Game Preservation SIG/Digital Game Canon/Warcraft I II and III

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Warcraft I II and III is the influential series of real-time strategy games by Blizzard. The full titles are:

  • Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994)
  • Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) and expansion pack Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996)
  • Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002) and expansion pack Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (2003)

Table of contents

[edit] Game Outline

In a classically inspired fantasy world (including magic, Orcs, Elves, undead, demons, and so forth) two or more sides battle on a map. Resources are usually limited (imposing a time limit) and the aim is to destroy the enemy.

All 3 games, and 2 expansions, feature singleplayer campaigns, with Warcraft II onwards supporting internet multiplayer.

[edit] Controls

The main controls were the keyboard and mouse, configurable on each platform it was available on.

[edit] Gameplay

The gameplay was like most real-time strategy games from each era. Warcraft I and Warcraft II played predominately like Command and Conquer, with 2 nearly equal sides except for aesthetics.

In the singleplayer campaign, Warcraft II also added "Heroes", more powerful mission-critical units. These were made army members in 'Warcraft III.

Warcraft III diversified as the previous Blizzard game Starcraft did, and each side became a lot more different.

The game aim was to gather two resources, wood and gold, to build an army and defeat the enemy force(s). In each game, fog of war covered unexplored areas (with Warcraft II onwards having the area hide again once a unit moves away from it).

[edit] Options and Features

A major addition to the game series from Warcraft III was the addition of map and editing tools added to the game. This allowed almost all the games featured to be altered in one way or another. Warcraft II had several user-made tools for modding and mapping.

[edit] Reason for preservation by Henry Lowood

Among the reasons listed, predominantly these are the main ones:

[edit] Complete transcript of Warcraft I, II and III in the GDC2007 panel

Okay, my second choice, and we are not going in chronological order I should say - we are each going to reveal two games that we chose, the order may skip around chronologically. My second choice is the Warcraft series. I'll just assert I mean by that Warcraft I, II and III, not World of Warcraft.

Warcraft is important due to its place in the history of the introduction of real time into digital games and in particular the introduction of real time into traditional game formats, namely the strategy game.

Warcraft another aspect is that transformation of the strategy game is the introduction of interface mastery as a component of playing a strategy game, where that is something you don't have in Chess or board games, or it doesn't particularly matter how rapidly you move your Chess piece and so on.

And for those reasons I'm going to say Warcraft and also you could say this about RTS in general, in some way represents the quintessential computer game as transforming another looted genre.

Warcraft is also important, there are few other games you can name like Command and Conquer for exploring the possibilities of overlaying narrative structure on top of what I would say is a purely game format, which is the strategy game, that's not so easy to do.

As part of that, Warcraft, one of its characteristic things which I find very interesting are these sorts of textual elements that are thrown in throughout it, namely these narrative touches – the poke quote, or the pissed sounds as they are known as. “It's not easy being green” and so forth, which then become very important parts of shared game culture.

Warcraft also because of these aspects of narrative that are overlayed on top of the game, makes possible the creation of a vast narrative space and that's what leads to World of Warcraft, and to many other things like card games, novels, and so on built in the world of Warcraft.

Warcraft is a competitive game, it has played a very important role in E-sports and competitions. Probably it's one of the, probably I'll assert along with Starcraft which is a derivative of Warcraft of course, the most important non-shooter title.

And last there's a huge player-created content aspect to it, with custom maps and modifications – (Indicating slide) this is DOTA, which if you look at the BattleNet server, is a more popular game then Warcraft itself almost. I'll assert that more maps, more mods if you will, have been made on the basis of Warcraft III, then any other game.

And just to conclude quoting Loftus & Loftus 1983, this sort of summarises what I think is important about Warcraft, “Videogames are fundamentally different from all other games in history because of the computer technology that underlies them”, and I think Warcraft has demonstrated that in its transformation of the strategy game.

[edit] Project resources

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[edit] Links

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