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The basic game design is the same as it has been for years. You start off with a base. You must collect wood and gold in order to build and upgrade structures and produce more units. Once your forces are built, locate your enemies and wreak havoc! Sounds pretty simple right? Maybe even a little boring now that we’ve played that same game for the past 7 years... this is where Warcraft III revitalizes the RTS Genre. Read on:

The most touted feature of Warcraft III is the Heroes. Warcraft III emphasizes on smaller armies with much of the focus on the Heroes. The Heroes are what set Warcraft III apart from other RTS games and make it more than a simple “build, build, build, attack-destroy and win” game.. Each of the four races (Humans, Orcs, Night Elves, and Undead) can have up to three distinct Hero characters. Your Heroes advance in level, have stats, do mini-quests, find items/artifacts for increased power, die, get resurrected, etc. The power of your Heroes will often affect the outcome of your battles. An army without any Heroes versus an army with Heroes is pretty much screwed! Playing around and leveling up your Heroes in WC3 is like playing a Mini-game within the game itself. Heroes have advanced combat capabilities, spells (with buffs), and other abilities that vary depending on what race you are playing. All the Heroes are distinctly different from one another. Because of all this, many people are calling Warcraft III a “RPG-RTS”. The more appropriate classification would be “Adventure-RTS” (yeah, there’s a difference).

The first and most obvious race is the Humans. Their Dwarven and Elven allies join them in the battle for Azeroth. The Dwarves bring their ingenuity to the battles – sporting gun and tank like weapons. The Elves provide their Magic abilities. Of course you still have your typical Peasant slaves that gather your resources – and the Knights and other such units to govern them.

The Orcs are their typical beastly selves. The Peons are back once again for your tormenting pleasure. Most of the Orc units are beast like. The Orcs are built to rumble! Their magic is more Shamanistic in nature compared to the other races.

The Night Elves are a new race, which throw several interesting and tactical nuts and bolts into the whirling machine. At night, they become semi-transparent, making them harder to see and in turn making ambushes easier for the Night Elves. Some of their buildings are also living. This means they can uproot and MOVE (albeit very slowly). If the buildings get damaged, they can eat trees to recover health. Interesting..

The last race is the Undead. The Undead spread their black plague across the landscape in order to summon (nice touch) their structures and units. The Undead are the most advanced race to learn, but when played right, they can be a formidable foe. Close battles often turn in favor of the Undead after the undead lords raise fallen warriors to fight on the side of the undead army.

Quick twitch builders will often have the advantage of “Rushing” Rushing means building units very quickly due to a combination of game familiarity and quick, twitchy reflexes. One of the only way to prevent rushing is a verbal agreement with your opponent(s), which doesn’t always work with strangers on Battle.net. But such is the nature of the beast. Sometimes you just wanna build up a huge base then duke it out… ya know?

The Gameplay is solid, even for a Beta test. At this point, most of the changes being made are minor. Battle.net stability has also greatly increases since the launch of the beta many months back. I expect it to be close to perfect upon release… assuming Blizzard doesn’t underestimate the popularity of this game!

The game runs very well on my P4 1.6Ghz + G3Force 3. The graphics are KILLER and VERY detailed! The camera view doesn’t zoom back as far as I would like. Conspiracy Theory: I think Blizzard did that on purpose because the stunning graphics in this game are so mesmerizing, they may be used for potential brainwashing procedures thus forcing the masses into slavery and becoming minions of Blizzard and plot to… uhm, never mind. The graphics are very cartoony, but they fit the game. They are crisp and detailed; very top notch.

For the beta, only multiplayer Battle Net is available so I haven’t seen the single player game or the map editor yet. Warcraft III shows much promise and I have a feeling you’ll be hearing a lot about it in the year to come after it’s release this Summer/Fall-ish (hopefully!). After Warcraft III is released, the following slew of ‘Adventure-RTS’ games are bound to hit the shelves starting about Q3 or Q4, 2003, and probably ending sometime in 2006. God help us (or bless us, depending on your taste).