WarCraft III: When Men Were Men, Orcs Were Orcs, and Customs Were Fun

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > WarCraft III: When Men Were Men, Orcs Were Orcs, and Customs Were Fun

Xaris: Jul 25, 2006; Lucky there's a family guy
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guppiehaus posted:

Footmen Frenzy was the poo poo. I have so many good memories playing that custom all afternoon when I'd come home from school I was really disappointed they never made an adequate port for it in SC2 before I quit playing that game.

Zealot Frenzy had potential and came close--but the map maker was pretty arrogant with no real feel for balance and had an internet meltdown. Really though, Footman Frenzy was neat but had a huge amount of flaws (i.e. waiting around for a zillion hours because no one wanted to be the first in/waiting for scepter of shockwave) too.

I was working on an Enfo's TS remake for SC2--I got pretty far with over 200+ hrs put into developing it, but I was dealing a lot with custom models because SC2 really just lacks a lot of melee units/thematic units but one of the patches ended up breaking a lot of them so I gave up :effort:

to work on Squad TD.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2013 00:59

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 08:08

Xaris: Jul 25, 2006; Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
Laugh and cry

Eregos posted:

I think the key is mostly that Warcraft 3's models are more ubiquitous. Archers, cavalry, guys with swords and axes? Those can be turned into all sorts of different units in different medieval/ancient time periods, and adapted into all sorts of fantasy universes. It's a lot harder to do that with stalkers and colossi and broodlords and many of the other sc2 units. I guess you could make a WW2 map with sc unit models, turn vikings into bombers or something.

aye, this a thousand times. SC2 assets are limited and boring as gently caress. I had to really stretch to get some of the units to fit thematically in SquadTD . In the Enfo's remake I was working on, it was really loving hard to have a mix of melee and ranged heroes as well as not having the waves repeat the same models.

darealkooky posted:

That's part of it (even if most custom maps had 50 billion different reskins of marines and arthas w/ sword), but the real thing is that wc3 has the ability to load in custom models.

Because Blizard is really mad they can't make money off dota, they own the rights to all sc2 custom maps and so they can't have models of goku or whatever in their things they want to potentially make money from.

You can load custom models in SC2. I was actually using a bunch of imported WoW-models which looked okay but were a little janky. Then one of the patches broke custom models the way I did it and I gave up :effort:

There's a lot of reasons why the UMS scene in SC2 fell apart. Lack of assests for creativity, doing abilities is a ton of work compared to having an easy editable library, confusing UI on locating Arcade maps (at least until a couple patches ago), lack of chat channels (again, too late), popularity system and unused features (Spotlighting), lack of community involvement, no real way to see actively hosted maps (again, too late) and allow people to name lobbies. Some of these things obviously weren't in Blizzards interest because models are expensive, but much of the rest of it should have been there from the getgo. Some of these were finally fixed but several years too late.

I remember they initially had a custom map contest early on and then no winners were announced and nothing happened to it. Which is a pretty lovely thing for them to do. I think that was when people started to become dis-illusioned but the years of neglect and disinterest finally did it in.

Some of it is just the general gaming scene now vs back in 2002/2003. There's a plethora of free or very cheap games to compete for everyone's attention. A lot of the appeal for WC3 was there there wasn't much going on for the PC at the time--it was nearly a barren wasteland and lots of poorer gamers could enjoy playing a variety of gametypes on WC3 for free. Now it's much more competitive with ton more games on the market. There is still a use for UMS games because they allow for interesting ideas/gimmicks that can be put into a multiplayer environment that might be too much effort for an indie game to implement since netcode can be a bitch, but it's still much smaller market than 12 years ago.

Xaris fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Mar 21, 2014

# ¿ Mar 7, 2014 21:35

Xaris: Jul 25, 2006; Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
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Endorph posted:

If I buy this off the battle.net client, can I play online? I figured so but Blizzard's wording on the subject is vague. I wanna play some castle fight dammit.

Castle Fight was so good. Too bad the poor imitation Nexus Wars or whatever in SC2 was loving awful, and no one really made a good CF clone

# ¿ Apr 2, 2015 17:04

Xaris: Jul 25, 2006; Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
Laugh and cry

yeah, chaos was cool. i was more of a high-elf player though, bloodthirster start :getin:

also the well of pains owned, turn them off, save up mana, turn them on and watch entire army melt. or giant cannon tower spam. or when you could block in a ton of units and unleash them all at once. actually everything in that game was good and balanced.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2015 20:57

Xaris: Jul 25, 2006; Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
Laugh and cry

Jsor posted:

DOTA 2 has custom maps now, and they're actually pretty fun! There are a few issues, and it's really early on so there's not a huge selection yet. But they have a lot of easier WC3 remakes (Enfos, Footman Frenzy), some of them by the same creators as the originals. Some of the stuff can take getting used to, though (as far as I can tell there's no a+move).

Holy poo poo theres an Enfos remake? Is it good? How many people play DOTA2 customs?

# ¿ Aug 10, 2015 17:33

Xaris: Jul 25, 2006; Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
Laugh and cry

The Shortest Path posted:

They'll load it down with restrictions because they're terrified of another DOTA happening and not being able to monetize the poo poo out of it. Just like with SC2.

Honestly I can't see Blizzard making another good Warcraft RTS. The story and characters will be poo poo because Metzen is still in charge of the creative department and the game will be heavily dumbed down because modern design standards. Just look at Starcraft 2 and how badly that's been received past the initial launch of WoL. Really, really depressing.

Eh. SC2 wasn't loaded down with restrictions. It was loaded down with neglect, lovely custom map ui/interface and navigation, really loving hard to use actor system, and rather complete lack of assets (compared to WC3 which had enough you could make almost a dozen races-worth alone). Plus times have changed and theres' about a million free/cheap other games to play now and more serious devs can easily jump onboard unity or something.

I never really played SC2 ladder much, I mostly stuck to customs and used to develop Squadron TD for awhile, but I thought SC2 was a pretty fair modernization of SC1? Perhaps a bit too focused on competitive esports. I mean yeah story was poo poo and another WC4 will/could have a poo poo campaign too, but I think they could pull off a decent multiplayer game at least.

Xaris fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Aug 13, 2015

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 15:59

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 08:08

Xaris: Jul 25, 2006; Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
Laugh and cry

HonorableTB posted:

The best WC3 custom games were the Footman Frenzy Armageddon games where you could get heroes so insanely powerful that a chain lightning would rip through every single enemy footman in the center and keep jumping back to their base to absolutely murder everything spawning for as long as you wanted. God those were fun as hell.

I never played that but Footman Frenzy was pretty garbage. There were about a zillion different hacked versions and poo poo. And at the core no one wanted to commit or it came down to being located to the noob who fed another player first. Best was just saving up for a Scepter of Shockwave when everyone was playing pussy and then wait and roll in with a Scepter and mow everyone down for $$$$$$ and then just completely overwhelm people with insane tech/items.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2016 23:25

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