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Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

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Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#91
post #61
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another interesting story is that the engine came from an engineer at Nihilistic who made Descent, a PC pre-cursor to StarFox. It's just that it was never put to work as complicated before, Descent had just 4 perspectives and only a handful of models. WarCraft3 was another beast entirely.

if you ever decide to write a collection of these memories.... like a little blurb for reach story, and the things like 40 pages of 40 small stories or something. please put them on gumroad or some easy site where we can buy them . Id' gladly drop a 5$ bill to read a bunch of these on my way to work.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll strongly consider it and let you know what I can come up with.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#92
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've played the first retail release version of WarCraft3 and it was indeed flawless, I haven't noticed a single glitch. But I have never tried the multiplayer mode. Cool thing was it played nicely on my Pentium-II with a Matrox G550 video card which is famous for being great at 2D an very bad at 3D graphics.

Props to the compatibility lab at Blizzard. They worked a lot of overtime with me. I owned a Matrox Millenium card myself for 3DSmax and TruSpace. There was no such thing as truly dedicated gaming cards. Only high end cards for CAD. The gaming card evolution only came after the first GeForce.

Well, there was 3dfx Voodoo before that.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#94
post #76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overwatch is a riff on the class-based FPS genre, which was pioneered by Team Fortress, a game that started its life as a Counter Strike mod.

Team Fortress started as Quake1 mod, which then Valve made to a Half-Life mod TFC, and later as the TF2 [1]. Also Counter-Strike was a mod as well which again Valve made official versions of. I started with the Quake TF and now still pay TF2 sometimes. Basically been playing the same game for ~20 years. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2#Origins_and_ea...

Some games are just good so you can play them for a long time. As long as there is a community. I occasionally fire up HL deathwatch and have people playing. Plus CS:S is almost 15 years old and that is quite active (surf communities anyway)

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#95

One thing I don't see mentioned here is how important for history it is to be compatible with those old mad. WC3 was where the tower defense game was invented, where DOTA was invented, and where a dozen other smaller sub-genres of games were invented. Being able to play those again will be incredibly important for future generations.

Not sure if it'll be important but it'd be fun for sure! Think I'll have no luck on Linux though.. blizzard does not give Linux any love :(

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#96

Oh I’d be thrilled to play WC3 Tower Defence again. Those were loads of fun.

Amazing how WC3 maps were responsible for both MOBAs and Tower Defence, two of the most popular genres of all time, both moreso than conventional RTSs at this point

Pretty much any genre you can imagine was emulated with WC3 custom maps.

Proto-MOBAs and tower defense games were basically singlehandedly popularized by WC3, of course. Some of the WC3 TDs, like Wintermaul Wars, were way more complex than the mobile games you see today, though -- they involved strategies like building truly gigantic mazes to expose enemies to more tower fire and precisely angled walls that took advantage of quirks in the pathing AI to confuse enemies and keep them in the kill zone juuust long enough. Some of them were really unique, too. Battle Ships combined MOBA mechanics with the auto-firing of a tower defense game. Skibi's Castle TD had a ton of unique Mario-Party-style minigames that you'd play against the other players between waves.

There was also a whole genre of reverse tower defense games, where you would buy and upgrade tons of units that would automatically march into the middle to battle enemy units, until one pushed far enough to take out the enemy's bases. Or until there were so many units on the map that the game crashed. But what a spectacle it was.

There were games that were sort of a mashup of RTSes and Betrayl/Secret Hitler, in that every player built villages but one was secretly a "werewolf" whose goal was to convert all the other players.

There was a game called Darwin's Island and other similar ones in an "evolution" genre, which were basically prototypes of Spore.

There were games similar to Civ/Risk played on a map of the world.

RPGs based on popular books and movies were super common, and some were as as good as or better than missions in the WC3 standard RPG campaign. Some the multiplayer ones incorporated a system where you could serialize your stats as a code that you could copy and paste into the next game you played to start were you left off.

There was a CTF-style game called Tree Tag where one player was an infernal who had to tag the other players (treants), who could build defenses and countermeasures as they hid. Then if they got tagged, they'd be sent to jail, where other players could rescue them.

Board games like chess and checkers were common too.

There were platformers like Run Kitty Run.

Even micro-MMOs like Life in the City where you basically just hung out, got a "job", and played some resource gathering minigame. Some of them were crazy complicated, several-megabyte maps with some players playing as institutions and others as citizens. Of course there were fantasy and sci fi themed ones as well.

The best part was that there was zero quality control, because anyone could edit anyone's map, so you constantly encountered variations and remixes of popular maps. Apart from a handful of very popular main maps, you often had no idea what you were going to get.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#97
post #61
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another interesting story is that the engine came from an engineer at Nihilistic who made Descent, a PC pre-cursor to StarFox. It's just that it was never put to work as complicated before, Descent had just 4 perspectives and only a handful of models. WarCraft3 was another beast entirely.

if you ever decide to write a collection of these memories.... like a little blurb for reach story, and the things like 40 pages of 40 small stories or something. please put them on gumroad or some easy site where we can buy them . Id' gladly drop a 5$ bill to read a bunch of these on my way to work.

Same! I'd be happy to pay for these small nuggets of blizzard history

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#98
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing how WC3 maps were responsible for both MOBAs and Tower Defence, two of the most popular genres of all time, both moreso than conventional RTSs at this point

Pretty much any genre you can imagine was emulated with WC3 custom maps. Proto-MOBAs and tower defense games were basically singlehandedly popularized by WC3, of course. Some of the WC3 TDs, like Wintermaul Wars, were way more complex than the mobile games you see today, though -- they involved strategies like building truly gigantic mazes to expose enemies to more tower fire and precisely angled walls that took adva…

Wow man, so many good memories on that post. I used love a coop tower defense called "Autumn Crossing TD". It was awesome. There was also a Dragon-Ball themed RPG map that was so so much fun.

One that you didn't mention and I used to play a lot was Hero Line maps. Those were super fun as well. Thanks for the throw-back!

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#99
post #60

I feel torn in so many dimensions. On the one hand, one of the greatest games of all time gets remade. And I feel humbled that we're able to make giants over decades — Star Trek, Cobol, Warcraft have my respect. But on the other hand, it also speaks of a dire lack of creativity as we speak, or boldness, maybe both. The general trend of remakes is also about fixing problems we too often created for ourselves in the fi…

My theory is many great people left from blizzard.. they're trying to milk what they can with as low as budget and a team as possible.

Re: Warcraft 3: Remastered Will Work with Old Custom Maps

#100

One thing I don't see mentioned here is how important for history it is to be compatible with those old mad. WC3 was where the tower defense game was invented, where DOTA was invented, and where a dozen other smaller sub-genres of games were invented. Being able to play those again will be incredibly important for future generations.

Not sure if it'll be important but it'd be fun for sure! Think I'll have no luck on Linux though.. blizzard does not give Linux any love :(

The original works great in Wine!
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