35 von 36 Personen fanden diese Produktbewertung hilfreich.
The Story of False Hype
Bewertet am: Mai 5, 2004
Fazit: This game is lacking compared to the competition of the RTS Genre.
Warcraft III was in every magazine that there was for the PC. It showed the stunning effects and terrain; it showed the epic battles taking place; it showed you everything you wanted as a gamer. I was one of the people who followed the game, having never played a Blizzard game, not even Diablo. I did not know that all of this hype for the game was only going to lead me into disappointment. I had no idea that it would be plagued by many gameplay flaws that are beyond a mere patch to fix.
As an avid RTS gamer, this game looked like it would take the cake. My favorite game of all time even to today is Warlords Battlecry II, a huge RTS game with all kinds of options. Yet, I was willing to shove this in the corner of my games drawer, as I was ready to play Warcraft III. Every gaming magazine that I read talked about how it was going to revolutionize the genre of RTS and stop all competition in their tracks. Of course, there were other options. Age of Mythology was coming out as well, but of course, it did not receive such high reviews. So, a week after release, I went to the store and bought Warcraft III. I went with a friend who drove and on the whole way home, I was reading the Instruction Manual. I couldn t wait to get y hands on the Night Elves or the Undead. I couldn t wait to reconstruct the epic battle scenes that I had seen on every PC gaming website.
I, with every other gamer who has any intelligence about gaming, was disappointed.
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Gameplay
The game includes 4 races: Humans, Orcs, Undead, and Night Elves. Each race has 3 heroes to choose from. Heroes are summoned creatures who aid greatly in battle. They level up from kills and can reach all the way up to level 10, where they become very useful. They have a big range of spells and auras which is a thing that makes it so all of your surrounding troops receive a bonus of some type.
The gameplay is very basic and easy to understand. You can a builder, build a main building (Castle, Tree of Ages, etc pending on race) and then you harvest from the two resources in the game, Gold and Lumber. So, you have builders constructing, running back and forth between a gold mine and the main building, and running back and forth between trees and your main building. Basically, you build a hero, as every race has 3 of them, and then take a army and kill the neutral opponents who guard the extra gold mines on the map. You then setup a base there and get more gold for production. You do this as many times as you can as long as you can keep your bases protected. When you get a big enough army, wipe out the enemy.
Now, my race rundown:
Humans
The Humans of this game is a mix of humans and dwarves. They have such things like the Human Footman and the Dwarven Mortar. Now, I didn t say these two units accidentally as anyone who has played online at Battle.net knows that these two units are very overpowered despite 14 patches. Footmen are cheap to build and fast to produce. With the right hero (Human Paladin) with the armor aura, these guys are unstoppable.
The humans have 3 heroes, just like every other race. These three are: Paladin, Mountain King, and Archmage. So, they have 2 fighter type heroes and a spellcaster. This is fairly well balanced, as you don t want too many high combat units in a attack. If you get the two fighter type heroes to get to level 10, your opponent is going to have some serious trouble.
The building type of the Humans reminds me of Medieval Times type of theme. Everything is made form stone and many of the buildings look like castles. The towers are made of wood and so are a few of the other buildings. However, if you build a lot of little houses to increase your Army Limit, it looks a lot like a manor.
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Orcs
Orcs are based form Tolkien s idea of Orcs. They are beastly creatures that have been raised from the dead. However, in this game, they are not dark and bloody looking. Instead, they are green skinned creatures that aren t very terrifying at all. This was a little disappointing to me as I always thought of Orcs as a very malicious race that would rip everything to shreds if it had the chance. However, this race certainly doesn t look like they could do that.
The main strategy of an Orc player is the tower rush. First you get the Far Seer hero and scout the map using the wolves that he can summon. You find out where your opponents base is located and send in some builders. Build as many towers as you have the resources for and then build your second hero, the Blademaster. Now your opponent is blocked in, and you have some very powerful heroes to keep it like that. Eventually, get some riders and some Grunts, and you can wipe them out completely.
The heroes of this race are much more simple that those of the other races. Orcs get the Far Seer, the Blademaster and the Chieftain. This means that the Orc side has access to 2 Warrior type heroes and a Support hero. This gives them quite a good advantage statistically, but when you look into it, you notice that the Far Seer is the only Support hero without an Aura making him far less useless.
The buildings of the Orcs are quite interesting. They have thorns all around the buildings as an upgrade and build using very primitive resources. Unlike the Humans, who use stone in their building structure, the Orcs use plain Wood for everything. This is great figuring you wouldn t think of an Orc to take much time on a building.
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Undead
The Undead are the second most unique race in the game. Their play style is unlike any other race, and this makes them very fun to play. Personally, I have no idea where this idea came from, as it could have come from many different places. Tolkien had Undead but so did things like Warhammer and D&D. These got their ideas from other ideas so the source of which this race was created is unknown, but it definitely isn t original. The units are made up of rotting corpses and skulls. This makes sense figuring they are dead
The main strategy of the Undead race is very cheesy indeed. One of their heroes has a aura that makes his units gain health while they attack. This means that all you have to do is make your weakest unit, in this case a Ghoul, and attack repetitively since it isn t costing you much. You will eventually out produce your opponent and force them to lose.
The heroes of the Undead are the Lich, the Death Knight, and the Crypt Lord. All three of them are Support/Warrior type heroes. This means that no matter which hero you decide to produce first, though one will give you a good advantage, you will be getting a greatly positive force to your team.
The building of the Undead is very unique. The Undead have 2 types of miners, the Ghoul and the Acolyte. The ghouls do not build at all, but they harvest lumber. The Acolyte summon the buildings and summon gold from your gold mine. Since the Acolyte is not required to stay by a summoning building, they can start the production of an entire base and then go to summoning gold. This is very interesting indeed. The buildings are very weird looking, however. You would expect undead to be focused around graveyards and tombs, but instead you have all of these weird things that don t tie into the race at all.
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Night Elves
The most interesting race of all is the Night Elves. They are your basic elven myth race, from Tolkien, and they have the characteristics of every other elf that there is. They are heavily advanced in Archers and ranged attackers. Since Elves love trees so much, all of your buildings are a type of tree. The twist is that they are alive. They move after you uproot them and can make for an interesting army.
The Night Elf strategy is very simple. If you are alone, you want a good mix of Archers and Huntresses along with the Demon Hunter hero. This will give you enough power to overrun the opponent very quickly and leave with a cheesy victory. If you don t do that, you want a build a few archers, rush to the Tree of Eternity (your main building at level 3) and start building all kinds of Chimeras. These are huge dragon-like creatures whose firepower is unmatched.
The Night Elves have 3 heroes just like every other race. These heroes are the Demon Hunter, the Priestess of the Moon, and the Keeper of the Grove. The Demon Hunter is the most powerful fighter type hero there is and the Priestess is the most effective support hero in the game. This makes for an awesome way to play the race, even if it is one of the harder to learn.
The buildings of the Night Elves were by far the ones that the most thought went into. Most of your buildings can uproot and attack. They also have the most effective tower/building that is quite entertaining to use.
****
Spells and Effects
This game has many spells and interesting effects that your heroes provide for your side. Such spells such as Earthquake, a damage spell that damages all units in the area of the shaking, or Star Light, a damage spell that causes stars to fall and damage all units around the caster, are very fun to use. They definitely make for side changing battles. I have been outnumbered and losing until my hero got access to a high damage spell and I was able to crush the enemies base with it, making me victorious.
The Auras of the game completely change a race s dynamics. This is what made it hard on Blizzard to patch the game because they didn't take into account the fact that auras make terrible units very useful. The Prestiess of the Moon increases any ranged attackers damage and range. Figuring the Night Elves already have the best archers, this makes them elite.
****
Although there are 4 races, all with some great creativity used in their creation, the gameplay of this game has its MAJOR flaws. First, most units in the game that are really fun to build are worth 4 points in your army limit. Figuring that biggest possible army limit you can achieve is 100; your army is limited to be very small. Figuring the competition, Warlords Battlecry 2 for instance, has an army limit of 250, Warcraft III is a very limiting game. This low army limit makes it so you cant include very much variety in your army. If you build enough of one type of unit to make their appearance useful, you have already used up too much of the army limit to make another type of unit useful.
Another flaw is the fact that it takes FOREVER to kill something. If you think about it, a huge Tauren (just imagine a huge cow/bull/man that is super strong) hitting you with a giant log is gone to kill you. But no, in this game it can take up to 5 hits to make a little Elven Archer die. The simple dynamics of the game does not make sense. The most common argument is the fact that having Orcs, Elves, and Undead in a world together with Humans doesn't make sense either, but that is just avoiding the fact that there is a flaw in the game.
Graphics
The graphics of this game was one of the major things that inspired many to buy the game. When I bought the game, I was expecting revolutionary graphics that would stop all competition dead in their tracks. To my surprise, the graphics were terrible. They are very cartoonish. Yes, every tree does sway in the wind and fall down when your builders have hacked enough wood off of them, but it still doesn't make up for the complete lack of reality in this aspect of the game.
Not only is everything cartoony in the game, but the models were poorly made. Yes, we all know that 3-d graphics are definitely not at their peak yet, especially in RTS games, but I would expect more than squares when I zoom in. The textures of the models are cartoony, but at least they make me think that the models are much better done when I am zoomed out. When I zoom in, it s a whole different ballgame. Everything was pixilated, and blurry. Its like they made the option to zoom in just so they could say so on the back of the box, and not let anybody know about how bad it looked when you actually did it.
Overall, I was very disappointed with the games graphics. As bad as they look, you can see that the developer did spend a lot of time of them. However, I think that they took the wrong turn when they were thinking about a fantasy RTS game. Things are supposed to look evil and vengeful. Instead they look stupid and dopey.
Single Player
Probably most of the money that Blizzard used on this game went into the development of the single player mode. There is a total of 4 campaigns that are very strong from the storylined standpoint. As a frequent storyline campaign player, I can tell you that this script was definitely professionally written. All 4 campaigns tie together; you just are on a different side in the same war.
One of the downfalls of single player mode is that you don t get the feel of leveling up a character. Instead, you keep one character throughout the whole campaign (each different campaign you get a different one though) and you can only level him a max of one level per scenario. While this might have kept the story actually alive, and the fact that it would be stupid to level up the same person in 12 different scenarios, it completely makes that gamer miss out on a nice aspect of this game.
At the end of every campaign is a movie. These must have cost thousands of dollars to produce because they were greatly done. While I do not believe that a good movie at the end of a game makes the game good, I can definitely say that the movie at the end was great. Maybe they should have taken this focus on a movie and put it into the gameplay aspect of the game? This might have made this game get a much better ranking on things like reviews (of the intelligent of course, not the dumb gamer who plays for eye candy.)
Muli-player
The multiplayer option of this game on Battle.net is the only thing that makes this game even worth buying. I know that most people buy this game for the storylined single player or the great movie that you get to watch for a whooping 30 seconds (note the sarcasm) but that is not what makes this game playable. Online, unlike its competition, is very competitive and easy to find games. You don t have to wait 30 seconds from logging in to find a game if you want. There is team play, 2vs2, 3vs3, or just solo mode. You can set up custom games with your friends as well. There is a ladder for every way you can play the game and they are very fun to look at. Most of the players on that ladder have spent most of their lives, or too much of it, playing to get on the first page. I played for about a month and wasn t able to scratch the surface even though I didn t lose often. This shows that the most skilled players of the game, are VERY skilled despite the lack of skill needed to play.
One of the bad parts of the online gameplay of this game is the fact that hackers are everywhere. I once had my opponent pause the game (one of the more annoying options in multi-play) and he somehow got past the part where there is a timer on how long you can keep the game paused for. After a long standoff and many harsh words said back and forth, he attempted to hack my computer. After he failed do to a little part of my computer he wasn t expecting (I was on a Mac, not a PC) he got very made and just left his computer on and went to sleep. I gave up and played another game.
Sound
The sound of this game can be annoying and interesting at the same time. The voices of the characters in the campaign were well done, despite the fact that I didn t appreciate the little humorous remarks that were said to help make the campaign more fun to play. When I play, I try to get into the theme of the game, but the stupid remarks made by my Orc General completely ruined that aspect of the game.
The music of the game isn t too bad. I didn t mute it for a while while I tried to listen to it for the sole purpose of reviewing it. You can tell it was professionally done and if Celtic music is your type of thing, then this is a great soundtrack for you. Unfortunately, it s not really my cup of tea, so I turned it off after I listened to the whole thing a couple times.
Artwork
The artwork of this game is simply amazing. I was very impressed with even the backgrounds to the screen after you complete a scenario. However, the interface can sometimes look like a cartoon. This can be simply overcome after you play enough, but for me, it got on my nerves.
Computer Requirements
Windows? 98/ME/2000/XP:
400 MHz Pentium II or equivalent
128 MB of RAM
8 MB 3D video card (TNT, i810, Voodoo 3, Rage 128 equivalent or better) with DirectX? 8.1 support
700 MB HD space
4X CD-ROM drive
Macintosh? OS 9.0 or higher/ Mac OS X 10.1.3. or higher:
400 MHz G3 processor
128 MB of RAM
16 MB ATI Technologies or nVidia chipset 3D video card
700 MB HD space
4X CD-ROM drive
Recommended:
600 MHz processor
256 MB of RAM
32 MB 3D video card
DirectX? 8.1 compatible sound card (Windows)
Multiplayer:
Low-latency, active Internet connection rated at 28.8 Kbps or faster. LAN play requires TCP/IP connection.
Conclusion
This game is receiving 3 stars for a basic reason: the gameplay is too limited. I know that the single player is great and the multi-player is easy to use, its just the main part of the game is lacking. The thing that got this game the 3 stars that it did get is the fact that it plays so well. It plays very cleanly that it is almost amazing. There are no hang-ups, no bugs, and no problems. Balance is almost non existent due to 12 patches that are available online or through Battle.net. I just do not feel that this game adds up to its competition. I would much rather recommend games like Warlords Battlecry 2 or even Age of Mythology. I would recommend this game to anyone who likes a game that doesn t take much to think about. This game seems almost dumbed down and that can be nice if you don t like to think.
