[grawprog]

I Still have all my original copies of all my blizzard games with CD keys from the original Warcraft and diablo up to Warcraft 3. I enjoyed Warcraft 3 but I always liked 2 and its exapansions better. I wasn't a big fan of the the expanded RPG elements and to be honest i never really liked the way the story went. I also never got into WoW so I was kind of sad to see the franchise change so drastically after and still hope, fruitlessly I feel, there'll be a Warcraft 4 with a return to the solid RTS roots of the first 2 games.

Warcraft was the first RTS I ever played and the first game I remember going to a computer store to buy. I remember seeing the box and that was the game I wanted. I read through the manual, eagerly awaited the never released Warcraft adventures and played Warcraft over and over. When the second one came out it blew my mind. It made everything about the first one better and expanded the story pretty well. It introduced other races, increased unit speed drastically, added aerial and naval combat, got rid of the ridiculous road system and just felt like such an awesome improvement. It was the first game I played over lan. I remember playing with my cousins and my brother when we got a newer computer and had the old one hooked up still. It was amazing to me.

I never felt the same way about Warcraft 3. The 3d graphics were cool, though I didn't really like how cartoonish it all became, I enjoyed the additional races, but it didn't really feel the same. It felt like they took those really annoying maps from the first Warcraft where you had a hero and had to go through those dungeon cave things and made an entire game around it. I played through it all and the expansions, but I don't remember it as fondly. It may have just been that point in my life where I was becoming more disenchanted with video games overall, but the series is still one of those special ones to me. Even if I probably spent far more time with StarCraft and diablo 2. I was addicted to diablo 2 for a while, I can't play games like that any more.

[kayaeb]

The hero mechanic is what made WC3 WC3... If you weren't a hero-guy, go with undead, their heros were 50% supplementary and stupidly weak, and you could just focus on your army. Orc was like 90% hero action though, with a single Blademaster being the equivalent of an entire army at the cost of the fact that orc armies were stupid expensive and their air-force was laughably horrible (except the year or so when wyvern poison was massively overpowered)... And this was representative of the racial strengths as a whole, orc grunts were the most expensive, and most powerful of the tier 0 fighters, and undead ghouls were the expendable zerglings. It's one kind of rush to see two 300 apm pros go at it in SC with max-food armies, and entirely another to see a level 10 demon-hunter face off solo against a lv 6 archmage, lv5 mountain king and lv 3 paladin. Additionally adding in terrain hazards of creeps and day/night and manipulable trees made battlefield mechanics so much more interesting than the colonial line-warfare of SC. The decision to drop food limits in WC3 compared to SC (dramatically limiting max army size) was purposely done to enhance this difference. The inclusion of items was less about RPG elements and more about tactical versatility allowing heroes mercurial abilities to shift roles at the drop of a hat.

The addition of heroes made early game harassment, specifically the sub-2 minute fastbuild archmage rush, possible and exciting, much more interesting than zergling-rushes.

It was a new game, WC2 was great but it was chess, all sides exactly equal in all cases (except I think 1-2 ogre-mage vs paladin spells). SC was an incredible feat because each race was distinct yet balanced. WC3 was just as much a feat because they maintained that balance (with notable exceptions, like the year or so when sorc-rushes just dominated all levels of competitive play) with the introduction of super-units.

Also WC3 is definitely RTS more than RPG, I mean one of the first basics one learns is peasant pathing with farms to optimize gold-flow... or fog-of-war manipulation to distract the enemy by popping a single unit in and out of their sightlines while you're busy elsewhere... If you watch pros playing in first-person camera-mode you'll see that 50% of the action during battle is base-management. Battle could conceivably be considered more distraction than main-thrust.

[specialist]

Replying here because you mentioned WarCraft 2.

For whatever reason, while I love watching others play 3D MMORPG, I personally prefer to play 2D or 2.5D (Diablo 2, Dungeon Keeper, old school FF Tactics).

[kayaeb]

FFT is one of the greatest games of all time. It has a little community of people making custom mechanics / storylines / etc.: http://ffhacktics.com/

[specialist]

Thanks. That's very encouraging.

I love the UI, mechanics of Polytopia on iOS. I'm eagerly awaiting a Final Fantasy Tactics with a similar touch-centric UI.

[Pxtl]

I think you're SOL, it seems like StarCraft is their "pure" RTS brand and Warcraft is their hero-driven brand.