Recently, I replayed warcraft III, one of my childhood games. My dad was big into warcraft and blizzard, so, i've grown mostly playing warcraft 3 and world of warcraft, I remember loving warcraft 3, but that opinion was formed when I was like 6 years old, now that i'm triple that age and developed critical thinking, I expected to be way worse than I remembered. I was wrong, it was better.

warcraft 3 is such a good game, even if it's a game from 2003, it feels really good to play, it's polished to oblivion, i've experienced no bugs or any loose ends, there are 20 ways to approach any single situation and every one of them have been thought through, this is something I criticized from lisa, the fact that for a lot of circumstances I found alternate solution to problems but those solutions were not coded in

the game is AAA, and had a big budget, but instead of bloating the game, half of that budget went to the cinematics. They were SO far ahead of the curve in terms of cinematics, not just in term of technical skill (they were BEAUTIFUL for their time, so much, that they still hold up today), but also in pure cinematography, honestly I have yet to see a game that has a trailer better than the world of warcraft warth of the lich king opening cinematic

This is something blizzard excel at, and even if they recently have been getting weaker in that front, they still have some cinematics that fucking rocks, like some of the diablo IV cinematics rocked

you may argue that these are shitty cinematics (mainly the warth of the lich king cinematic) because it was marketing and didn't actually show you the game, but you're wrong because blizzard used to show two cinematics, a gameplay one, and a CGI one, which is actually better for the consumer than whatever companies are doing nowadays

warcraft 3 , to this day, is still probably the best RTS campaign ever created and honestly one of the best RTS games, genre that was again, accidently killed by blizzard

thing is, RTS game are fun, they still have a big playerbase even if the genre has been dead for over 10 years. Thing is, RTS games didn't die because people lost interest, they died because of starcraft. Starcraft basically created the whole concept of e-sports, and it turned out that RTS brought more money to the table, they actual cultural perception of RTS also shifted to be hyper competitive games, so every game tried to be a e-sport, neglecting the actual campaign and stuff which is what made games like command and conquer or warcraft so good in the first place (thankfully it seems that for the first time in history, we are starting to see indie RTS, so maybe that will change soon)

thing is, later world of warcraft released and it fucking sucks, it was good for it's time but nowadays, even classic sucks ass, it did a lot for it's time, it innovated a lot, however, they also did a lot of mistakes along the way, when it released those problems were easy to ignore, but now that the original parts have become industry standard, the game just sucks

it retconned a lot of warcraft 3 too, because, the biggest sin of world of warcraft, it that the actual gameplay structure doesn't allow to very effective storytelling, every expansion up to like pandaria relied on warcarft 3 plot points, characters that were mentioned, things that were never resolved, etc, and it's just, an MMO as barebones as world of warcraft doesn't have the storytelling capabilities of an hyperpolished RTS

In order to support the gameplay a lot was changed, a lot of the maps were changed (for example, moonglade is on a totally different location), a lot of zones were not balanced due to how dangerous they were, but more distance to your starting position, so felwood, a zone that should have been max level with at least 2 raids was an early game zone, and winterspring, a place where nothing ever happened, is basically max level.

As I said in my previous rant in MMO's, people don't really like to lose progress or their accounts, so it's not like they could just maybe do wow classic, then do warcraft 4, and then release world of warcraft 2, with a better client and better set up storytelling, they basically killed the RTS warcraft franchise, so they were just locked into wow

Warcraft 3 sets up a lot of things but it isn't infinite, and well, they started running out fast, so, they had to start picking up secondary characters and retcon them to be more powerful, which makes none of the battles and early raids in wow make sense in terms of actual plot progression

they actually tried fixing this adding plot outside of the game with books and stuff, but man, this just doesn't work at all

thing is, there is actually an expansion in wow that actually fixed most of these problems, and that was pandaria. Pandaria featured a brand new story that wasn't rooted in warcraft 3, so it didn't retcon anything, it has the best plot in recent warcraft history with all the garrosh stuff, the zones were beautiful, the pandaren are the best race in wow, the actual gameplay was very solid with the thunder and atemporal island, but, up to that point, this was the most hated expansion reveal to date.

Why?, because they're appealing to CHINA and CHINA sucks because we're AMERICANS RAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, so the actual commercial side of things weren't very good, also people seemed to be scared of the idea of the start of the expansion being a lot lower stakes and doing actually really fun things like learning how to mount a dragon or taking care of your farm

so they got scared, did draenor which was a "return to form" of the game and they haven't recovered since then, it fucking sucked

so yeah warcraft 3 is peak, world of warcraft sucks on it's entirely except pandaria which is actually good

also play rabbit & steel it's mmo combat if it was good


if warcraft 3 was requested in my thread, it would be an S rank but it seems like none of you have good taste

also I haven't even gone into how much I fucking hate blizzard like holy fuck I hate them so much but that is for another thread entirerily

mmmm yes, the activblizzard crop

kinda disappointing they ended up as it is today but it seems like publicly traded corps are going that route anyway

don't have much of an opinion on warcraft 3

I haven't played Warcraft 3. I remember one of my cousins playing W3, but I didn't play it myself. I will try it out eventually. I've played WoW but only until level 20 and frankly, that completely killed my interest in MMOs.

wc3 is the bomb and a childhood classic for me, though for a different reason

as a child i never really cared for the main game that much, all i was focused on was the custom games

like holy shit there was so much fun custom games that i would devote hours into

besides the obvious dota (pretty sure that here in the Philippines, wc3 is known as the dota launcher lmao), there were tons of classics such as Vampirism, Sheep Tag, Footmen Frenzy, Bleach vs One Piece (lol), that crypt lord snake game, Azeroth Grand Prix, and tons of RPGs whose names I forgot

WoW bad.

Never played Warcraft 3 because I'm bad at RTS or any game that requires thinking.

Lapizote wrote:

wc3 is the bomb and a childhood classic for me, though for a different reason

as a child i never really cared for the main game that much, all i was focused on was the custom games

like holy shit there was so much fun custom games that i would devote hours into

besides the obvious dota (pretty sure that here in the Philippines, wc3 is known as the dota launcher lmao), there were tons of classics such as Vampirism, Sheep Tag, Footmen Frenzy, Bleach vs One Piece (lol), that crypt lord snake game, Azeroth Grand Prix, and tons of RPGs whose names I forgot

yeah true, custom games were sick

no comment on wc3 since I havent played it and wont however mists of pandaria was pretty fuckin mid. dont get me wrong it wasnt the worst expansion ever (dat's easily bfa) but it's funny to see people starting to praise it in retrospect because of that fact that it's not the worst. i think this is because it was sandwiched between cata and wod, easily the worst two expansions after bfa. this is coming from someone who stopped playing during shadowlands prepatch so idk about that one nor dragonflight
the zones may have been pretty and you're free to care about wow lore, tho, lmfao, but mechanically? nah it sucked. soo was cool... aaaaaand that's about it. and if you care about lore beating and capturing garrosh, who people fucking hated, didnt even matter when he escaped and did some time travel alt universe bullshit and we got wod out of it. at least the raid was good. dude killed cairne with a poisoned weapon in a duel for warchief and it's pretty dumb this happened in a book, and not the game.
idk what they were thinking with wod but the fact that they tried to switch gears back into the stereotypical high fantasy orc bad bullshit after mop kinda goes to show how people actually received mop at the time. it's also funny in retrospect to think about how many ppl during wod were wishing for mop back. was this because mop was truly good or because wod was so goddamn bad?
I guess we'll just have to wait until mop classic in order to go back and more or less experience pandaria as it was then and not as it is now, but idk if that'll even happen lol

xch00F wrote:

no comment on wc3 since I havent played it and wont however mists of pandaria was pretty fuckin mid. dont get me wrong it wasnt the worst expansion ever (dat's easily bfa) but it's funny to see people starting to praise it in retrospect because of that fact that it's not the worst. i think this is because it was sandwiched between cata and wod, easily the worst two expansions after bfa. this is coming from someone who stopped playing during shadowlands prepatch so idk about that one nor dragonflight
the zones may have been pretty and you're free to care about wow lore, tho, lmfao, but mechanically? nah it sucked. soo was cool... aaaaaand that's about it. and if you care about lore beating and capturing garrosh, who people fucking hated, didnt even matter when he escaped and did some time travel alt universe bullshit and we got wod out of it. at least the raid was good. dude killed cairne with a poisoned weapon in a duel for warchief and it's pretty dumb this happened in a book, and not the game.
idk what they were thinking with wod but the fact that they tried to switch gears back into the stereotypical high fantasy orc bad bullshit after mop kinda goes to show how people actually received mop at the time. it's also funny in retrospect to think about how many ppl during wod were wishing for mop back. was this because mop was truly good or because wod was so goddamn bad?
I guess we'll just have to wait until mop classic in order to go back and more or less experience pandaria as it was then and not as it is now, but idk if that'll even happen lol

my point with pandaria is that they escaped the chains of warcraft 3, they're not retconning, they're not relying on lore of warcraft 3, they did original content and the storytelling worked, people hated garrosh because garrosh was supposed to be hated, it's a really good character, but people hated it and they got afraid of doing anything original ever again basically killing the game

it's the best wow could be at that point in time, of course it still has fundamental flaws as I desacribed, but, it's the best they could have done.

if the main metric you're judging mop on is blizzard's inability to retcon things because it's so far removed from the rest of the world then sure it's the best expansion
at least garrosh's trajectory was more interesting that sylvanas', but his entire backstory mostly boils down to grug grug orc bad. you said it yourself, he was meant to be hated right. if that makes a character good then that argument should hold for sylvanas to some extent and it very clearly doesn't. people hated garrosh long before mop bub

xch00F wrote:

if the main metric you're judging mop on is blizzard's inability to retcon things because it's so far removed from the rest of the world then sure it's the best expansion
at least garrosh's trajectory was more interesting that sylvanas', but his entire backstory mostly boils down to grug grug orc bad. you said it yourself, he was meant to be hated right. if that makes a character good then that argument should hold for sylvanas to some extent and it very clearly doesn't. people hated garrosh long before mop bub

people hated garrosh before pandaria because it's supposed to be a hated character, it's media literacy, the gameplay isn't the best because as I said in the thread

"thing is, later world of warcraft released and it fucking sucks, it was good for it's time but nowadays, even classic sucks ass, it did a lot for it's time, it innovated a lot, however, they also did a lot of mistakes along the way, when it released those problems were easy to ignore, but now that the original parts have become industry standard, the game just sucks"

pandaria is the best wow can be, it's original, it's cool, it has some of what are considered the best raids, etc

if we're going to start bringing up things like media literacy we should probably just straight up admit that a lot of the hatred for both garrosh and mop as a whole came primarily from racism lol, tho the people hating mop for being china were way more overt about it. racism is embedded into perception of orcs
I will agree that mop was original and it was a nice change of pace but otherwise I still think it was pretty mid overall. soo was great in terms of mechanics. there was a lot of dumb shit too though. legendary cloaks on alts? ugh, fucken spare me

I started during wotlk, my quick list of best to worst would be
wotlk > legion > mop > cata > wod >>>>>> bfa

now I'm curious about what the backlash would have looked like if garrosh had destroyed teldrassil, that was basically the only thing in wow that affected me and a lot of people on any significant emotional level. probably the same just swap the misogyny out for racism rofl

yeah racism is imbedded in the perception of orcs, but the story takes advantage of that, garrosh was meant to be hated, yes the racism helped it, but at the end of the day, that was the point, it was expected from you to hate it

The actual faction war wasn't really a thing in warcraft, it was the alliance vs the burning legion, and in warcraft 3 it was the alliance + the newfound horde which had like taurens, one faction of orcs, and one faction of trolls vs the burning the legion

also goblins are a jewish stereotype

Patatitta wrote:

also goblins are a jewish stereotype

yessir, special shoutouts to jk rowling for making this one chic again

a lot of words