around their base (Zerg version of creep) and summon in new structures instead of building them (like the Protoss). None quite differ as much as the Zerg did in Starcraft, who had units as farms and no barracks, just auto-spawning, morphing larvae. They all have their form of workers that gather gold and wood - with the only difference being the night elves 'spiritually' capture the resource from the trees without chopping them down - all have a 'farm' structure to increase population limit, and all have various barracks to produce military. Blizzard were able to pull this off to make it more than a simplistic gimmick, but not too complex to be worthless in the fast-paced combat of RTS.ДЄll the races have a greatly different set of units, but generally function in the same way to be easy enough to pick up. Items either passively increase your stats when held or can be cast to summon help, award health or lay traps. The RPG element is accentuated further in that heroes have a six-slot inventory for items you find either from slain creatures, inside crates (yes, crates!) or even to buy at merchants scattered around the maps. Ultimately, they'll have access to everything anyway, but the climb up is always fun. Heroes gain experience in battle and eventually level up, acquiring skill points to assign as you wish. You also get a small but significant say in how you want your hero to develop. To use the Star Trek analogy, it's the difference between killing off Kirk and killing off a Red Shirt (you'd actually shed tears for the Red Shirt). Every controllable hero is a character that gets a lot of screen time and dialog in the game's story, so you'll always have at least one unit on the battlefield whose motive is clear and well-being you want to protect. Okay, commander units aren't exactly a new idea, but they've been implemented well in Warcraft III, specifically in the single-player campaign. You can group units in the usual CTRL-# way, but now hitting TAB cycles through the unit types in your group for quick, easy access to different special abilities.Д«ut all of these changes are minor in comparison to the additions of heroes.

The interface and controls have also enjoyed some tweaking, including the ability to set spellcasters to auto-cast, peons to auto-repair, quick-select idle workers, use smart formations (range attackers stay behind melee), and the most useful of the bunch: subgroups.

#WARCRAFT 3 REIGN OF CHAOS PLUS#

There are the familiar humans and orcs, plus the ghastly undead scourge and the tree-lovin' night elves. This is not to say that there aren't improvements - there's plenty! Climbing the evolutionary ladder from Starcraft's three unique races, the game now features four very distinctly different sides whose balance has been fine-tuned in that inimitable Blizzard way. It's believable that a majority of the large anticipation of sales is coming from gamers still hooked on Starcraft or even the re-released Warcraft II: Edition, though arguably superior titles have released since.

Same screen layout, same space-hogging interface, same vidscreen with animated unit portrait, same keyboard shortcuts. 3D engine aside, when you first load up Warcraft III, you could almost believe you're playing its 1995 predecessor.

#WARCRAFT 3 REIGN OF CHAOS PC#

The concept of the orphaned orc Thrall was salvaged, though, and this particular character plays one of the many key, 'starring roles' in this summer's PC blockbuster.Д«lizzard has two enviable luxuries when it makes its games: first, the designers can spend as long as they damn well please on them, and second, they can work in a bubble, ignoring much of what is happening in the industry all around them.

Blizzard instead decided to revert to Warcraft's roots and the very thing that made the company huge in the first place: real-time strategy. This game was already a bestseller the day it was announced, seeing as Blizzard Entertainment is truly the only development studio in the industry that can sell games on its name alone.Д¬uriously beginning life as a cartoon-style point-and-click graphic adventure that followed the story of a young orc raised by humans, practically all of the work put into the game's original design was scrapped back at the turn of the century.

There's no better introduction to help summarise what Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos means to PC gaming than disclosing this simple tidbit: 4.5 million initial orders.

Warcraft 3 reign of chaos