Blizzard Announces Warcraft III

LONDON - A few weeks ago, Blizzard Entertainment stated that it would announce its latest project during ECTS in London, and online speculation, ranging from the return of Warcraft Adventures to Blackthorne II, immediately flared up. Earlier this weekend, Blizzard put an end to all those rumors with its announcement of Warcraft III.

The original Warcraft is credited by many as the game that ushered the real-time strategy genre onto PCs. Perhaps, then, it's only fitting that Warcraft III be the game that ushers in the genres' demise. Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime explains. "With the release of StarCraft, we felt that we reached the pinnacle of what could be accomplished in the current generation of strategy titles. Our goal with Warcraft III is to carve out a new direction for strategy games by incorporating the interactive dynamics present in role-playing games and applying them in a competitive strategic combat environment."

In effect, Blizzard has removed several key aspects that define traditional real-time strategy games from Warcraft III, and created a genre that the company's marketing team has dubbed a “role-playing strategy”. Instead of building up bases, countless units, managing a number of resources and then repeating the entire process during every mission, Warcraft III will take place in a single, dynamic world, and give players smaller, but more powerful, forces with which to explore and interact with - the object being to create units that aren't expendable, but rather improve with experience.

Four new classes, including the Demons, will join the Humans and Orcs, which return from the previous two Warcraft titles. Each of these units will be rendered in 3D, and will feature skeletal and skinning animation for a more realistic look. Azeroth itself will be filled with NPCs, neutral towns, fortresses, temples and wandering monsters, sharply skewing the feel of Warcraft III from that of any other RTS.

We'll have more on Warcraft III from the show floor of ECTS later this week. Blizzard has pinned a Q4 2000 ship date on the game. Whether or not the notoriously tardy developers will be able to meet that date or not remains to be seen.