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Friday 8 February, 2008
Gameplay:
after playing Warcraft III for another hour, I was very compelled to just keep on playing. I had not gotten very far in the single player campaign, because it bored me and strenuous real time strategy games don't interest me. Instead I kept on playing custom games, like DOTA, Footmen Frenzy, Wintermaul Wars, and Fortress Defense Survival.
I explained Dota before, a game where two teams fight each other, with each player controlling a single hero and no structures. Footmen Frenzy is a "massing" game (a term coined by Starcraft and Warcraft players) where each player has a base that continuously spawns footmen (close combat soldiers)
Most of the time when playing I had to change my mentality for the different custom games because of how much they vary. Warcraft is all bout which sort of mentality the player favors most. Once the player has played enough of the custom and non custom games, he/she begins to develop a certain favor towards certain ones and begins to stay away from others. In my case I stopped playing non custom games and almost exclusively play Warcraft III for the custom game DOTA.
The game play experience flows as well as you wish it to flow, meaning it all depends on the players decisions on what online games to join. My gaming experience flows well when I constantly join DOTA games, but sometimes I join random custom games, without knowing the rules of the game. The majority of the time this disrupts the flow of gameplay but it does add new flavor and lets me try out new types of gameplay when i get bored of playing DOTA incessantly.
Warcraft III is an awesome game and each time I play it, it just never stops amazing me, how well it can entertain for so long.
Design:
The Warcraft game editor is an extremely complex system that allows players dedicated enough to develop their own maps and customize the appearance of any object and the strength of any unit in the game. normal strategy game map editors usually have simple instructions so anyone beginning the game can create maps, but Warcraft III is so complex that a much fewer amount of people attempt to learn the process of map making. Although it has this drawback, the complexity of the map maker allows for much more customization and allows map makers to create more interesting maps and to create maps with objectives that the original creators of Warcraft III may not have even foreseen.
This complexity in Warcraft III is clearly an emergence factor. But the map maker allows the makers to create games of either emergence or progressive qualities. Games like DOTA are emergence in that the choice of heroes one side chooses will not always be the same, the same goes for the other side, and thus the combination of heroes cooperating and clashing together creates unique game experiences for every game. Other games classified as "RPG's" in Warcraft III are custom games where you control a hero and go through some level defeating monsters and getting stronger as you go through harder levels. These games are more distinctly progressive games.
the mixture of emergence and progressiveness in Warcraft III furthers the game play. But because of all the mixturing, I have no longer come to see Warcraft as just one game, but the collection of all these custom games. When I play a map in Warcraft III I have to not only get in the magic circle of Warcraft but also the magic circle of the specific game.
Because of Warcraft's massive variation of map selections, the gameplay is affected also through the measure of conflict and the reward structure. Warcraft III is an amazing computer game that introduces countless amount of possibilities and with its massive selection of custom games, molds itself into the form of a game likable to the player of the game.
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