Facebook – Top 100 FAVORITE Video Games: 69

69: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (PC)
Developer: Blizzard
Year: 2002

The number of hours I spend playing games online is pretty small; I’m a man that likes single player experiences, unless – of course – I’m playing a game with people I know. I played a lot of TFC and my fair share of some UT, granted, but I have no love for RTS play online. For the most part, I just suck at them. But this game – THIS GAME – devoured so many hours of my life online that I couldn’t even compare the total numbers to any game I’ve ever played on the net. Why? Because this game if fucking amazing.

Granted, WC2 was just on this list not but a few games ago, but WC3 is the better game. Why? Storytelling. Blizzard came ahead of the curve by crafting a story that took the simple, “we can haz a war!?” narrative from the previous two games and fleshed it out 100% better than could have been expected. Granting character development to people we’ve never heard of, the game told the story of Medivh and his foolishness in the first game, opening the portal, and – in the end – the ramifications of the tampering Gul’dan had done before with demon powers. It also told the story of Arthas and his blind ambition, the fall of the human empire, and the rise of the Orc kingdoms. It was a sweeping narrative that, in the end, pitted everyone against a common foe, sure, but it was a sweeping narrative all the same.

The game did what StarCraft 2 did as a sequel, and that was to bring it forward, graphically, and enter the 3D world. Sprite units were replaced with cartoonish, but effective, models, buidlings took up space, and you could move about the map both in a scan-and-pan type of fashion, standard in RTS’  and also up and down, closer and further away from the battles on the ground. If you had a computer that could run the game at its top settings, these battles could appear very epic indeed, particularly when all the armies were battling at one time, creating a real sense of war on your computer’s screen. The spell effects also got a touch better, with fantastic lighting and what not. But the real treat of any Blizzard game, now, is their incredible and over-the-top-quality CG movies. This game really started a new trend and raised a bar with cinemas and cut-scenes that looked so much better than some of the things coming out of movie theatres at the time.

The gameplay, though, is still your standard RTS-style point-and-click-and-point-and-click battle campaigns, with each race having uniquely structured unit and upgrade trees making them different enough to have advantages and weaknesses to the other races’ respective units. But one of the things that really made it stand out was the inclusion of leveled heroes. Using these powered characters in combat got them raised stats, the possibility of new items to equip, and new spells. All of these elements carried over into the online play, too, which introduced a new ladder system on Battle.net, one that made it easier to find players at your level (this would be why I played it so much, actually, because on WC2 and the first StarCraft… it was random and I sucked balls. Hard.) and have a great bit of fun.

All in all, Warcraft III is a game that, along with its expansion content, continued a trend of quality RTS gaming from a company that has almost never faltered in game making. While WoW is still huge (new exapnsion out soon, you can play as Wargs. Why? Why not!), I would love to see another game in the RTS franchise come along. I know they’re moving the plot forward through the online experience, right now, but – still – they could easily produce a game that takes place during WoW’s story and then have WoW pick up where Warcraft IV leaves off. Am I overly hopeful? Yes. Yes, I am.

Classic Moment:
The very first level where you play as the now Undead-sided Arthas (Spoiler alert!) has you sneaking through a town and taking no damage. Its a great stealth level taking place during a game that usually relies so little on being sneaky. You are weak and can get easily busted up by the town soldiers, leaving you with a “game over” and a necessary restart. Its a great moment in both the game and Blizzard’s excellent use of “dungeon crawl” map missions, featured from time to time in the their other games and, in my opinion, some of the comapny’s best moments, overall.

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Added January 18, 2017
I should replay this one at some point, but I likely never will. If they do a HD remaster of it on PC someday in the future I might get around to it, but until then? I don’t even have a CD ROM drive in my laptop so I’d have to re-buy the damn thing, anyhow.