I really love real time strategy games, am simultaneously poor at them and know very little about some of the biggest players in the genre. I've never played Dune II. I've never played Starcraft or Starcraft II. I've never played Warcraft: Orcs and Humans or its sequel. I've only played Age of Empires II out of the whole series. And I definitely haven't kept up with any of the modern RTS games, as my focus has shifted more towards playing console games as I've gotten older.
But the two games/series that stand out most to me in the genre are Command & Conquer and Warcraft III. I played Command and Conquer religiously as a younger teen, playing Command & Conquer, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 especially. Later in my teens, my attention became completely captured by Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion, as I loved playing 2v2s and 3v3s with my friends and the edited maps. It's by far my favorite RTS game of all time, even though I genuinely love and enjoy Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 a great deal.
But for whatever reason, perhaps because I am bad at RTS games, I never completed the campaigns of either this game or its expansion, and so I finally dove back in on my actual physical copies of the games, and really enjoyed playing with an old friend once again. I also wanted to brush up on the game before its remake due out this year (please Blizzard make this happen).
Again, being far from a student of the RTS genre, you'll have to forgive me if I miss a little in terms of attributing the big leaps in the game compared to the genre at large. I'll just say how it seemed to me at the time, being a fairly early adopter, and discuss how the game has aged in 2019.
The biggest difference between this game and the Command & Conquer series was the existence of heroes with role playing elements, and I adored this. Being a fan of RPGs at the time, the mechanic made a great deal of sense, and added a level of strategic decision making that was lacking in Command & Conquer. Sure, there were characters like Tanya in Command & Conquer who were really heroes in all but role playing, but they also lacked functionality in multiplayer, which comprises a big amount of the gameplay in Warcraft III. For example, if you want to play a more aggressive, hero killing strategy as the Orcs in the game, you can select the Blademaster, who has extremely fast movement speed and crushing critical hits. If you wanted to play a more balanced style focusing on incrementally winning battles by efficient minion trading and map control, go with the Far Seer.
The game features four separate races (Human, Orc, Undead, and Night Elf), compared to the two sides in Command & Conquer. Despite the challenges of doing so, the balance in the game is generally excellent, with each race being very usable in competitive play while having a varied play style and approach. But the one area in which the game could probably be better balanced is in the hero choices. Each race has a viable path to victory, but each also has a maximum of two heroes that are at all usable in competitive play. You will almost never see, for example, any Undead team using a hero other than the Death Knight, and there is definitely a dominant hero choice among each team. But any competitive online game will always have a tier list despite the creators' best intentions, and the game is still remarkably well balanced today.
The graphics are pretty ugly today, and weren't even great back in the day. But this is an important, Nintendo-style tradeoff (see the Game Boy and withering tech), as even at the time of its release Warcraft III could run on less powerful machines, such as the Gateway 2000 that my parents had (it didn't really overcome my slow internet, though). But in modern times, it's not a pretty nasty looking game, to be honest.
The music and sound in the game are excellent, with separate tracks for each race that infuse the gameplay with a unique feel for each race. The voice work is tremendous as well, with unique voices for each unit, with dozens of phrases recorded for each. Some of these, as has been noted a lot, are pretty humorous, particularly if you click on a unit many times.
The campaign is long and very fun, although you're rarely at risk of defeat, save for in a handful of missions (the last Undead mission and the last Night Elf mission, to be clear). The worst thing that will happen most of the time is your army gets wiped out, you need to build a new one, and the mission takes 15 minutes longer to finish. I really don't know why I couldn't beat this one in high school. I must have just been really bad at video games. In fact, I don't think I got really good at video games until 5 years ago or so when I started testing myself on retro platformers that crushed me on original hardware back in the day, so I did find that I was handling a lot of the challenges better now than I did back in high school. The lore in the Warcraft series has always been superb, with sharp writing, careful thought, and interesting moral dilemmas throughout. I really wish that at some points in the game you would be given role playing choices to split the plot, as I think that would have greatly improved the replayability of the campaign to see all the endings. But they also do tell a pretty tight narrative that works on a lot of levels, with substantial voice acting, in 2002, so this may be asking a bit too much.
The controls are really good, and are way better than those in Command and Conquer, where you needed to command movement and select units with a left click. Using both mouse buttons makes for a clearer control mechanism, and it just makes more sense. But there are some weird control moments that probably could have been ironed out, such as only allowing 12 units to be selected at a time, and pathing improvements such as having characters move out of each others way in narrow spots.
But all of this pales in comparison to the glorious experience that was online multiplayer. If you ever tried to play Command and Conquer online, it was a really difficult experience. Warcraft III simplified everything by having a universal server and friends list that just worked. It was even playable on my 56k modem, although I'm sure this is some of the reason why I couldn't ever win at a high level in singles play. Microing was completely out of the question with my connection, so I tended to just mass a ton of units, pick heroes with auras that didn't require finely times actions, point them in the right direction, and pray for the best. Playing standard Warcraft III was incredible, but the game's biggest selling point, to me, was the prevalence of custom games and a robust map editor that were worth ten times the game's selling price. People could use the editor to create their own game modes, some of which were absolute trash, but over time a meta understanding of the good ones would emerge. Some of my favorites were Snipers-which featured a game in which you would have to point and click to launch a bullet across the map rather than auto attacking, tower defense-a game mode that has now been copied endlessly in which you need to destroy mobs of baddies with defense towers built in intelligent patterns, and especially DotA-Defense of the Ancients. DotA was my first exposure to the MOBA genre, in which you must take your place as a solely controlled hero on a huge battlefield split into three lanes, and push through enemy heroes, NPCs, and towers to crush the enemy's base. I was in on this 5 on 5 action from the very beginning (before it became the mega-hit DotA All-stars under the guidance of Guinsoo and IceFrog), commanding the Dwarven Sniper, Venomancer, and Skeleton King to middling, but tremendously fun results. I later jumped into League of Legends with both feet, and have spent more time in that game than probably any other. The sheer balls that it took a huge company like Blizzard to allow community members to play around in their game gave it life beyond the quality of the normal RTS action, much like great PC games like Doom and Half-Life.
This game has some warts as it has aged, but it is definitely, along with its expansion, The Frozen Throne, in my top 10 video games of all-time. It's still great fun to jump into, and surprisingly still has a bit of a community left, particularly in the 1v1 competitive and custom game scenes (don't expect to find a 2v2 or 3v3 matchup anytime soon, though). I'll give it an admittedly biased 10/10. I greatly look forward to the remake, and it will definitely be one of the few games I buy new, at launch.
Up next will be a review of the expansion to Warcraft III, so no need for a teaser. See you soon!
-TRO
No comments:
Post a Comment