Edited by - lupine on March 28, 2001 5:01:51 PM

"Nothing against RTS or Blizzard (heh)
But WarCraft3 features are being chopped
off the design table faster then public
broadcating, well, maybe not that fast."

that''s standard for most companies. Blizzard comes up with a lot of innovations but it turns out that most of them aren''t that useful for the game they are trying to build. So they cut them. They''d rather make a good game than an innovative game, and I''m glad they think that way. If you know much about the earlier versions of Starcraft you''ll know what I mean. In some earlier versions for example machine shops produced rocket launchers that marines could pick up and use. They cut the feature and now they''re finally using it in wc3. They had air units that banked, but it turned out to not be so good so they just made them hover. They cut out most of the art to lower the system requirements dramatically. On and on, cutting and trimming, that''s how they operate. If we judge them on past games (not counting the pathetic diablo series, but blizzard north makes that) they''ve delivered nonstop hits. I''d bet money that wc3 will follow in that tradition.

"As far as I know they fired the project
head"

??? completely untrue. They have not fired anyone recently, if so it wasn''t anyone inportant. The three main guys who work on the craft games are all still working on wc3. They did lose three of their best employees though, however they were working on the unannounced project not wc3. So the unannounced project will be delayed somewhat and *might* not be as good as it would have been, but we''re talking wc3 right now.

"and then started cutting features
and races."

I never believed for a moment any of the original press releases. I''ve been watching blizzard operate for years. Do not believe anything they say. They said wc3 would be out in 2000. It did not come out did it? I think we''re looking at a spring 2002 release. One and a half years after the original release date. Don''t believe anything you hear from them until you learn to interpret it.

"It looks like now they are
only adding some of the single player
stuff (hero''s) to the multiplayer schtuff."

good, single player and multiplayer have almost nothing in common. Keep them seperate. If you want to play an RPG go buy one, don''t ask Blizzard to ruin the best gaming francise in the world.

"I mean hell, given some time i could design
12 or 13 races."

and how good would they be? Oh and how would you balance them? You wouldn''t. You wouldn''t even be able to get a rough balance worked out. Ok let me show you what I mean. Get out a piece of paper or imagine one strongly. Draw some dots in a circle, one for each race. Now you have to balance each race against the others. So start at one dot and draw lines from it to all the other dots. Each of these lines is a matchup that must be balanced. Now do it for all the dots. The more dots you have the faster it grows:

2 races: 1 matchup
3 races: 3 matchups
4 races: 6 matchups
5 races: 10 matchups
6 races: 15 matchups
7 races: 21 matchups.

Ok so do you see what I mean? it''s going up pretty quickly huh? Balance is extremely hard and extremely important for a significant portion of blizzard''s customers.

Also blizzard likes to put quality into their races. They don''t just throw them together. They want you to know each unit intimately, how how they interact with each other. Four races is plenty, 12 or 13 insane. Play Age of Empires if that is the kind of game you want. Perhaps you aren''t a blizzard fan, that''s ok with me, not everyone has to be. But if you are looking for the premier RTS game played by the masters you''ll see the blizzard label on it. SC is still the most popular RTS out there. At any given time of the day (and I mean any) you will see 25k people playing either SC or BW. Don''t try to get blizzard to ruin it for those of us who like the kinds of games they make.

Oh and here''s a company making a great game in the blizzard tradition. I''m on the beta test and the game looks very promising, it is going to be better than SC when it is finished in about 2 months. www.ethermoon.com