Has anyone seen the preview for Warcraft III yet? It looks awesome!! I just hope they did as much for the AI as they said they were going to. (They could certainly learn a lot of AOE2!) But, seeing as it's been five years since WAR2, I'm sure they'll have improved noticeably...

www.blizzard.com/war3/

Get the preview here!! (Note: It's 14MB. If you don't have a good connection, you might want to wait...)

I was out at Blizzard a few months ago and saw the game live on a giant Gateway monitor. It's pretty cool looking. I'm a bit concerned about shifting the emphasis from building to fighting though. It may work, but they're monkeying with a successful formula and I don't think Rob Pardo understands how satisfying it is to build a nice base in these RTS games.

I was seriously unimpressed by the footage. I understand it is an unfinished build, but there were two things I saw that I hated about Warcraft I and II. First, brain-dead AI. Throughout the footage, the enemy stands there like a statue while the player slowly and carefully picks on them one at a time. Also, the fights immediately degenerate into mob scenes, with no sign of combined-arms use (archers staying back, etc.). Baldur's Gate 2 did a much better job on this aspect, with selectable combat scripts for different character types.

Second, it has a clumsy spell interface. You can see the player select the wizard, select the spell, then select the target. As I have complained before, I hated in WC2 how the computer could instantly bloodlust a group of ogres while I was still clicking away on the first. That looks like it is going to happen again. How about some hotkeys, or some scripts for the wizards at least? I loved the Contingency spell in BG2, let's have something like that.

"I loved the Contingency spell in BG2, let's have something like that."

Cool! Since I haven't played BG2, I had to look this up. What a great idea. AI scripting within the context of the game world!

-Tom

WC2 has always had hotkeys. It sure makes it a lot easier for ogres to bloodlust and paladins to heal. It makes it go a lot quicker. (One of my friends is getting frighteningly good at bloodlusting...He can rival the computer speedwise when it comes to bloodlusting a group of 9 ogres...)

The idea of scripting is very intriguing. While I am one of the last people in the world who would ever complain about Warcraft 2, I admit it has some room for improvement, and hope that they accomplish a lot of that in Warcraft 3. (I always thought that you should be able to group-select and heal, or bloodlust. Paladins ought to take on the initiative after a battle to heal the people around them...My friends and I had often talked about some scripting. Hopefully Blizzard will do some of that. They're a great company, and they seem to know what they're doing. (Keep in mind, Warcraft has been around for quite a while! Isn't WC2 like five years old? Things have come a long way in just the last few years.)

Maybe the trailer just shows the easiest and most conventional way to select spells. I'm sure there will be hotkeys -- there always has been -- and it wouldn't surprise me to see some scripting.