For those who think of Warcraft 3 primarily as an RTS, they might be a bit surprised when they pick up its brand new campaign, The Forsaken Kingdom, only to find it doesn’t have much in the way of traditional RTS gameplay. It’s more of an RPG. No basebuilding in sight.
That’s not entirely out of pocket for Warcraft 3, nor is it entirely unwelcome. In the original game, added bonus content starring Rexxar was similarly RPG-focused, and well-liked. But it may come as a surprise to some who were expecting something more traditional.
So when I sat down with Warcraft senior manager Brad Chan and game director Ion Hazzikostas at BlizzCon, I had to ask: why no base building?
“This more RPG-focused campaign was made just to serve the story essentially, because we were doing a more character-driven, more— don’t want to say the lesser characters, but the street-level characters. You’re a city guard, you’re not a prince, you’re not a king, you’re not like a super power,” Chan said. “So this was a form that we could leverage to really service that story. And one of the cool things about Warcraft 3 is that it’s not just an RTS. It is an RPG as well, too. It’s like the only RPG RTS game that I think has had real success. And so we leaned into it because of the story and sky’s the limit. If there is a story that we want to service, like, big-scale battles, being that overarching commander again, we’ll definitely lean into all that.”
Fair enough, but that does still leave traditional RTS fans a bit in the lurch with nothing new to chew on since Reforged first launched, and that’s a touch disappointing for many. So I wanted to know what Chan and Hazzikostas think about RTS as a genre right now. Is it still relevant?
Definitely, says Chan. He confidently name-dropped several successful and current RTS games: Total War, Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, Age of Empires, and Tempest Rising.
Hazzikostas, the more senior of the two, had a broader company perspective to share. “We’re re-entering this space,” he said.
“We’re so excited to have a new story to tell and a new experience to offer in Warcraft 3, but so many of the next steps are going to be informed by what we hear from the community, what they want more of, what they want less of. If people are jumping in and what we’re hearing far and wide is, ‘This is awesome, but man, I miss the base-building parts of it, I wish you guys could tell a story that was more about building up a base and forming an army and engaging at that scale of battle as opposed to heroes,’ we’re all for it and we’re here for it.”
Here I pointed out that as far as storytelling goes, this new campaign seemed to be very actively trying to tie in with a lot of other things Blizzard has been announcing. It fills the gaps between Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft, yes, but it also has narrative ties with whatever is going to happen in WoW: Forever, according to Hazzikostas. The Last Titan, the next WoW expansion, will take place in Northrend, which was once the seat of Arthas’ power. The upcoming, limited-time “remix” game mode will focus on the climax of Arthas’ story, Wrath of the Lich King. Undead paladins are coming to both WoW and WoW: Forever. In fact, everything surrounding Arthas’s narrative and the places, people, and events associated with him has consistently been Blizzard’s most popular Warcraft-related content, whether it was in Warcraft 3 or World of Warcraft or something else. So I ask them if this is all a deliberate attempt to time a bunch of relevant stories together across all Blizzard’s Warcraft-related things.
“There’s definitely some franchise-level cohesion and timing to it all,” Hazzikostas confirmed. He went on:
“It is the best storytelling medium that Warcraft has had,” Hazzikostas says. “Coming from the WoW perspective, an MMO can be challenging in terms of building up and conveying a connection to characters because you’re experiencing the narrative from the outside, you’re watching their deeds and not getting in their head while at the same time, you’re trying to have your own adventure as, at times, we’re trying to lead you through someone else’s journey. I think a huge part of why a character like Arthas remains our most iconic and probably our overall favorite character is because players got to walk in [his] shoes and got to play as him going down that journey of ends justifying the means as you went down that dark path. And that’s the kind of thing you can only do in this medium.”
