I picked Warcraft IV as a topic for a university marketing assignment. 
I would be curious what you guys would like to see in a potential continuation of the classic RTS series. What would your “needs and wants” be for this game? (Story, mechanics, multiplayer, map designing, gamemods, feeling, etc.)
you’re better off posting this in the general forum rather than the argent dawn realm forum
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Were you specifically looking at what RPers would like to see, from the perspective of people who immerse themselves in this narrative?
If so that’s probably worth specifying so people don’t think you’ve hit the wrong forum.
If you’re looking for a wider reach of responses, then the General forum likely will give you a much more… varied set of answers.
Good luck, either way!
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why am I an idiot? he would get more responses from a wider pool of people in general forum…
you have some deeply rooted issues dude.
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TTRPG with VN elements, that way it can avoid clashing with WoW while still being a worthy successor to WC3. Given the Fourth War happened in BFA, it could:
- start as a Saurfang-centric story,
- swivel to a few beats of Tyrande & Malfurion,
- pan to Lordaeron where the Royal Apothecary Society deploys the Blight against the Alliance
- have Renzik “The Shiv” lead the SI:7 in infiltrating the Undercity, then making their getaway
- Pan back to Zekhan’s final stand where Saurfang is eventually taken prisoner
- segway into trolls by using Greymane in Stormwind as a means to convey the significance of Prophet Zul
- accompany Princess Talanji on a quest to help her father in Zandalar that ends in Rezan’s death,
- briefly feature Jaina’s personal struggles as the other side of the story,
- accompany Brann Bronzebeard on a quest to defeat G’huun,
- have Nathanos nab the rod,
- have Mathias Shaw & Flynn steal it back,
- play the Gob Squad to hold back the Lightforged threat,
- return to the Alliance who attack the Zandalari capital from the sea,
- flip sides to Sylvanas during King Rastakhan’s death and have a neat boss fight vs Jaina and her fleet,
- have Shandris & Lor’themar oppose Queen Azshara,
- after the great climax, introduce a brief Goblins vs Gnomes story on Mechagon that concludes in cooperation to set up
- the Orgrimmar revolt, which starts as a flashback of Saurfang stories where he gathers supporters on his journey to Thrall, having to brave Sylvanas’ assassins every step of the way
- Anduin & Baine, who in cooperation muster what forces they can. The story here climaxes in a duel between Sylvanas and Saurfang, where - in a shocking turn of events - Saurfang loses not only a fight, but his life
- and in the final act play as the Black Prince, who under Ebonhorn’s counsel leads a campaign against the Old God N’zoth.
As for gameplay elements, the maps should feature square tiles for immersive strategic play. There should be cone attacks, line attacks, targeted area attacks, nova attacks, and it should feature side- and back-attacks, height modifiers, ground, water, air, hazard, and Old God Corruption tiles.
The main character mechanics will be Move, Attack, Guard, Skill/Spell, Item, Talk and End Turn
There should be team attack modifiers, the bulk of which is supported by character relationships between one character, and another character. The finalé should also feature a corruption meter that the player should seek to avoid filling lest the Black Prince succumbs to the whispers of the Old God.
Unit-wise, you have your hero unit(s) and can choose between a handful of faction specific troops that can be summed up as: melee, ranged, offensive magic, defensive magic.
Their spell mechanics and resistances span across the canonized categories: Life, Death, Order, Disorder, Light, Shadow - alongside a separate dynamic between Earth, Water, Air, Fire, Spirit and Decay.
Armor and dodge stats should suffice for physical attacks.
Roll all this into a neat package and you’ll have a Warcraft 4 that will appeal to both modern and older audiences without sacrificing the artistic charm that hooked us onto WoW to begin with.
also nobody wants an rts in the 21st century
TTRPG as in tabletop RPG? Isn’t the whole point of those that the players have the freedom to make their own decisions, so that the game becomes their story? Your outline is about a fixed sequence of events involving lore characters, which is not generally how tabletop RPGs work. They present a world, and a specific published adventure may have a setup, scene and encounter descriptions, and rough outline of how the world would evolve in response to different actions taken by the player characters.
Sorry! By TTRPG I meant Turn-based Tactical RPG! It’s a genre wherein a player is meant to complete an objective using limited forces & resources at their disposal in order to advance the game/story/plot.
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source? plenty still play starcraft, warcraft, age of empires among others.
nah nobody wants warcraft anime dating simulator, get out of here
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Ignore the hidden post above.
I’d love to see some more posts done in the proper channel, or specifically the lore channel.
I really think the Argent Dawn forums could do with an end to the mismatching of topics, an update could be made that tells you what channel is for what topic properly akin to a tutorial and then they can look at Argent Dawn and realize this isn’t the place.
I badly want to agree with you but
https://steamcharts.com/app/1466860
These aren’t winning numbers from a company’s perspective.
I reckon it’s where AD ends up in the ‘top’ or ‘new’ lists quite often, so it’s easily overlooked that we’re a server forum.
Probably why we get tech support queries or game complaints too. So yeah I’m on the side of politely redirect, it’s not really good for the OP to not reach the people they intended either.
Company of Heroes 3 is #15 on steam wishlists - https://steamdb.info/stats/globaltopsellers/
Stellaris has 13k players in 24hr - https://steamcharts.com/app/281990
TW: Warhammer 3 24k in 24hr - https://steamcharts.com/app/1142710
AoE 2 19k in 24hr - https://steamcharts.com/app/813780
You could get pedantic and say TW is turn based, but the battles are still real time.
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I could get even more pedantic and say all of these games have been developed by devs who know how to make an RTS. Blizzard’s RTS team, no, anybody remotely enthusiastic about developing a new RTS, is currently mostly working on Stormgate (which has to beat Starcraft 2’s [at least western world] numbers in order to be considered a success), so for Warcraft 4 they would need to hire a whole team of new people, which is a massive money sink because there’s an additional cost to merely hiring new employees that nobody ever talks about. Add to that production cost and bad PR from Warcraft 3: Reforged and it’s going to be kill or be killed (by Activision). A turn-based game, on the other hand, could draw resources from RPG (WoW, Diablo) and Hearthstone teams without necessarily needing to worry about the additional rocket science of balancing (something Starcraft 2 has historically dramatically struggled with and still does, as seen by the fact that it has never, ever come close to reaching Brood War State, as dubbed by the fandom) that comes with real-time strategy games post-release, and thus become both a worthy successor to Warcraft 3 while giving Blizzard a venue for returning to the strategy game niche (which, let’s be honest, they departed from in the mid-2010s) and drawing in RPG enthusiasts in one fell swoop. Everybody wins.
So to help with your project I’ll describe what target demographic I’m from:
- Enjoyed Warcraft as a franchise all the way from Warcraft 1
- I enjoy well made RTS games, both micro and macro-heavy, with a bit more leaning towards macro
- I would love to see Blizzard giving a Warcraft RTS another go without outsourcing it as some high school project for another dev company
- I’m not a fan of where the franchise has gone in terms of storytelling, characters and world building
Now with that in mind, if ActiBlizzard ever attempted to do a Warcraft 4…
- I’d prefer if it didn’t retread the same events and elements that WoW and adjacent novels covered. Give us instead campaigns that took place in the past and present that didn’t get much screentime. Make campaigns based on race again and not necessarily based on faction, so we get War of the Three Hammers and War of the Ancients, as well as The Fourth War and the Invasion of Alt Timeline Draenor being a backdrop for skirmishes and battles that were mostly mentioned on mission tables and not fleshed out at all.
- Keep the mostly micro-oriented and hero-centric gameplay from Warcraft 2 and 3 with an increased pop cap and more unit density as a feature (call it Epic that you can enable for both skirmish and campaign mode) if you want larger battles.
- Have an understandable Rock-Papers-Scissors unit counter gameplay system akin to Total War games. Ranged are best at dealing with melee infantry and fliers, melee infantry are best at dealing with cavalry and monsters, Fliers are best at engaging melee and Cavalry/Monsters are best at dealing with ranged and weaker infantry respectively
- Changes in core gameplay can include having a toggle between being mounted or on foot for different roles that they can only do when not engaged in combat. It can be a cheeky WoW mounting animation even. This would allow for you to create a base army that you customize after you have trained them, with tech trees unlocking specializations and allowing you to put together counter strategies and unit comp on the go rather than play with some FOTM setup.
- Keep the elements of Warcraft 3 that reward aggressive expansion, scouting and small engagements so smart micro can still win the game instead of having blobs of units duke it out
- Introduce Army Specializations similar to what CNC Generals had: Make the Dwarf faction be able to pick between the three clans that have their pros and cons, Elves being able to pick High Elves, Blood Elves and Void Elves, Humans can pick between Southern Kingdoms (Stormwind and adjacent areas), Northern (Lordaeron+Gilneas) and Kul Tiras and so on. Lock available Hero choices behind these too.
- Multiplayer can be the same as before
- Restore the modding and map creator tools to how they were in Warcraft 3, allowing players to mod the game and introduce their own factions and ideas to flesh out whatever their ideal gameplay or camapign would be
- Add Custom Campaign mode based on Map Creator allowing a player to host whats essentially a Dungeon Master session, where the DM can bring in Legion or Scourge Invasions, create natural disasters, resource scarcity and whatnot that the Commanders have to deal with, either together or while battling each other. The DM can also set the campaign objectives so it’s clear what players will be up against.
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Honestly a Warcraft: Prequel RTS would be quite amazing.
A cohesive story. It wouldn’t even need to be “the WC3 gang” featuring as main characters in the plot, though an occasional cameo might be fun. Timeskip or prequel perhaps? There is roughly 10.000 years of unexplored lore from the Sundering to now.
Secondly and just as importantly, for the game to be made with effort and due time. The WC3 Reforged fiasco was a warning of what outsourcing and low-priority planning can do to an otherwise beloved game.
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I would dare say with the current popularity of grand strategy games, RTS is in a golden age. Don’t think we ever had this many streamers / youtubers covering strategy games + they have multiple major E-sports events next to the old-running classic ones.
That brings my argument for WC4 though: considering CK2, CK3 and HOI4 all have community-made Azeroth mods I definitely feel there is a demand for a WC4 that leans more into grand strategy. I personally am torn, since I would likely enjoy both a traditional RTS and a GS game.
For the sake of repping Grand Strategy, the Paradox mods out there outline some clear directions a potential WC4 in the genre could take:
Freedom of choice and alignment. You can play as Thrall or guide the Saurfang Rebellion - but a player should also be able to unite Kalimdor under a Farakki Empire, play the invading Burning Legion in the respective expansion pack or defeat the Lich King as Illidan.
The latter is the most popular playthrough in thw CK2 mod, next to Sylvanas + Forsaken founding.
I doubt Blizz would ever do Grand Strategy though, we’ll see.
I would just settle for a Warcraft Reforged that isn’t just a shoddy remake just about not left on the cutting board table because Blizzard didn’t think anyone would want it and with models that aren’t cheaply made because the making of them was outsourced to a Chinese company.
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If there’s a mainline Warcraft game that begs to be made, it’s either a small-scale MMO-lite like Genshin, or a Destiny-like coop FPS/TPS/ARPG (which Diablo 4 should’ve been, but they lacked the courage).
If they want a strategy game, just give the license to Creative Assembly and let them make Total War Warcraft and that would likely be pretty cool.
Blizzard-style RTS are kind of a done and exhausted thing design-wise and the baggage of unmanageable expectations would be enormous.
Malaysian, IIRC, but I agree.