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Last month was that of May, and for many people it meant term papers, and cramming for finals as everyone prepared for the impending summer. Fortunately for me, this also meant that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3 for all of you uncouth folks out there) would be making its way back to the Los Angeles Convention center. As usual I was as giddy as a schoolgirl at the opportunity to go and rub elbows with the gaming bigwigs as I had done last year. This year’s E3 however was a bit if a disappointment. It lacked the energy and excitement of its predecessor. The Playstation 2 had already been established, and Sony’s booth paled in comparison to the grandeur and glory that it had contained the year before. Everything there felt recycled and reused. Most of the games that were being demonstrated were from last year, and only the announcement by Nintendo, stating that the GameCube would be released at the same time as the X-Box and with a $100 lighter price tag was really of interest to anyone.

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The first day was rather uneventful for me. I mainly spent it milling around the console area, drooling over Final Fantasy X, and admiring Nintendo’s new system. Everything felt done before, with nothing radically new and unique… I milled around from booth to booth looking for hope in a sea of redundancy. My lifeboat came the next day in the form of a semi-private interview/preview with one of the designers of WarCraft III that had been arranged for me by the management at Neoseeker. Thursday was a day of anxious anticipation. I had done a preview of WarCraft III at the last year’s E3, but I knew that that had simply been a graphic shell, hastily completed to illustrate their shift in perspective focus. Now with WarCraft III nearly at completion, I was eager to see what had become of this epic tale. Finally the time came, and I sat down with Tim Campbell, a level designer for WarCraft III, and talked with him for almost an hour and a half about the evolution of the game. This is what I discovered:

WarCraft III will differ significantly from the previous Blizzard RTS games, not only due to the fact that the environment in WarCraft III is completely 3D, but because unlike the previous games, this one will focus on heroes. Tim said that Blizzard did not want players to scarcely use their heroes, as was the common practice in WarCraft II and StarCraft. Before, the heroes were rare and vital commodities. They were only mildly more powerful than a normal unit, however, if they were ever to die, it would often end the game in a loss. Because of the vulnerable nature and their importance to the game itself, players would often hide them in the far corners of the maps and surround them with guards, refusing to move them for fear of loosing the mission.

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This time however heroes are an integral part of the game. The designers even decided to make the heroes glow just to make them easier to spot on the battlefield. One of the main reasons that heroes are now usable in WarCraft III, is because of the fact that if one was to die, the player can simply resurrect them at his altar. Thus the only penalty for a player actually using heroes is that he may have to spend a good chunk of money to resurrect one that died during a campaign. However, the benefits to using heroes extensively in this game far outweigh the risks. In the single player campaign, heroes come as rewards for completing quests and progressing through the missions. However in single player where the storytelling element does not play such a key role, you can build heroes at the race’s town hall, just as you could build peasants. Subsequently you can build multiple heroes of the same class in multiplayer, each with the same abilities as his brethren. The heroes are no longer unique entities, but more of an elite super unit.

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