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Thursday 6 March, 2008
Gameplay
Like Starcraft, Blizzard developed the factions to represent extremes of game play style, and include a balanced choice. Like the Zerg, Night Elves build quickly and cost less, with powerful ranged damage, but their units have low hit points. The Orcs have massive amounts of hit points and powerful melee units, but are extremely expensive to build, and build slower, The humans and Undead lie in between these two extremes. This careful balance allowed me to pick the race most suitable to my play style and kick some ass. If I was feeling defensive, I would go casters with humans, and if I was feeling bloodlust, I’d go melee with the orcs. This choice of strategy through race adds a lot of replay value and fun to the game.
Design
Following the success of Starcraft, Blizzard continued its real time strategy series with Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, released in 2002. Warcraft III contined Blizzard’s RTS tradition of unique but balanced factions, adding two more playable factions on top of the Orcs and Humans available in Warcraft II: the Night Elves and Undead. To further complicate balance issues within the different factions, Blizzard introduced an entirely new aspect of game design to Warcraft III: Heroes.
Heroes are special units available at the start of the game, that gain experience with kills, leveling up, getting more powerful and learning unique abilities over time. Heroes can add defense to nearby units, like Paladins with Auras, damage masses of units at a time, as Far Seers do with the earthquake ability, and even heal units, as the Undead Death Knight. With the introduction of Hero units, Blizzard blurred the line between real time strategy and RPG, creating this amazing hybrid game. In addition, each faction had three unique heroes, each with its own unique set of four abilities, a major balance headache.
Blizzard solved this problem rather cheaply by mirroring. Instead of truly unique heroes, each faction has the same collection of hero types. There are melee heroes, capable of absorbing lots of damage, ranged, damage dealing heroes, which deal massive amounts of damage but are fragile, and balanced heroes, which are in between, and often have healing abilities. Each faction gets one of each type-and though they do have minor differences, such as the Night Elf abilities to cloak during the night, the heroes do not stray vastly from their designated type. Though a bit disappointing, the game still demonstrates a careful balance amongst the factions, if not amongst the hero units.
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