Warcraft 3 Not Until 2002 184
Thomas M Hughes writes "Blizzard said a few weeks ago that Warcraft 3 won't be ready in 2001. While Blizzard has never been good at meeting its release deadlines, usually its a good idea. They tend to put out decent games the first time and not have as many huge fixes, just small tweaks. " They've put the announcement in the FAQ.
Blizzard can take their time (Score:2, Interesting)
The only thing that comes to mind in terms of failures for Blizzard is Warcraft Adventures, which was supposed to be some animated Warcraft adventure game where you play an Orc slave. I forget exactly what happened, but the game was canceled.
But otherwise, all of their other games have been amazing fun and were devoloped for both Windoze and Macs.
Hurry, we need you! (Score:2, Interesting)
Starcraft can only last so long, and people are already going back to Warcraft II . . . good, balanced RTS games that don't require everyone to have a copy of the CD are quickly running out, and we're left playing dusty games, crappy RTS games, or ughh . . . first person shooters.
I want a quality Blizzard release as much as the next person, but the sooner the better . . .
Finally this would be on-topic (Score:5, Interesting)
But the big downfall of RTS games, and why I think many people hate them, is that as the genre has progressed, the interfaces have not. Ultimately victory comes down to not managing resources or having brilliant strategy, but being nimble enough to control the interface.
Take StarCraft, for example. To control your troops you assign them to hotkeys. The problem is that when you mix unit type within a group, you lose the ability to give them advanced commands. So you have to assign separate hotkeys by type and you end up using five or six of them just for one attack.
Unit grouping is another factor. You can carefully arrange your troops in a formation that gives them the advantage, but when you order them from point A to point B they arrive in one big jumble. Often times, unit will arrive at a destination one by one and get slaughtered.
The question I have...how hard would it be to develop some kind of basic programming language for these type of games? In StarCraft, Reavers cause an enormous amount of damage. I would want my characters to attack them first, overriding any previous attack orders. Or, for Zerg troops, if their health dips below a certain point, automatically burrow.
I know there are free software version of many strategy games in the workd (like FreeCIV) but are there projects attempting to recreate open source versions of RTS type games? So that this type of functionaly could be added?
And to Blizzard if there are any employees reading, why not work on this as a nice standby to WarCraft III? It should be very simple to develop a way of giving commands from scripts instead of point and click.
- JoeShmoe
I'll wait (Score:2, Interesting)
All of their other titles have relied on 2D (even Diablo 2, which is 2D and enhanced with 3D). StarCraft ran well even on non-bleeding edge gaming hardware. I have always loved their attention to detail in performance. They are the anti-Funcom (anyone who plays Anarchy Online with its 1FPS in towns even with a GeForce 2/3 knows what I mean). People who knocked Diablo 2 for its lack of "revolutionary" graphics were missing the big picture, IMHO.
Total Annihilation was an impressive 3D RTS in its time, however when the units filled the screen, performance fell through the floor. I'm optimistic that Blizzard, in committing to 3D in WCIII, will find a way to avoid this.
Still searching for my Inner Adult...
True (Score:2, Interesting)
There were also huge problems with Battle Net when starcraft was released. Battle Net now is MUCH better than it used to be.
Another thing going for Blizzard is they don't drop their games quickly. Starcraft, which was released around 3 years ago now, is still supported, and they recently released a new patch to fix some issues. Diablo is still being supported too.
Too bad they don't seem to like Linux since Blizzard seem to be one of the few game companies that give a damn about their customers, and aren't just out to ship product.
Total Annihilation was the peak of RTS (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, you could send a building bot around the base on patrol, and he'd automatically reclaim metal, energy, repair units, repair buildings, help build units, or help build buildings, depending on the availability of resources. It's not just about flexibility but about sensible heuristics and testing and balancing, all fields that have been badly overlooked.
I played Kohan, and it's a wonderful first title, but neither it nor anything I've played in a very long while comes close to TA.
TA has its flaws, but I have not seen its equal in RTS for years now, and the fans are *still* generating new units, new maps, and even new games out of TA.
Check out http://www.planetannihilated.com if you want to learn more.
I would love to see someone make a new RTS that learned all the user interface and most of the heuristic lessons from TA along with the matchmaking and community support lessons from Battle.net, but I feel that right now, we're in a rut where alpha-blended 3D accelerated special effects and enough camera angels to rival a porno DVD are being prioritized over the real design issues.