The only good part of WC3 was the overhauled battle.net interface and expanded quickmatch options which were groundbreaking at the time.

Gotta disagree with you on that one Nom.

Sure the story might have been hacky. But the presentation was top notch.

The gameplay was also much more accesible than SC or Warcraft 2. The relatively small food cap and focus on heroes and high unit health made it easier to keep track of all your forces and focus more on tactics and army composition and less on psychotic single unit microing. Also the UI was a vast improvement over anything else that was present at the time in RTS games. Hell the editor that enabled the entire modding scene and dota to come about was a massive achievement and very accessible for newcomers.

I think you're a bit to negative about the whole thing, just look at its competition at the time to see how far ahead that game actually was.

I'll probably buy that and maybe dive in to WOW classic for a few months. Anything else, I'm not interested in.

PS: Diablo 3 already looks like Chinese MMO, so getting the phone treatment seems fitting.

I fucking loved warcraft 3 when it originally came out, but the best part for sure was the custom maps. I played through the campaign and all but all I can really remember gameplay wise are custom maps like DOTA and tower defense.

It's okay, RSR, I'm here to help you.

The story presentation was even more garbage than the story itself. "Watch these shadows of the interesting thing happening instead of watching the actual interesting thing happening" was the approach to every...single...scene. Shadow puppets. Then the super ultra big bad plays with sand castles and a tree explodes. The end.

Warcraft 2 was objectively simpler and more approachable.

Battles lasted longer in WC3, but there wasn't anything interesting to do during them. No more decisive spells, just automated buffs like it was an MMO raid. The low food count actually hurt tactics because there was no more skirmishing or splitting your forces. If you didn't meet their full army with your full army you were fucked. Side that won the first engagement usually steamrolled right after that. The whole rush/economy/mixed dynamic was greatly diminished.

And there absolutely was psychotic single unit microing involved. It was just more boring. You danced low health units out of the fight for a second to shake off being targeted, then sent them back to the firing line. That's not to say anything of keeping track of up to 3 separate MOBA heroes at once in addition to your army.

Army comp was massively dumbed down. You had one basic melee unit and one ranged, which you eventually traded for one stronger melee unit and a mage with auto buffs. If you felt really bold, you could try for an all-in ultimate flying unit surprise. That was it.

The UI, modding, and bnet design were all superior I agree. All the superior stuff was outside of the actual "game" part though.

And none of that stuff is ahead of its time anymore. Starcraft remastered makes sense because while the actual game is great (Brood War still kicks SC2's ass), the interface and online support were horrendously archaic.

WC3 was a middling game with all that interface stuff already in place. All the good ideas have been extracted and improved on in other stuff for the last 15 years. There's no reason to go back.

But that still makes more sense than Sony trying to hop on the bandwagon with the Playstation Classic. Who the hell wanted to pay $80 to go back to ugly late 90s first gen 3D?

I'm pretty sure there was more to the cinematics and in-engine cut-scenes than just shadows. I think you haven't played it in a long time and you're remembering really harsh first impressions.

If you're telling me that Warcraft 2 has better gameplay, you're outta your damn mind.

Blizzard has always had problems with writing. They always work backwards, but saying they want some combination of cool things they've seen in movies recently (Death Knights = vampires?
Game of Thrones frost zombies? Nurglings?) and then just say "This thing exists now," and then they sort it out in a novel five years after the fact.

WC2 did not have better gameplay, no. You said 3 was simpler and more accessible though, which it wasn't.

Oh no, I remember how nearly every single cutscene went to shadows or off-camera!

Every single cutscene:

-Opening fight between orc, human, and demon. Cuts away to show dead orc & human rather than the fight.

-Arthas kills his father, only shows the shadows.

-Big bad destroys mage city, only shows the shadows (while playing with sand castle).

-2 orcs confront a demon, built up as a massive fight, ends suddenly when he's stabbed with a sword :\. This will be the one and only cutscene that doesn't cut away.

-Big bad climbs a tree. Tree explodes. I guess this one didn't cut away either, but does it matter when the event is so lame? Remember how much cooler the similar final Starcraft cutscene was when the protoss rammed the carrier into the overmind?


Diablo 2 did a pretty great job for cutscenes. A Lovecraftian tale of some loser nobody drawn into a nightmare journey. I think it was someone here who made the comparison to Diablo 3 calling it "A girl falls asleep as her grandfather reads a book".

I liked Warcraft IIIs story quite a bit. I mark the beginning of blizzards tragic downfall directly _after_ WC3 but to each their own.

They tried to take Starcraft and make it more fun and interesting by focusing on micro, and I think they were at least sort of successful.

> "If you didn't meet their full army with your full army you were fucked."

This is actually extremely true and a super good point.

Make Azmodan great again!

today we are all arrogant nephalem

It’s unreasonable to expect a sequel to a successful game to be completely different aside from lore.

Spinoffs and different franchises are the places to experiment

Diablo 2 was way more than the same game with better graphics.

The one thing that was a big letdown was the music. 20 years and they STILL haven't come up with anything as good as the town theme from the first game.

@Solro.. Of course, now, I am fully aware that big games companies churn out the same old shit on a production line just like Hollywood movies, airport thriller novels etc.

But that was a change, and a bit of a shock at the time for me when I encountered it.
In the 80's games on home computers like C64, BBC micro, ZX spectrum, was a much more indie scene, passionate devs made what was in their imaginations.
Every game was different almost.
Then in the 90's / 2000's consoles and large corporations dominated and games in general became very bland and repetitive.
Now with the democratization of game development, that weird indie stuff is coming back.. Games are getting good again :)

Theres a good doc about all this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bedrooms_to_Billions

These fans don't really want another diablo, what they want is the same feeling that 2 gave to them, except that's not really possible since the formula has already been perfected.

These guys want a sequel to the Mona Lisa.
(Not that I'm saying Diablo 2 is the Mona Lisa, it's just that it has that aura of reverence in certain doughy white guy circles)

I think people just want a modern Diablo game done right, not the total clusterfuck "streamlined" (only 2 stats mattered) microtransaction mess that was D3.