Speaking of maps that people enjoyed, I had a lot of fun playing Island and Jungle Troll Tribes. Honestly sad that they didn’t catch on and get its own genre, a quick survival RPG 30 minute death match with class progression? Nice.
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I recently did Battleships Crossfire again. Which is basically Dota but with ships, and so sadly plagued with similar issue. Either play the meta, or get flamed by your teammates.
Lordaeron: The Aftermath and Lordaeron: The Foremath were some of my favourites, along with Glory of the Horde.
Troll Tribes were a really fun gamemode!
Pimp my Peon was simple but fun. I also liked Werewolf alot, and as I said most of the RPG maps.
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There was the other ones which had all of Azeroth and Outland. Adored playing thise but god damn was it toxic if you weren’t following some vague meta.
Survival Chaos is probably my favourite map at the moment. Not that ive booted WC3 up in a fair while.
That was probably Foremath and Aftermath, since they did have all of Azeroth and Outland. Their predecessors Azeroth Wars: Legacy Reborn aswell as Dark Ages of Warcraft were similar I believe.
But yes, warcraft 3 players were really among the toxic of the toxic…
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Green TD was always my favourite, also one of the only ones I could understand as a kid, heh.
Man… simpler times ._.
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Funnily enough, rp on warcraft 3 custom games ( Azeroth Wars: Legacy Reborn) is what eventually got me into moving over to Argent Dawn. That and my IRL friends moving on from the game.
Edit: That, and seeing Argent Dawn as Forum Topic of the Day near daily, this was around the time of Hrothgar shenanigans. I moved over in summer 2013.
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Warcraft Retrospective 21: A Boy, a Girl, and a Grandpa
https://lintian.eu/2024/03/17/warcraft-retrospective-21/
Excerpt:
This mission has an upbeat tone to it. It shows Arthas at his best: as a kind-hearted paladin-prince, one who’s eager to protect his people and knows his way with both his hammer and words of reassurance. Terenas is not long for this world; he’s venerable and spends important meetings half-asleep on his throne. Soon, Arthas could have succeeded him and become a beloved king… if only fate had turned out differently.
Then again, perhaps not. Would Light Yagami have remained a decent person if he had never found the Death Note? We might not know, but we do know that the flaws that were amplified by his possession of the Death Note were there with him from the start.
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Another beautiful part in the blog!
As for the excerpt you posted, what if Arthas had not turned, I actually wrote a small fanfic of that a good while ago, inspired by a custom made campaign about Arthas where he -did- stay on the good guys side. In my story I had Medivh just outright show Arthas just enough of the future to realise that if he went through with the Culling, he’d play right into the enemy’s hands.
But my story only deals with the direct start of what -could- have been the Culling, and I had thought about continueing but… honestly, Arthas -not- going down the path he did changes so -much- about WC3 and it’s later implications for the lore that it’s almost impossible to comprehend and make work. Biggest question being, if Arthas does not take up Frostmourne and become the Scourge’s champion, then which character would be suitable in his stead?
As for Medivh, you rightly point out that, for a Prophet that is trying to convince people that doom is coming, he is sure going about it in an… odd way. Where we come back to, why couldn’t Medivh just be a little clearer as to exactly -what- the threat was that was coming? Why could he not explain more? Ohwel, I reckon the story wouldn’t have been half as fun if Medivh just straight up told Terenas and co what was going to happen and they immedeatly follow his advice.
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The funny but weird thing is that he is clearer later. Next time he shows up in the campaign he holds absolutley nothing back and shares EVERYTHING in one of the few moments WC3 does an exposition dump.
He has no issue at all being straightforward then. So he was being mysterious just for dramatic effect in-universe.
Edit: He does do one more cryptic appearance first though, but he atleast then says a little bit more. Infodump is after it.
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If I was being charitable, I’d assume the author intent was that the leaders of the Alliance grew complacent and comfortable after their victory in the Second War, so they’re not taking new threats seriously enough — so when the push came to shove, the Scourge wiped them off the map, leaving the remnants of the Alliance in the hands of the only one both moral enough and determined enough to get to the bottom of what’s really going on.
Unfortunately, because of tight pacing requirements, negligence, or both, they didn’t give the Prophet any kind of actual coherent arguments besides “doom is coming, for real guys, I’ve foreseen it”. The cutscenes might have been longer in development — the fourth mission alone has eight unused voice lines in the game files — but in the released game, instead of making the Alliance leaders look obstinate, the cutscenes instead make the Prophet look stupid.
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I think it’s later on in the campaign but I think this was definitely the intent given that even Dalaran which used to utter Medivh’s name with equal parts fear and reverence (The Last Guardian) has forgotten who he is and just refer to him as a “rambling prophet” even wise old Antonidas does the same and dismisses him as just an old, mad man. So it goes to show just how complacent the Alliance has become post-war.
My Devil’s Advocate is that this usually worked really well for Stormwind 99% of the time when they did heed Medivh’s usually pretty cryptic warnings, so it seems the rest of the Kingdoms just forgot the memo of “don’t backchat Medivh Light have mercy”. The fact that he’s very clear when speaking to Jaina and Arthas privately later in the campaign backs this up as well.
He was so real for that honestly, if I had cinematic drama magic I’d be appearing as a raven and giving ominous omens all the time as well.
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That is actually one of the few critiques I will personally give Warcraft 3, even though it isn’t really a full one. You’ll have to tell me if you agree, but I did personally also replay WC3 last year and I noticed something.
While the story is straight-forward and I like it, I was a bit surprised with how rushed it feels and felt compared to how I remembered it in my head from childhood.
Alot of the dialogue in missions(even the ones that are “long” are maybe just a few sentences, and there are moments where it feels like it could have done with a bit more details because it just picks up a break-neck pacing. Especially so later in the campaign where characters often agree on things or make decisions completely out of nowhere, and you’re just meant to fill in the blanks yourself.
No idea if you agree with that, but its how it felt!
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He also doesn’t namedrop who he is until the night elf campaign, and according to the warcraft wiki, it was primarily because he was scared of being viewed poorly as the reason for the orcs invading.
So for most, he was just a random hobo who was telling people doom was coming, but never elaborated why.
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This is another curious thing to note: nobody recognizes the Prophet as Medivh! Not even the Kirin Tor, who you’d think would have his portraits in every book on the modern history of magic, and would recognize Atiesh if nothing else. I can only theorize that he magically concealed his identity to avoid being recognized as the man who led the orcs into the world — but as a result, he had no reputation to lean on, and almost everyone regarded him as, indeed, some random hobo with magic parlor tricks.
Of course, this far, there’s no indication that Medivh looked like this, or wielded this staff (which won’t be named until WoW), or had a raven motif before his fall in the First War. These details were all added later, backfilling his past mannerisms based on his iconic appearance in WC3, and it’s an example of how continuity drift can create new puzzling questions about lore where none needed exist. We’ll see more of them later.
Well, of course, in the actual missions, the cutscenes are broken apart by gameplay. But I do agree that WC3 is very fast-paced, and the human campaign in particular introduces a staggering number of new concepts over its nine missions. The writers really tried to make the story understandable on its own even without the manual, but it can still leave you confused about things like who is this Kel’Thuzad guy, how he got access to Andorhal’s grain, and why he’s helping the undead.
Late human campaign spoiler
Or what exactly happened to Arthas between the end of the human campaign and the start of the undead one, and how he got back home without ships.
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I think they overall succeeded with this considering that we(or at least I) mostly remembered the story as alot deeper and well-paced than it might actually be, and how much WC3 expanded its universe and became such a well-beloved game.
As I mentioned in another post, even when I was barely understanding english and learning it, I still mostly understood what was going on in the story’s broader strokes!
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True, in the night elf campaign he does finally come clean about who he is, and it’s indeed seemingly because he feels shame for his past that he did not reveal who he was. But indeed as Meronspell and Lintian later point out, how did the mages forget about him?
How the heck did Dalaran and Antonidas just -forget- about the strongest and greatest mage, the Guardian himself? The man they were dying to learn everything about, what he was doing, what knowledge he had? Whose literal -book- they had laying in the basement which would later play a role in the summoning of Archimonde and the Burning Legion?
Jaina clearly sensed that he was powerful, so you’d think Antonidas could have aswell. That alone should be enough reason to not dismiss Medivh as just a raving madman, even if he did magically conceal his appearance.
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It hit me while writing about the human campaign that Arthas is not just a deconstruction of the standard fantasy hero, but also a deconstruction of the very idea behind WoW’s more cookie-cutter plots: that everything can be solved with heroics, that you just have to find the right bad guy to punch, and that any artifacts you find along the way are just means to an end to enable your eventual triumph.
Sometimes, the right solution means admitting you don’t know everything, exercising caution, gathering information and strategizing. And sometimes, blindly charging in and punching the apparent biggest baddest guy around is exactly what the real bad guys want you to do, and you end up playing right into their hands.
If the original Lich King had not one, but 10–25 Arthases eager to play hero for fame and glory, Azeroth would be toast. Arguably, that’s more or less what almost happened way later, and only a deus ex machina saved the day.
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As per the rules of the street, if you wear a hood nobody can recognize you. Works every time.
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sometimes i look back at this and feel like the potential threat that nearly took out azeroth ends up under-stated because of how badly the champion(s) of azeroth feel implemented in the world compared to other mmos.
from just the mainstream ones of ESO, GW2, FF14 and SwtoR the PC is nothing short of a force of nature, an agent of change, a litteral superpower and/or a godkiller that makes divine/primordial beings actually pause and consider that “maybe i should try an alliance because yeah very real chance they will end me.”
The champion(s) of azeroth are very much on this same level. Even just by the point of the finale of ICC, the champions hit list consists of an Elemental Lord, the children of Deathwing, not one but two Old Gods, The Defiler (granted that was through time travel shenanigans but still), the Deceiver, the Betrayer and a Dragon Aspect. Arthas was one of the few villains to recognise this group of murderhobo’s is stronger than anything else the Alliance or Horde had to offer (Nzoth being the only other villain to come to my memory to make a similar achknowledgement.) and realised raising them gives him the power to see the Scourge’s campaign to its brutal end. That is a terrifying thought. It’d be more terrifying if Blizzard didnt treat the PC as a foil for the various faction leaders to sic on threat instead of doing it themselves.
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