Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne

"Loads of Potential Goes to Complete Waste"

With the sublime perfection of Starcraft and Diablo, gamers have come to demand excellence from Blizzard, and rightfully so. They put full effort into making their games, and their dedication to the trade shows, be it by listening directly to the fans or with canceling a game outright if they feel it won't live up to standard, as evidenced by the recent cancellation of Starcraft: Ghost.

And yet somehow, some way, the atrocity that is Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne was allowed to hit store shelves in its current state. Not to say it doesn't have some good spots --- the music and graphics are excellent, and the storyline isn't bad when it isn't forced and predictable --- but overall, one has to wonder how a meticulous company like Blizzard fell into the Square Enix zone and decided to put graphics and music above gameplay and polish

The Frozen Throne's storyline is an extension of Reign of Chaos, but most of the events are extremely predictable and a good deal of the single player levels are a chore to play through. Furthermore, it becomes painfully obvious as one plays through single player that the effort put in is lazy at best. The Night Elf campaign ends more anticlimactically than Halo 2 and has the most annoying missions and setting in the game, half of the Undead missions are a direct redux of Starcraft missions, the only good parts of the Human campaign are the gimmick levels, and there is no Orc campaign at all save for a secret, bastardized RPG meets RTS campaign in which the story has nothing to do with any events seen prior. Even sadder is that said bastardization of the RTS enterprise in the Orc "campaign" is the most fun you'll get from Frozen Throne single player, which doesn't say much. Blizzard grew so lax with development that certain unit quotes from the characters are directly taken from their lines in the story.

But surely, a great company such as Blizzard makes up for such faults with multiplayer! This is after all what they're famous for: free, fun, and deceptively deep multiplayer action. Unfortunately, multiplayer in Warcraft 3 is about as broken and imbalanced as possible. While it's a difficult task to properly balance four races, Blizzard is so far off the mark in this venture that an epileptic seven year old with one functioning eye could have done a better job.

The main reason for multiplayer imbalance comes from the god awful hero system. Blizzard's cute little idea for Warcraft 3 was to stray away from what made Starcraft great, and instead focus on heroes leading their armies into battle. Proper for antiquity perhaps, but terrible for balance in a real-time strategy title. 1-3 can so wildly fluctuate the outcome and balance of a fight that balance becomes a sideshow for aesthetics. Battles are no longer about winning, but how good 1-3 units look while winning.

And it gets worse. Further ruining of RTS elements in Warcraft 3 exist due to Blizzard's idea to introduce RPG elements into multiplayer RTS gameplay. Heroes are not only more powerful than any of your units, but they gain experience points and more special skills as they accumulate kills. And if this weren't enough of an embarrassment, hero units can also carry items, making them even more broken than they already are and making the entirety of multiplayer an embarrassment. If similar gameplay were in Starcraft, Blizzard would have gone down as a laughingstock and Command and Conquer wouldn't be as niche a series. Given the current state of affairs, one wonders if this wouldn't have been a better course for gaming's history.

On top of the ridiculous hero system, no semblance of balance is found in the races either, assuming you're even lucky enough to have a game in which units and races matter. Blizzard defends themselves by citing 50-50 stats across all levels of play in all races, completely ignoring that the in-game AMM system is supposed to yield 50-50 stats by pairing you up against opponents of similar skill --- if you can manage to avoid smurfs that is, which is one of many Battle.net ills that end up on Blizzard's ever-growing backburner of tasks.

The reality is that Night Elf is by far the best race in the game. Not counting their heroes, they have the most ridiculous abilities and more than one imbalanced unit. Other races do break through every so often, but time has shown that Night Elf is the best across the board. That is not balance, unlike in Starcraft when three entirely different races somehow found perfect harmony among their chaos. It took very rare exceptions for balance issues to appear in Starcraft. In Warcraft 3, they're all part of the game and cannot be rectified.

The one bright spot in Warcraft 3 is custom play, which has grown bigger than the game itself yet says more about the genius and creativity of the community than it does Warcraft 3. But as for Warcraft 3 itself, you'll get more entertainment from reading the game script and downloading the soundtrack than you will playing. Which is needless to say, completely ridiculous.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 07/16/07, Updated 05/19/08

Game Release: Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (US, 07/01/03)