[SuperSonic1305]

So a few years back when I was really into World of Warcraft I decided that I would go back and play through the Warcraft games just to see the beginning of the lore and I like RTS games so why not? I suffered my way through both campaigns of Warcraft 1 with it's painful lack of multiple unit selection and unit queue. Then got Warcraft 2 and finished the orc campaign. Still no unit queue but at least It had dragging to select units. I recently went back to play the human campaign and got to the last mission before thinking "why am I doing this?" Those first two games are so archaic now that I just wasn't having fun plus the story is just sentences before every mission that I can look up somewhere else. I decided to skip the expansion and finally get into Warcraft 3 yesterday.

Holy crap it is so much better than those first two games. This must have been a revelation when it came out because even in 2012 I'm enjoying the campaign more than most RTS games. The persistence and RPG elements make it so much more intriguing than the usual RTS formula. Plus it finally has unit queue.

It's also interesting to see some of the music, art, and UI that I recognized from WoW is ripped straight from this game. It makes me regret not having played this before as I would have appreciated those touches more in WoW. When watching the intro to this game I thought "Oh it's the music from the WoW" when it really should have been the other way around.

[Brandon F]

Still my favorite RTS campaigns, particularly the WC3 expansion. Many will cry foul, but I'm a huge fan. Also revisited during the height of my WoW addiction to dig back into the lore and was extremely engaged connecting the locations and major events to the aftermath presented in WoW.

Starcraft II just never hooked me the same way. I know many people savagely dislike the plot, but I really miss hero units and even the harsh unit caps. Kept the experience more manageable.

Definitely stick with WC3 through the Frozen Throne expansion. So much variety in the mission design. Music is also phenomenal.

[cheststrongwell]

Garbage. Ruined by heroes.

[ciaossu]

I was the same as you, playing WoW first and deciding to go back and play WC3. I didn't have a go at WC1 and 2 though, knowing how Diablo 1 has aged I didn't bother.

WC3 is a lot of fun, Frozen Throne as well. I would have been much more excited about the addition of Death Knights and killing Arthas in WoW if I had played WC3 prior.

[Entropia]

Garbage. Ruined by heroes.

Heroes made game play much better and set it apart from Starcraft.

[Liquid_Bike]

I love WC3 and the frozen throne expansion. It makes the playing WOW a lot better from a lore perspective.

[Lizard with a ladder]

I was the same as you, playing WoW first and deciding to go back and play WC3. I didn't have a go at WC1 and 2 though, knowing how Diablo 1 has aged I didn't bother. WC3 is a lot of fun, Frozen Throne as well. I would have been much more excited about the addition of Death Knights and killing Arthas in WoW if I had played WC3 prior.

You should reconsider your stance on the older warcrafts. WCII is amazing.

[Lyphen]

Garbage. Ruined by heroes.

Uh...hidden items and heroes are what made the campaign persistence so interesting. Rexxar's campaign was fun to break.

[Technosteve]

it spawned dota, i am unsure how to feel about that.

[Jharp]

One of my favorite games of all time. One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Warcraft 2 as a kid in the 90's. Reign of Chaos came out when I was in Jr. High and I remember being there day one.

I was also never able to get into MMOs as a kid because of the monthly fees, but being that Warcraft was such an immense part of my gaming life, I could NOT pass up World of Warcraft, so in March of 2005, only a few short months after it launched, I started saving up my lunch money to pay for WoW month by month. To this day, being in Azeroth from the ground looking out rather than from the sky looking down and exploring it is one of my favorite memories of all time. I remember spending hours upon hours on Teldrassil and in Dun Morogh, long after the quests had gone grey, just exploring this world I knew so well from an overhead perspective.

Man I miss that. I was deep into the lore too, like something fierce. Had all the novels up to 2005-ish read, had the special edition art books, and regularly took the manual to school just to reread the stories I loved in class (remember that original big ass WoW manual that was filled to the brim with lore?). Makes me real sad that they sort of dicked the lore over. I don't hate it as much as some, but the introduction of the pre-corruption Draenei really hurt my interest in it. I was so pumped for the Alliance to get the ugly Draenei (which at the time, were the only Draenei we knew of), but then Blizzard had to go and jump the shark with Russian space goats. I do love what they did with Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm though- bringing closure to Arthas' storyline as well as revisiting the Blackwing stuff was great, but I stopped playing WoW in the months leading up to Wrath, so I never got in on the ground floor for that stuff, and I haven't been back since.

Diablo III has actually given me a bit of that old feeling again. I didn't play Starcraft II, mainly because I never played Starcraft or Brood War, and didn't care about them, and I totally expected to love Diablo III, but not as anything more than another mouse-destroying action RPG, but it's more than that. The marriage of quality audio-visual design, making me feel like a total badass when playing it, the excellent cinematic work... it feels like for the first time since I first played WoW in 2005, I'm really playing a new Blizzard game. I should really pick up Starcraft II.

Goddammit. I know where I'll be when Warcraft IV launches. Hopefully between more WoW expansions, the remaining two Starcraft II expansions, the Diablo III expansion(s), and that new MMO they're working on, we'll get it in the next ten to twenty years.

[Pop On Arrival]

I loooooved warcraft 3 so much. I played so much of that shit on Battle.net back in the day. I don't remember much of the campaign, honestly. But the multiplayer was like crack to me. I'd just spend all day searching ranked matches, playing with friends, etc. It's a shame I couldn't get into Starcraft as much as I got into Warcraft 3.

[Junie12]

Wow this game brings back so many memories for me :o

The campaign was good, the MP was great, the lore was fascinating, it hit all the right spots for me. One of my all time favorite Blizz games :)

[Chinpoko_Master]

Everyone always talks about their fond memories of the original StarCraft and Diablo II, but no-one seems to have those same feelings for WarCraft III, except for me.

I loved that game. It's definitely one of my favorite games of all time, and a great blend of RTS and RPG. The hero units were my favorite thing about it, especially the Blademaster which was easily the best hero in the game. The BM was great for scouting, harassing, and if you got him to the higher levels he's an absolute beast. I've won games solely because I had a level 6+ BM. The Shadow Hunter was great as well, I remember winning 4v4s by rushing and spamming serpent wards with an all Orc team, all Shadow Hunters. I'd actually say that Orc has the best heroes in the game, that's why they're usually my first choice.

I have to go back and play it sometime, but the community that actually plays the main multiplayer seems to get smaller and smaller each time I go back. I can't imagine how small it must be now.

Unfortunately, I'm somewhat doubtful that we'll get WarCraft IV after WoW. I'd love it, but I also feel like I'm one of the few that even cares. It just doesn't seem like there's enough demand for it, but I hope I'm wrong.

[Flux]

I have fond memories of the campaigns to all of the races and the expansion Frozen Throne is just as great. I must have spent countless hours playing ladder and custom games.

[An-Det]

It really is a fantastic game. I loved Warcraft 2, and so eagerly anticipated the release of 3 back then. Bought it at launch, and despite our dreadfully slow computer I fell in love with it (my first time through it was consistently ~15 fps gameplay, I really dont know how I finished with it choking on that computer), though unfortunately I couldn't do multi then. When we later upgraded to broadband and a new fast computer and could run it at max/near-max, I was in heaven. Frozen Throne was wonderful as well, such a great expansion for me. I really should install W3 again, I haven't since the lan parties in college a few years back. And what I wouldn't give for a proper Warcraft 4.

[Chinpoko_Master]

...

This post reminds me how much I regret that I never got into World of Warcraft. I loved the Warcraft lore, and I played a trial for WoW a couple years ago and thought it was awesome. The thing that actually turned me off from it was Cataclysm. I hated the fact that I wouldn't be able to experience all of the pre-Cataclysm content so I just gave up on ever playing it in the future.

Maybe that's a mistake, I don't know. I just wished I played WoW from the beginning instead of wasting my time on other MMOs like FFXI. I also missed out on a ton of the lore, but I heard it wasn't very good anyway.

If they do make Warcraft IV, I hope they pick up where Frozen Throne left off and forget that WoW ever happened. That's not likely though.

[Xanadu]

warcraft 3 is one of the best rts's ever imo

[Alex]

Great campaigns, especially TFT, terrible multi. But hey it spawned the MOBA field so that made up for it.

[Houston3000]

Warcraft III was, and probably still is - though I haven't played it in ages, my favorite RTS game. It was definitely the reason for my hype back when World of Warcraft launched. In-fact, I would say 70% of the reason I enjoyed WoW so much when I played it, especially initially was because of its connections to the Warcraft III story. I feel bad for people who skipped WC3 but then got into WoW, because really, World of Warcraft's story is very much a direct sequel to everything set up in WC3 (much more so than the progression through the Warcraft 1, 2, and 3 story-lines) with all the characters making major appearances. I imagine none of the story beats in WoW were as enjoyable if you had no idea of the story built in the RTS game.

[JaseC]

I remember trying to play this back in the day, but it'd always freeze after some time. For months I thought it was my video card (GeForce 2 Ti!), but when I tried to reinstall WinXP one night, the setup of which would also lock up, I eventually -- and through pure dumb luck -- discovered it was in fact the result of a borked IDE/PATA cable.

Nobody misses you, IDE.

[jbueno]

Garbage. Ruined by heroes.

I agree. It never caught my attention as StarCraft did.

[Rafaelcsa]

I played WC3 a lot back when it came out. Looking back, it was a great game. I never liked it as much as Starcraft 1, it didn't have as much depth and design decisions like the Upkeep held it back somewhat, but it's still a one-of-a-kind game. To my knowledge, there's nothing quite like it and it is really fun.

It did though have the same problem as Starcraft 2 has now: if you're playing online, you're either going to get absolutely crushed by players who seem to practice the game all day long or you're going to face people who seem to have never played an RTS game and pose no challenge at all. This is something that made me stop playing WC3 around the time Frozen Throne came out. It was hard to get a balanced match through the match-maker.

EDIT: I wonder if people who say WC3 has the best RTS campaign have played Starcraft 2's? The story is dumb, but the missions are awesome and really varied. I don't remember the WC3 campaign making much of an impact on me, but SC2 definitely did.

[NeOak]

Very fun RTS with a great story. Playing the campaigns was awesome. Too bad they couldn't do that one fight in CG though.

[FieryBalrog]

So a few years back when I was really into World of Warcraft I decided that I would go back and play through the Warcraft games just to see the beginning of the lore and I like RTS games so why not? I suffered my way through both campaigns of Warcraft 1 with it's painful lack of multiple unit selection and unit queue. Then got Warcraft 2 and finished the orc campaign. Still no unit queue but at least It had dragging to select units. I recently went back to play the human campaign and got to the last mission before thinking "why am I doing this?" Those first two games are so archaic now that I just wasn't having fun plus the story is just sentences before every mission that I can look up somewhere else. I decided to skip the expansion and finally get into Warcraft 3 yesterday. Holy crap it is so much better than those first two games. This must have been a revelation when it came out because even in 2012 I'm enjoying the campaign more than most RTS games. The persistence and RPG elements make it so much more intriguing than the usual RTS formula. Plus it finally has unit queue. It's also interesting to see some of the music, art, and UI that I recognized from WoW is ripped straight from this game. It makes me regret not having played this before as I would have appreciated those touches more in WoW. When watching the intro to this game I thought "Oh it's the music from the WoW" when it really should have been the other way around.

The best part is how a lot of buildings in WoW actually look like their Warcraft 3 counterparts. It's a very cool transference of that art style. For example when you do the Death Knight opening sequence, right in the beginning, the Town Hall, Barracks, Forge, etc. look exactly like the human buildings from the RTS, just made to scale.

[Schweinehund]

It's my favorite rts campaign to this day, only thing that has come close is DoW2 campaigns.

I prefer to run the game with black bars on the side to maintain aspect ratio. Game looks like garbage in 16:9.

[Big-E]

Great single player and I don't care if the multiplayer sucked according to some people. Heroes gave us DOTA and that is enough to make War III one of the most important games of all time.

[Conciliator]

Incidentally, WC3 custom maps is also in large part responsible for the tower defense genre.

I think it's a pretty decent single player game, and I don't really play competitive multiplayer, but I think it offers an experience that's unique in comparison with Starcraft, which is good.

[Rygar 8 Bit]

there was a ton of tower defense for starcraft as well

[Napalm_Frank]

WC3 and its expansion is probably on my top 3 pc games of all time :3. The main campaing and multiplayer are both fantastic and there were sooooo many fun custom maps.

Warcraft 3>Starcraft 1/2 any day of the week.

Also you could play on lan partys with only 1 cd key so that made things easy too!

[Suairyu]

The thing that actually turned me off from it was Cataclysm. I hated the fact that I wouldn't be able to experience all of the pre-Cataclysm content so I just gave up on ever playing it in the future.

Private servers are your friends. One of the largest (and mostly bug free) is actually a vanilla server.

Buy the monthly fee from Blizzard to assuage your guilt then jump in.

[coopolon]

I recently played through this for the first time as well (just the original, not TFT). It was fun, but by the end I was pretty bored. I have no connection to the lore, and almost every level has the same strategy - turtle, then annihilate. Then again, this might be true for all traditional RTSs, I wouldn't know since I don't really play many of them. I'd hoped that with Blizzard being considered the king of RTSs, they would have risen above that but they didn't.

I think I just need to accept I don't like this genre.

[Pai Pai Master]

I recently played through this for the first time as well (just the original, not TFT). It was fun, but by the end I was pretty bored. I have no connection to the lore, and almost every level has the same strategy - turtle, then annihilate. Then again, this might be true for all traditional RTSs, I wouldn't know since I don't really play many of them. I'd hoped that with Blizzard being considered the king of RTSs, they would have risen above that but they didn't. I think I just need to accept I don't like this genre.

Heroes were enough of a revelation to the genre back then. Looking back the mission structure is pretty vanilla but no one else was making as many innovations as Blizzard.

Starcraft 2 campaign might be up your ally. Every mission has a different objective and is much more than just "turtle in base and kill the AI."

[Nyx]

Probably my fav and most played RTS ever.

Campaign was awesome (get the expansion if you didn’t already!), and the multiplayer is even better imo.

Though in the end most people played custom maps (DOTA) while I preferred the regular MP games a lot more.

When WoW released the small clan I was in got disbanded, and I moved on to WoW as well a bit later.

[Effect]

Still one of my favorite RTS. It's also a big part of why I jumped on Starcraft 2 on day one. Ended up loving that as well but my enjoyment of WC3 made trust Blizzard all the more. Which makes the wait for Warcraft 4 really annoying. This relates to the the only reason why I would dislike World of Warcraft. The success of that and the constant adding of content and story is what I believe is delaying WC4 even more.

[Max Knight]

Garbage. Ruined by heroes.

Hahaha...heroes are what make it the only RTS I keep coming back to.

So good.

It might not surprise you that I'm pretty bad at every other RTS game.

[zerokoolpsx]

If you're into WoW, there is some good background lore on the single player campaign. Also started dota, which lead to LoL and HoN. A lot of custom maps to play from. I don't like RTS that much either, but Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne is that good!

[Volodja]

I bought the game day one or a short bit after but never really managed to get into the multiplayer, at first because I really didn't understand how to play RTSs so I was discouraged, later because I didn't find the peculiar gameplay to be particularly appealing to me, both from a spectator and a player point of view.

I still spent a lot of hours on its custom maps. Starcraft 2 really disappointed me from this point of view, even if I have to admit that it's been a while since I last checked the custom maps on that game.

[Khal_B]

Warcraft 3:TFT is the best RTS game ever for me. I loved the dynamic that heroes added to the game and it kept things fresh for me. I loved seeing comebacks made from them (especially from a DH or DK) due to excellent micromanagement and good decision making. It made the game a joy to play and watch over and over again. No other rts has captured me quite like Warcraft 3.

[anotherVegan]

I tried to get into WC3 (borrowed it from a friend), but I couldn't quite get the hang of it. After playing so much Starcraft and Brood War, I tried to play WC3 like you did SC - picking a handful of units and massing them. But the game limits massing units, and it is more small-party and hero-based. I couldn't get the hang of it, and ended up going back to Starcraft.

Good game, though. I kind of wish I gave it more time, maybe I'll try it again some day.

[Macmanus]

This is my favorite RTS, from single player to multiplayer. The small guerrilla armies with hero units made the game play incredibly unique for an RTS, which I loved.

Honestly I loved all Warcraft RTS games, and felt they all got significantly with each iteration. I didn't even mind building roads in the first one.

[Barrel Cannon]

I loved using the hero units in WC3. They made your army more personal because it felt like you had invested in the characters who were leading your units. It's one of the best things Dawn of War copied from the WC3 formula. I really miss WC3, and every time a WoW expansion gets released I get a little sad wishing it was a WC4 release instead. I pray that when SC2 expansions are complete that we get a Warcraft 4 game. The new WoW expansion looks like it could be setting the lore up for a new game too :D.

[la_briola]

SP and the ~1000000 fun map it spawned were great. I still play TFT today for its fun maps.
This is the game I would take on a lonely island.

[Napalm_Frank]

Warcraft 3 and its expansion is the best game blizzard has made and in my personal top 3 PC games. GREAT campaings, GREAT multiplayer, GREAT mods or custom maps however you prefer.

[MYE]

Amazing game.

Still prefer WCII but its a fantastic experience for sure. Classic Blizzard

[Schweinehund]

WC3 has my favorite campaign as well, I love it so much I keep it installed on every computer I own in case I feel like playing through it again or playing some matches. I like the hero units as well, the blending of rpg/rts was fantastic, and I enjoy it in DoW2 also.

Loved WC3's UD and NE campaign, Frozen Throne's human and ud campaign are excellent as well.

[Barrel Cannon]

There was a modded map for multiplayer where you got to play as one of numerous champs and square off against one another(I'm not talking about dota). I forget what that one was called but it was a ton of fun.

And two things immediately come to mind when I think of the multiplayer mode

"Work, work"
"Something need doing?

[antitrop]

WarCraft III is decent, but it's no WarCraft II.

Zug Zug.

[antitrop]

YOUR SOUND CARD WORKS PERFECTLY.

[Raptomex]

First RTS game I ever played. I still suck at RTS games but I enjoyed what I played.

[CoconutTank]

Love it or hate it, I find that WC3 was one of Blizzard's most ambitious games of all times. The screenshots for the alpha and beta up to the retail release had some even crazier ideas that unfortunately never saw light of day (but I suspect the ideas were probably too radical at the time).

Not only was it ambitious for Blizzard, but the world editor for WC3 allowed those with motivation to make some really spectacular stuff. Footman Frenzy, Tides of Blood, Battleship, Sheep Tag, the crazy amounts of RPGs... and of course, DotA. Whereas the the custom games for BW had some cute ideas going for them that sometime bugged out due to the limitations the editor had with the game, WC3's editor let players do some really crazy things, and it worked really well with what WC3 could offer. And of course, we had vJass and wc3campaigns to really add a big community push to custom game development to WC3. Wonderful times.

Sorry for the personal plug, but GoblinWarfare is one of my most cherished hero creations, and would also give me some regrets in the end. I had all these interesting ideas planned out for how GW would be played, the new directions it would take Footman Frenzy, and its usefulness in both a support capacity and a fight initiator. That all turned to mush though; GW's regular skills were just too bad on their own, and his ultimate turned out to be too good, so instead of a hero with unique tactical uses, GW turned into a brain dead bomb on a timer that basically stayed in base until his ulti was ready. Absolutely disgraceful on my part.

The main game for WC3 wasn't too bad though. In fact it was great.

I was the guy that would put a bunch of siege units into a Zeppelin, destroyed the trees behind a gold mine and siege an enemy's base from behind.

I was the guy that would mass Bats with Demolishers and raze the hell out of your base at every second I got. I've won multiple non-hero games doing this :)

I was the guy that would tower up, do Blood Mage harass with proxy Workshop and mass Flying Machines or Siege Engines.

I was the guy that would go Tinker and harass workers and towers. Once I got to lv 6 I got perma Avatar and would wreck the shit out of your buildings.

I was the guy that would get boots on a Tauren Chieftain and harass... using TC. I don't think I ever got this down but it was hilarious nonetheless.

I was nearly the only guy willing to ever treat Hippogryph Riders seriously.

In other words, I was the crazy guy that never did anything right. But I had a lot of fun doing so. (And no I never ranked high and I'm pretty sure I didn't make any of the above strategies trendy, AngryKoreaMan did the Blood Mage harass thing for instance)

I'm really sad that I don't play WC3 nowadays, and SC2 doesn't seem to have that magical pull for me. I'm still looking forward to Heart of the Swarm though, there seems to be some cool stuff there, although there's also the classic Blizzard waffling going on :)