WarCraft 4 and More RTS'

 

            Hellooo! So, my wish list post put me in the mood to play WarCraft 3. It’s always a slippery road, I play WC3, maybe SC2, I’ll play a little HotS then next thing you know I’m playing WoW, I’m hoping I don’t go that far but while trying to play Reforged I was reminded of why I stopped and the current Blizzard truly makes me sad.

            When I first got into WC3 and scrolled through the campaign list I saw that the Undead campaign was locked, the Orc and Night Elf were unlocked and nothing else after that. I know for a fact that I had cheated my way so I could play Rexxar’s campaign and the Tomb of Sargaras mission in Maive’s campaign because those are two of my favorite things to play but they still showed up as locked. No big deal you know, I want to kind of play through the campaign anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever fully completed a Blizzard expansion without cheating and I would like to just once. I know I couldn’t do it in Brood War, probably not even Beyond the Dark Portal, I know I did the Night Elf of Frozen Throne and maybe Humans in Reforged but pretty sure I still haven’t done the Undead and I think I got to the last mission of Legacy of the Void and just decided it wasn’t quite worth it. But I’m playing the game, I get to The Culling where you have to slaughter a bunch of civilian’s because otherwise they’ll turn into the Undead and as I’m going the game crashed. Cool. Start it up again, playing, playing, playing, crash. Now I remember, this was a thing, guess it still hasn’t been addressed, cool cool. So I sent basically that message with my crash report and kept on playing, saving like a motherfucker every few minutes. I finish the Human Campaign and I look and yup Undead has unlocked, scroll, uhhh my Orc and Night Elf one are gone, neat, check my saves, nothing. Nothing? Nothing. Their all gone, there’s nothing. Well that’s weird. I look at the Human campaign and it shows that I’ve done the last five or so missions but the first few I haven’t. Again, not exactly a big deal but since this is not the first time this has happened it is a little annoying. I pick a random mission, go to load a save from there and lo-and-behold, my saves are there. I back out and now my Human campaign is saying I have not done the last three or so missions but the other ones are done. Whaaaaat? Like, for god’s sake Blizzard, what is going on? I remember back in WC3 it was real simple to look up another player on battle.net but in SC2 it didn’t work. It was a simple command from what I remember but it didn’t work in SC2 or there was some round-about way to do it and Blizzard’s response at the time was “we know it sucks, we dropped the ball, we’re sorry” and that was it. As far as I know it was never fixed and again I ask; “Why?”

            I was looking for a way to play the original Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne. I had seen something on Reddit, probably, about using your old discs/cd keys and download the old patch and some other shenanigans, so I went looking for my discs. Can’t find them. Anywhere they would’ve been, I looked and they are not there. Doing some more Googling and I come across the classic installers. Okay, cool, download it, start it, “enter CD Key,” fuck! But! Blizzard, not being 100% douchebaggy has my cd key in my account information! Neat! Copy, paste, enter, viola, it works! I really like the campaign missions in WC3 because there’s a lot of weird stuff you can find if you explore the map. Just yesterday I found something I’m not sure I ever encountered before, it was the second or third mission for the Undead and there’s a path of trees that have been cut down. I go up there and I notice two sets of posts on either side of another wall of trees so I knock them down and start exploring that path. At the end of the path a little cutscene starts playing about the “Secret Sasquatch Society” or something and I was like “huh.” I know Reforged has some of the same weird things hidden away, I don’t know if they have “all” of them, cause I don’t know all of them, and I don’t know if they’ve added more, I’m sure they have. It’s fun finding these things and even using the map cheat, yeah you see the whole map but unless you know where to look or you’re searching absolutely every inch of the map you’re probably still going to miss stuff. I don’t think SC2 has the same kind of Easter eggs to find, it’s just easier with WC3 because they have all these creep units they can use. I do remember finding the Tauren Marine (make StarWarCraft please) and him rocketing off in a porta-potty.

            In the days of WC3 I really liked doing random 2v2’s. It was rather simple, the game starts and you or your partner would ask what you were doing, ranged or melee, there would be an answer then the other person would do the opposite. It was nice because then you didn’t have to worry about balancing your army I want to say. In SC2 I felt like you still had to act as if you were playing 1v1, you still were expected to diversify your army. I watched a pro match of Beyond All Reason recently, it was a 4v4, which is just madness to me, and apparently you can share resources like most RTS but you can also share units (maybe buildings too??) so there was a different layer of strategy there. I don’t completely understand it; BAR has a little too much going on for me to actually want to get any good at it. It does look cool though. I remember WC3 had weekly tournaments you could enter. I think they were weekly, maybe daily? I don’t know, but that was a neat thing, I only entered once or twice and got spanked so.

            I learned recently also that one of the Tims of Stormgate was a level designer for WarCraft 3 so I’ll give Stormgate the benefit of the doubt. I’ll give it a chance. There’s another RTS coming called Tempest Rising, basically Command and Conquer. I tried a demo but couldn’t quite figure it out. I’m sure it plays like C&C but I’m not familiar with it. I understand SC and WC keybinds because that’s what I played growing up, C&C are a little different. I do remember in Tempest Rising having a unit with a drone and I would use it but then I didn’t know what to do after. Sometimes it seemed like it would fly off where I’d tell it to, sometimes it’d just sit there so, yeah, idk. If I decide to play it more maybe I’ll figure it out. It’s been nice playing WC3 though, using a mouse and keyboard again, for most games now I use a controller. I did go through a spurt where I was using mouse and keyboard for everything, even for something like Assassin’s Creed but then I transitioned to a controller for most things other than FPS but even that I’m starting to use the controller more. Even for Apex I use a controller. I find there’s too many buttons in Apex for me to use a keyboard. Sniping is much easier with a mouse, I would get some good shots off but when it comes to close quarter crazies, bouncing all over the god damn hallway, I can’t track them with my shotgun at all where as with my controller those are my favorite match ups because most of the time I win them.

            A thought I had since my last post was for the race skins idea. Mostly for WarCraft 4, but could also apply to StarWarCraft, was how much you could do with it really. Night Elves for instance, there are so many elves in WoW right now that it would make sense to just skin swap them instead of making their own races. I’d like to see a Blood Elf race but a skin for Night Elves would be fine. They’ve got Void Elves and the Nightborne, even the High Elves though they’re not much different then the Blood Elves, all kinds of elves! The Orcs could be Draenor Orcs or Chaos, grayish Dragonmaw Clan type, I still like making them into Pandarens myself. The Old God corrupted Human idea I had for StarWarCraft could be used in WC4 as well. There certainly are options.

            So yeah, I don’t know, that’s that. I’m hoping for a WC4. When people ask “what’s your favorite game” I never have an answer because nothing now really interests me as much as old games so WarCraft 3 is probably my favorite game of all time. I just have so many good memories from b.net and it’s a game I can keep going back to. So yes, I want a WarCraft 4, I’m not getting younger and if there’s one thing I really want to see is WC4. Now that this Xbox deal is done and that Stormgate is a thing, maybe Blizzard won’t want to compete with a StarCraft clone and go for WarCraft. As far as other RTS, Tempest Rising is still interesting, maybe a Dawn of War 4 will be around soonish too? I know DoW3 didn’t do so hot but I mean, look at it. I enjoyed Dawn of War and me and the guys liked Last Stand in DoW2 so maybe they can bring it back. In any case, RTS is still a thing and maybe it’ll make a little resurgence.

              @AztecSauce