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How can they fail to even mention Warcraft III, an epic multiyear development effort and one of the most commercially successful video games of all time? Its d

How can they fail to even mention Warcraft III, an epic multiyear development effort and one of the most commercially successful video games of all time? Its debut was an epic win for Blizzard. It made more money the year it came out than any Hollywood movie. WC3 also set the stage for World of Warcraft, which would not have experienced nearly the same uptake without it. Truly a glaring omission in an otherwise interesting article.

mylons 11y ago
and spawned dota -- which more or less propelled mobas into the forefront of gaming.
sidusknight 11y ago
Hell, there are probably some people here who's first programming experience was JASS for WC3 modding.
- Rumudiez 11y ago
  You figured me out!
douche 11y ago
Really the last Blizzard game that I enjoyed. I'm not really into the cartoony look that WoW has gone for, particularly compared to the old Metzen concept art that was included in the Warcraft 1/2/Starcraft manuals http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manual#scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manua... http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20edition.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20... Those were some beautiful manuals. Once upon a time, kids would spend the entire afternoon reading the manual of a game, waiting in the car while their mothers finished up the grocery shopping, before they could get home and pop the massive pile of floppies or CD in and try to get the game installed/get autoexec.bat tuned right...
- ambicapter 11y ago
  You didn't think Warcraft III was cartoony?
  - douche 11y ago
    It was, but aside from the awful character portraits, it's not much worse than other low-poly 3D games of that era. That's right around the cusp of where 3D engines started to overtake the older 2D/isometric engines for RTSs and strategy games.
hiq 11y ago
WC3 is also a remarkable example of what a devoted community can do. Several third-party clients were developed to fill the gaps of the regular multiplayer server (battle.net), the two main ones being w3arena [0] and netease [1]. Some competitions in China and South Korea still reward their winners with high prizes, more than a dozen of k$ (WCA 2015). [0]: http://tft.w3arena.net http://tft.w3arena.net [1]: http://dz.blizzard.cn http://dz.blizzard.cn
- pjlegato 11y ago
  And a sad and remarkable example of what developer neglect can do. Despite numerous pleas on their forums, Blizzard lost all interest in WC3 after WoW came out. The planned expansion packs were cancelled, major bugs in the client went unfixed for years, including serious maphacks that allowed a few griefers to completely ruin the once-strong online tournament scene and break apart the community. The WC3 installer won't even run on Macintoshes newer than 10.6.8. Fixing that would be a matter of recompiling it and making a couple of minor tweaks -- perhaps a week's work, tops. Even if you have an old version already installed when you upgrade your OS, you suddenly find that network games don't work at all anymore once you upgrade - that is, the major feature that you bought the game for in the first place. It relies on Apple's Open Transport networking library, which was removed in 10.9. There is no patch and no fix. The best people have come up with is dual booting into Windows or running Wine. Perhaps this is why they didn't want WC3 mentioned in the article.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    > It relies on Apple's Open Transport networking library, which was removed in 10.9. There is no patch and no fix. As much as I wish Blizzard would continue to support their games, Apple deserves as much blame here as anyone. Their aggressive removal of older libraries is annoying. The same thing happened to Starcraft (and a number of other software packages I used to use). If they are going to get rid of their old packages, they should open-source it so people who care can do something about it. That is the proper way.
    - 11y ago

mylons 11y ago

and spawned dota -- which more or less propelled mobas into the forefront of gaming.

sidusknight 11y ago

Hell, there are probably some people here who's first programming experience was JASS for WC3 modding.

Rumudiez 11y ago
You figured me out!

douche 11y ago

Really the last Blizzard game that I enjoyed. I'm not really into the cartoony look that WoW has gone for, particularly compared to the old Metzen concept art that was included in the Warcraft 1/2/Starcraft manuals http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manual#scribd http://www.scribd.com/doc/3914674/Warcraft-Orcs-Humans-Manua... http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20edition.PDF http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Warcraft%202%20Battlenet%20... Those were some beautiful manuals. Once upon a time, kids would spend the entire afternoon reading the manual of a game, waiting in the car while their mothers finished up the grocery shopping, before they could get home and pop the massive pile of floppies or CD in and try to get the game installed/get autoexec.bat tuned right...

ambicapter 11y ago
You didn't think Warcraft III was cartoony?
- douche 11y ago
  It was, but aside from the awful character portraits, it's not much worse than other low-poly 3D games of that era. That's right around the cusp of where 3D engines started to overtake the older 2D/isometric engines for RTSs and strategy games.

hiq 11y ago

WC3 is also a remarkable example of what a devoted community can do. Several third-party clients were developed to fill the gaps of the regular multiplayer server (battle.net), the two main ones being w3arena [0] and netease [1]. Some competitions in China and South Korea still reward their winners with high prizes, more than a dozen of k$ (WCA 2015). [0]: http://tft.w3arena.net http://tft.w3arena.net [1]: http://dz.blizzard.cn http://dz.blizzard.cn

pjlegato 11y ago
And a sad and remarkable example of what developer neglect can do. Despite numerous pleas on their forums, Blizzard lost all interest in WC3 after WoW came out. The planned expansion packs were cancelled, major bugs in the client went unfixed for years, including serious maphacks that allowed a few griefers to completely ruin the once-strong online tournament scene and break apart the community. The WC3 installer won't even run on Macintoshes newer than 10.6.8. Fixing that would be a matter of recompiling it and making a couple of minor tweaks -- perhaps a week's work, tops. Even if you have an old version already installed when you upgrade your OS, you suddenly find that network games don't work at all anymore once you upgrade - that is, the major feature that you bought the game for in the first place. It relies on Apple's Open Transport networking library, which was removed in 10.9. There is no patch and no fix. The best people have come up with is dual booting into Windows or running Wine. Perhaps this is why they didn't want WC3 mentioned in the article.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  > It relies on Apple's Open Transport networking library, which was removed in 10.9. There is no patch and no fix. As much as I wish Blizzard would continue to support their games, Apple deserves as much blame here as anyone. Their aggressive removal of older libraries is annoying. The same thing happened to Starcraft (and a number of other software packages I used to use). If they are going to get rid of their old packages, they should open-source it so people who care can do something about it. That is the proper way.
  - 11y ago