A tiny little detail that interested me in particular as a shaman enthusiast; we see the orcs have far seer as their hero unit, with classic spirit wolves and the like, but the humans have a “mighty dwarven warrior who can throw his hammer, stomp on the ground and transform into an empowered Avatar state”. Not having played the game, is this Avatar closer to shamanistic Ascendance, or something else? What are the visuals like?
2 Likes
The Avatar state (snerk) makes the mountain king grow in size and turn to stone for one minute, getting extra damage, armor, hit points, and spell immunity.
It’s the precursor to the WoW warrior ability of the same name (Avatar) and the dwarven racial Stoneform.
You can see it in action in these videos. The visuals are not really flashy, the hero just grows in size and turns white.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBqCV6uU4Nc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r94aAE-lyf8
1 Like
While its quite a while away for you, I remember not really liking hers and Maievs love triangle drama in TfT. (Not even sure if it was meant to be one, but I thought it was when I was young). Their rivalry feels very catty.
2 Likes
Ah! Very, very cool. Thank you for the clarification!
1 Like
And there’s a theme emerging. We see, again and again, how the road to ruin, both personal and world-shaking, is paved with good intentions. This will be a prevalent theme in Warcraft 3 itself, too.
It’s certainly better than suddenly introducing a new villain you never heard of and claiming he was secretly behind everything all this time.
Oww, Lintian, ow, ow, ow…!
(they deserve that burn)
4 Likes
Quick compliment to say I will stalk the forums just to see if there’s a new entry in your blog to go with a cup of coffee, appreciate the care and insight you put into it!
6 Likes
Warcraft Retrospective 19: Exodus of the Horde, Part One
https://lintian.eu/2024/03/10/warcraft-retrospective-19/
Excerpt:
Along with base building and combat micromanagement, exploration is one of the gameplay pillars of Warcraft 3. The maps contain very little unused space; instead they’re filled to the brim with secrets and optional encounters. So far, the Narrator has been hand-holding us across the main quest, but nobody encourages us to step off the beaten path and explore. This is yet another brilliant part of Warcraft 3’s mission design, is that it simply counts on your own curiosity to drive you to these optional areas. You see that the main road is leading you to the mission objective, but there’s also this sidepath leading into the black area — what secrets does it hold? And in these baseless missions where you control a limited stack of units, there’s usually no time pressure, and you can explore the entire map at your leisure.
And that is how you establish — even with a small number of geographically small missions — that the world is large, full of unexplored wilderness, and there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I intended to cover the entire campaign in one post, but even the first two missions ended up very screenshot-heavy, as I wanted to offer a good idea of the game’s visuals and gameplay pillars. So part two will come in the next post.
9 Likes
So exciting to see you getting into the game! And well done post!
I really like the WC3 tutorial. It’s simultaneously very user-friendly and straightforward, yet also so open(as it can be for a tutorial level) for exploration and playing around with the maps, and still being story driven atop of it all.
Warcraft 3, its tutorial and demo in particular, actually did help me learn english. The dialogues are well-paced and split up so its good to read, and due to the updated graphics and visuals, its still fairly easy to follow what is going on even if you happen to not understand much of the language.
5 Likes
I miss WC3. Yeah, it had issues of its own, but I feel like I’d have a better stab at not seat-of-my-pants ing the campaigns, these days.
But Reforged ._. Ugh.
Edit: And oooh, the ‘forgotten’ tutorial missions. Didn’t they add them back in, at some point? I dunno, my memory is creaking at the seams these days 
4 Likes
Rubs hands -Now- we get to the good part.
For me, the warcraft 3 tutorial, available as a seperate demo at the time, was what began my love for the warcraft universe, and served as my introduction to it.
I quite liked Thrall as a character then because, from what I could see, despite being the orcs, they were clearly not the evil beings I had come to know from Lord of the Rings. They were still just as ruthless and savage if need be, but also had noble qualities, and Thrall was the embodiment of it. To quote Cairne Bloodhoof upon first meeting the orcs:
“You greenskins fight with both savagery -and- valor. I am intrigued.”
And the world itself, it seemed quite vibrant and filled with life, with all of these different creatures and factions inhabiting it. I got to see the humans and the trolls through that prologue aswell.
Then, a good while later, I went to the local store with my mother and we bought both Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos aswell as the Frozen Throne. And from then on, Azeroth became my most favourite fantasy-universe next to Middle-Earth.
They’re added back in yes, under custom campaigns I believe in the single player tab. I’d have to check to be sure. But they’re back in yes.
4 Likes
So here’s a question.
I played this campaign in 16:9 widescreen, but after inserting screenshots into the post, I realized that the UI was not optimized for widescreen, and if I played the game in 4:3 instead (which will require some tinkering with Wine settings to get 4:3 in 4K), the text on screenshots would be slightly larger and more readable, at the cost of less of the map being visible.
Do you think it’s worth switching from 16:9 to 4:3 for future campaigns?
Yes, these missions are available in the demo, and also as a Frozen Throne custom campaign with no voice acting. Reforged has the full campaign with voice acting, but only with the new graphics.
3 Likes
I think 4:3 As Was would be fine, so long as it’s not too much tinkering to deal with? 
Good old Warcraft 3. I wonder what it would be like, if I were to play it again.
Guess I will have to keep reading Lintian’s posts to know!
2 Likes
Warcraft Retrospective 20: Exodus of the Horde, Part Two
https://lintian.eu/2024/03/13/warcraft-retrospective-20/
Excerpt:
Listing every encounter, every item, and every secret in this one mission alone would fill a guide by itself. It’s an explorer’s paradise, and it’s very satisfying to methodically visit every corner of this space-filling dungeon and the surrounding volcanic cavern. I have to admit that they made it a bit too mazelike; at one point I reached an impasse, was confused where to go next, and only after consulting a revealed map on Warcraft Wiki, did I discover this one passage I missed, requiring me to backtrack across half the map to break down these rock chunks.
The rock chunks are yet another antepiece. By forcing you to break them down to proceed, the game teaches you that rock chunks are destructible, and there are several more of them around the map that hide secret items behind them.
6 Likes
Those troll polygons have not aged well at all.
Another nice update! And like you, I absolutely love the dungeon crawling missions during WC3. While the base campaigns are fun, it was just such a different and fun feeling to control only a hero or smaller group and navigating maps. And both RoC and TfT have some huge campaign maps!
There is a reaon my favourite custom maps ended up being RPG ones. The WC3 engine really is fun to play around with when it comes to heroes and exploring.
Another thing I remember in particular with the demo(mainly because the maps werent available in RoC). In RoC and the Demo, the murlocs look like you show in the screenshots, yet in TfT they all got spikes plastered over them. Not fins like the murlocs we know today, but just random assortments of spikes.
I still don’t know why that is, but I prefer the non-spike ones.
2 Likes
From what I understand, TFT murlocs use mur’gul models. I don’t really know why this change was made. Mur’gul seemed to be a lore experiment that didn’t pan out, and they were quietly retconned out of continuity, with Sean Copeland clarifying that they were normal murlocs.
The replacement of murlocs with mur’gul seemed to be one of those unexplained TFT changes like replacing catapults with demolishers, except this one didn’t stick.
2 Likes
That does make some sense! I do remember the Mur’gul. When I was younger I just assumed them to be some kind of deep-sea murloc, similar to what we got in WoW in the end.
It makes sense that they did experiment a bit with some things in TfT. An expansion seems like a good place to try and see what might work better or not, but they also did a few of these changes with no actual explanation beyond “lets change this for the sake of it”.
2 Likes
Okay, question to you all: while I play the human campaign, what looks better to you on page — 16:9 or 4:3?
https://lintian.eu/bits/testpage/
(Don’t link to that page, I’ll delete it after I’m done with feedback!)
3 Likes
4:3 personally, it feels weird to see parts of the UI missing even if its nothing major.
3 Likes
Yeah, it’s hard to explain but 4:3 feels ‘right’ heh.
3 Likes