It used to be – we remember Warcraft III

It used to be – we remember Warcraft III.

Warcraft III is a game of legend. As the saying goes… Old but good. And so is Warcraft to this day. I came back to it from the middle of the holidays and lost dozens of hours to get into the game and then write something about it. Why was Warcraft so good and why is it still so?

Honestly? RTS games have never been particularly idolized by me. In fact, I’ve never played Warcraft I and II, I’ve seen some videos on YouTube and that’s it. However, with Warcraft III it was different.

Plot

I won’t go into too much lore here, but I can briefly tell you something. The whole game is about the conflict between humans, orcs, night elves and of course the undead. Each of these factions has its own commanders, skills, units and buildings. You can’t play one tactic all the time. For example, mechanics block it. The undead harvest wood with ghouls, and the night elves with certain souls. This is a huge difference because ghouls can attack and heal themselves, while elven souls can build buildings, cannot fight, and only collect 5 wood instead of 10.

The plot is divided into scenarios, and in addition to the usual story, we will get additional stories that deviate from the main plot. When I played a bit of the storyline – I didn’t go through the whole game for some reason – cutscenes stuck in my mind. Even though the game is quite old, it still has pretty good character dialogues and even some special effects for those times.

Mechanics

Let’s say something about the mechanics of multiplayer combat on base maps. The mechanics of regular matches may not have been terribly elaborate, but the ability to create tactics to win is simply a miracle. Each race had four commanders with unique skills and a different ultra ability. To win the game, you had to destroy all of your opponent’s buildings and kill his army. So it was necessary to build fortifications in the form of watchtowers and buy troops for defense. Think you are playing 1 vs 1 vs 1 and you want to attack some player. It will not be difficult to send your entire army into battle, because our second enemy may have placed his unit so intelligently that he was just waiting for you to leave your settlements.

In addition, we could improve the skills of our troops or buildings. We could fight with units from one building, but also build an army consisting of several other types of units.

A huge field to show off your tactics, army expansion and disposal are one of the things that attracted me to Warcraft III the most. Also, the resources on the map were limited. While I had no problems with harvesting wood on the map – especially when playing night elves – it was different with gold. When I was playing 1 vs 1 with a friend, my basic tactic was to grab as much resource as possible in the first minutes of the game to attack relatively quickly and weaken heavily. It probably wouldn’t work for older players. If you don’t know why, I recommend turning on some Twitch stream of people who have been playing Warcraft for a long time. This is slightly above the extended level.

Mods

One of the more interesting aspects of this game is its susceptibility to modding. Just a bunch of mods, most of which were just great. Starting with “footman vs grunts”, through a mod with building towers and protecting a certain line of road, to additional scenarios, all the way to Dota. Yes! If it wasn’t for Warcraft, Dota or LoL probably wouldn’t exist, or it would look different.

Do you see the similarities?

I had a great time with mods for Warcraft. And best of all, you could play multiplayer. And here I can tell you about a slightly funny situation during one of my games on the “Footmen lvl 1000 ultimate AI v1.0” mod. During one match there were so many minions on the board that at one point I got a game crash and it threw me to the desktop. As you can see, Blizzard did not foresee a situation where there would be several warriors on one square centimeter of the map. Well… Optimization.

If I would like to recommend you my favorite mod, it will definitely be “Footmen vs grunts” on the map given three sentences before. What did I like about it? Well, that I could feel like in a real war. A huge number of troops and constant pressure on the enemy. Just great! I could call it, hmmm… Warhammer? I think so.

scenarios

I couldn’t skip the scenarios in Warcraft III. Undoubtedly, they were very well constructed, and the short stories were really captivating. Most often, they consisted of several chapters in which we had to perform some deed with one character. Of course, it wasn’t that easy, because there were some kind of blockades that prevented us from getting there. For example, catching our hero and throwing him in a dungeon.

World of Warcraft Dreams

If you play or have played WoW and have never touched Warcraft III, then regret it! It can be a lot of fun to lead troops as Arthas or Jaina, while in the current WoW we perform tasks for them. For them or against them. The ability to control my favorite heroes from WoW after such a long time only intensifies my experience with this game. I didn’t play it at launch (I wonder why), but getting to know the backstory of the characters from my favorite MMORPG was kind of cool.

To sum up

Warcraft III is a game whose charms cannot be forgotten so quickly. This is undoubtedly one of the best strategies I have played. And here I have a small problem whether I would choose Heroes III or maybe Warcraft III. I think it’s the latter, but let’s not forget that each of these games was different in some way. Getting to know the lore of the characters and playing them was a beautiful experience. The mechanics of the game at that time were also very good (still are), and the game itself is quite dynamic, which I really like about it. If you ask me what rating I would give for Warcraft, I will say without hesitation that it will be 10/10.