Hidden Treasures of The Frozen Throne

Warcraft 3: Way of Others Screenshot. Taken from ModDB.

In my recent journey through the history of Warcraft 3, I mostly paid attention to main chuck of the game and its development. However, as you're probably aware, that's not all this game and its expansion have to offer. There're a plethora of community content made by talented (and not so) people. From many maps that deviate from actual gameplay of Warcraft 3 and became popular choice amongst "Custom Games" to full on Custom Campaigns and even Total Conversions with the release of The Frozen Throne! This time around, I would like to talk about the latter and there are many good reasons for that.

Back in "True Tragedy of Warcraft 3: Reforged", I was straight forward regarding my view on a couple of current community projects that relay on its disastrous art style. While I admire and wish all the best for everyone involved, it doesn't change the fact that all these people waste their talent and passion on flawed content that's never going to work. In order to fix the mistakes made by public and media, I want to highlight a few works of the past in order to showcase what Warcraft 3 actually has to offer. This will be a surface level preview, however: I encourage you to take a look and give them a try on your own.

The Legends of Arkain.

Starting with the more popular and modern creation, The Legends of Arkain is massive series of custom campaigns by Shar Dundred. It takes place in a world of Arkain, completely detached from Warcraft franchise, but that doesn't make this series any less interesting. Lore of this series is vast and will definitely keep busy those who are eager to get lost in this kind of thing. Although demonic invasion does sound pretty familiar, my friends from Warcraft 3 community continue to praise these campaigns and its story.

So far there're two books for three major factions with one or two more Acts coming out eventually, if I'm correct: The Human Empire, The Orcish Clans and The Undead Nexus. All campaigns come with three difficult options, unique storyline that's affected by your decisions and improved AI written in Jass to ensure its intelligence. There's also Behind the Scenes material and additional stories in case you can't get enough Arkain content.

Current versions of the campaign are made for Patch 1.29.2 and beyond (up until 1.31.1, to be exact; for obvious reasons), but there're older versions of Book One campaigns that are playable on version 1.27+.

During the Dark Portal.

This is one of the two Russian projects I wanted to provide some publicity due to their charming quality and... Well, I just think they're neat. Besides, During the Dark Portal has an interesting story that's worth talking about. This campaign was originally made back in 2004 and its quality still stands out to this very day. Perhaps it can be a bit janky (which is likely to be related to your Warcraft 3 patch of choice), but overall you can sense a lot of love and care being put into this project.

During the Dark Portal Screenshot. Taken from XGM.GURU.

Models and animations for it were created within notepad instead of using specific software, like MdlVis and that's some impressive "Russian magic". Anyway, DtDP's narrative provides an interesting take on a side story within the original canon of Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal that lets itself take some liberties here and there. Fairly decent voice acting only adds to the experience, making During the Dark Portal a good example of XGM.GURU has to offer. Improved version of this campaign was later presented in a developer's competition by Nival (known for developing Heroes of Might and Magic V) and took the third place!

Fortunately enough, there appears to be a translated version of this campaign on Hive Workshop. Although its quality is something I wasn't able to determine during the writing of this post, it's still better than nothing in case you don't speak Russian. It is recommended to use Patch 1.12 for intended experience.

Project Revolution.

Moving to something more advanced than just custom campaigns. Not that I wish to underestimate previous exhibits and other work of that kind, but total conversions are a different beast in its entirety. Their presence in Warcraft 3 modding scene might come as a surprise to a lot of players since this term is more common to classics like DOOM or Quake. I'm curious to try and learn how these next two projects managed to pull some of its stuff off, but I'm starting to get off point...

Perhaps because I don't actually have much to say about Project Revolution. I don't hate Starcraft, but this franchise doesn't really interest me all that much. This total conversion was the creation of a Snowflake Entertainment that originated from now seemingly defunct Wc3Campaign website. The goal of Project Revolution was to perfectly recreate Starcraft: Brood War in anticipation for the next entry in the series, which did get announced and released over the course of its development. That really is just it: Starcraft in 3D, as close to the original as possible.

Project Revolution's Main Menu. Taken from ModDB.

Sadly though, as it often happens with many ambitions community projects, Revolution has been abandoned. Last update did leave us with working demo version that allows everyone to try their hands at playing as Terran, but that seems to be about it. Either due to aforementioned release of Starcraft 2 or many other factors that could've taken their part, Project Revolution haven't reached its full potential. We did get Starcraft: Remastered though, so we have that going to us in spite of a few flaws it does have: not moving away from sprite to 3D models aren't one of them.

Way of Others.

I would go as far as to say that Way of Others might as well be one of the most impressive projects in Warcraft 3 scene. Planned as an entire expansion with multiple campaigns, only the first one named "Murlocs: Battle for Freedom" was released, and it takes place at the same time as Reign of Chaos, but with its own take on its continuity. There're some rather questionable parts in that story, but overall the narrative is pretty alright. 

Interestingly enough, this fan expansion was voiced by the same team that provided a Russian voice overs for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. On top of that, Battle for Freedom contains an actual CGI cinematic, and I'm honestly not sure how many (or if) there are any other custom campaigns that can brag about it as well. New units are added to all existing races with Murlocks being the stars of the show, obviously. This Total Conversion has been in development for around 5 years and the end result are pretty damn neat for a Warcraft 3 campaign in 2010. If anything, I think you should give Way of Others a try above all else.

From what I understood after my initial and lame research, Battle for Freedom is the true hidden gem of XGM.GURU that isn't really known amongst broader Warcraft 3 community and I hope I can somewhat change that. Latest version of this fabulous Total Conversion has been uploaded to ModDB, but without translation to English due to lack of translating team. Despite this, I encourage you to try at least one chapter of this massive campaign and just see what Way of Others has to offer. Perhaps this campaign will be translated one day and more people manage to learn the story of Fleck and his people. Battle of Freedom should run just fine on Patch 1.24 and beyond.