Versatile Succession of Warcraft 3

Warcraft 3 Inside Mac Games 2001 Screenshot. Taken from Blizzard Archive.

As Blizzard gradually shifted away from some of their initial ideas and World of Warcraft continued to form, Warcraft 3 moved closer to a Real-Time Strategy with RPG elements we know and love. If you're familiar with Warcraft series, you'll know that this game still ended up being vastly different from its predecessors even after these changes were made. That's actually a pretty interesting topic on itself as many franchises faced similar fate.

Anyway, a lot of elements in released version of Warcraft 3 are familiar to the players of previous two games, but there're also some things that were changed or removed over the course of its development. And I'm not just talking about the gameplay itself. So I think it would be interesting to just take a look at Alpha/Beta versions of the game and see how much of Orcs & Humans and Tides of Darkness carried over into the Reign of Chaos.

Last Units Standing.

We're going to start from here. In each Warcraft game, Alliance and Horde had different set of troops available at their disposal with a few exceptions, such as Peasants and Grunts. Originally many minions at both factions were based on their previous iterations. Great example of that would be the original model for Knight with a flair as his weapon of choice, much like in Orcs & Humans. Afterwards he adapted his current look that was borrowed from cut Crusader hero. Similarly, Orcs had kind of similar Warlord hero which didn't made the cut either, but his model was saved for Campaigns.

Warcraft 3 2000 Screenshot. Taken from Blizzard Archive.

Raider was lucky enough to return from the first game without much changes, unlike others. Paladins almost managed to keep Exocism up their sleeve, Sorceresses could've inherited Conjurer's ability to summon Water Elementals instead of an Archmage and Mortar Team was at first more demolishing. Catapults were meant to be pushed by Peons, which I think was an idea since Warcraft 2. Not to mention how Ranger hero was much closer to its Warcraft 2 counterpart before becoming a Campaign-only hero. That's just a few examples, but I would like to focus on one particular unit and its interesting development.

Warcraft 3 Orc Spearmen Concept Art.
Taken from MobyGames.

Similarly to Raider and even Medivh, Orc Spearmen was yet another returning actor from Orcs & Humans that took over Troll Axethrower's position on the drawing board. In this case, Blizzard decided to mix together two units from previous entries, which resulted in Troll Headhunter. Resemblance was even more appeared back in 1999 when these potential Berserkers were originally Forest Trolls, not Jungle. That made me appreciate Headhunter even more since he's one of the most canonical units in the entire series and I wish there was more of that in Warcraft 3.

Further Steps Forward.

It only makes sense that with Warcraft 3 Blizzard started off by looking back at Warcraft 2. That's a third game in the series, after all. However, Starcraft also played a certain part in its development in spite of their different approaches to the gameplay. Close to E3 2000, game's HUD was reworked and adapted Starcraft's design instead of the classic sidebar.  Then it was more streamlined by making the basic buttons more universal and not of a unique set for each race and minion. Concept of Basic and Advanced structures was also abandoned, likely due to the quantity of available building for each race.

Warcraft 3 Beta HUD Race Icons. Taken from Scrolls of Lore.

Before Reign of Chaos, the balance of two factions was fairly simple. They were pretty identical for the most part, with differences being strictly in some upgrades for units (especially ranged ones) and arsenal of magical minions. This time around, things were going to be different after Starcraft and both Humans and Orcs began to stand out on their own. Only Peasants were allowed to help each other at building specific structure and take on the role of Militia for a short time. Peons can defend and participate in combat by entering Orc Burrows. While Humans could improve durability of their building, Orcs surrounded theirs with spikes for anyone who comes close to them. Each race has its own unique features, strenghts and weaknesses.

Lastly, I've noticed once how some people were talking about how Warcraft 3's soundtrack "fades into the background" or something along those lines, favoring the compositions from other titles. And I'm mentioning this because music is one of the other aspects that changed quite a bit. Three Human tracks (1, 2, 3) from Alpha version of the game were out there since March 2001 and not only they're pretty neat, but also resemble the music from Warcraft 2. Would've been nice to get more tracks from that time period at some point.

Conclusion.

Overall, that's just yet another interesting observation of development process. Not some rumblings about how it's bad that Warcraft 3 went in different direction: I just don't think so. I like all three games from the RTS series: I think each of them are good in their own way and love them equally. Although it would've been nice to see some of these older ideas stay in Reign of Chaos, there's nothing wrong with the end results.

Those of you who are more informed might've noticed that this is just a brief rundown over a few titbits from the game's past I "borrowed" from Abelhawk video and other sources. I would encourage you to take a closer look at those as they're much more informative and solid than whatever I ended up writing: that's just the right thing to do, alright? Jokes aside, I do think that this was another great excurse into the story of Warcraft 3 and there's more to cover from it's long lifespan.