WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne (2003) - Sentinels: Terror of the Tides - Ch3: The Tomb of Sargeras

Playlist Warcraft 3 +: Expansion    • WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Froze...   Casual play (failures, reloads, etc.), ORIGINAL ASPECT RATIO Intro: Just nostalgic play taking in the sights and sounds, looking at the mechanics now that I'm quasi sapient relative to my old self. Haven't played this in 23 years. Not much needs to be said about WarCraft 3, it was a very influential title across the world. It birthed the modern DotA (a once humble map) and was the leading design direction for the theme park oriented MMO World of WarCraft. The so called "WoW Glow". To contrast this design was Blizzard North more gothic/satanic style (seen in Diablo 1 and 2) and the more darker toned StarCraft (which in the end succumbed to the WoW Glow with StarCraft 2 forward). WarCraft 3 on the other hand was nothing short of revolutionary in the RTS space, especially 1 vs 1. It introduced concepts like tight meta, had so many new ideas like heroes and was very heavy on the spell casting mechanics. Not to mention other new features such as items and stores, critters on the map, day/night cycle, upkeep, and 4 unique factions with their own paradigms. I won't claim that I was the best (like Tillerman; the alleged first top tier player on the original War3), I wasn't even middling on 1 vs 1 but it was my retreat for a while. The only sad memories I have with this game is that I had moved to a new school (again) and this time no one at this new school had a computer, let alone played WarCraft 3 so I was pretty much solitary playing every evening with strangers. It was kind of my secret. I would show friends and they would be amazed (compared to the dumb console nonsense they played like Halo). So what better way to enjoy this title than to replay the campaigns and get adjusted to this title. Its hard to put my finger on it but during this time technology was shifting to something quite different than the original intention. Forums, that used to be a space for focused discussion, turned into things like MySpace and Facebook, these huge social spaces totally devoid of their direction (with high rules and regulation). MMOs were sandboxes (Ultima Online for example), WoW turned them into social space theme parks (like Disney land), with instances and lots of rules and regulations. It was a prevalent trend during the era, console games took modern gaming from its open sandbox moddablility (think Half Life that produced Counter Strike or WarCraft 3 that produced DotA) into a locked ecosystems with rules and regulations (think xbox where end users had to solder a secondary board with custom firmware to bypass security features of what is essentially a computer with a custom geforce 3 graphic card).