Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos is a real-time strategy (RTS) game  developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment. This is the third installment in the Warcraft series and the fourth real-time strategy game developed by the studio after Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, and StarCraft, all of which had strong critical and commercial success.

Continuation of the story of Azeroth

The game takes place in the medieval-fantasy world of Azeroth several years after the events of Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, in which the portal that allowed the Orcs to invade Azeroth was permanently destroyed. As a result of the Humans’ victory, the remaining Orcs on Azeroth are imprisoned in camps and gradually lose their bloodlust. A period of peace then begins for the alliance of the Humans, High Elves and Dwarves but, for lack of having a common enemy, the peace is short-lived. Shortly before the events of the game, a former slave called Thrall and assisted by Grom Hellscream and Orgrim Doomhammer, manages to raise an army…

New factions

In addition to the humans and orcs already present in the first two games of the series, Warcraft III allows the player to command two new factions, the night elves and the undead. These races are entirely designed from scratch and have their own heroes, units, buildings and lore. The Night Elves being the stealthy, silent protectors of the forest, and the undead being a frenzied race aiming towards the destruction of all life.

Introducing heroes in the Warcraft universe

Three different heroes are available for each race. Each of them has their own spells and is characterized by three attributes: strength, agility and intelligence. As in other role-playing games, for each enemy killed, the hero gains experience points allowing him/her to gain levels. At each higher level, the character’s characteristics (HP, Mana, Attack, Armror etc) improve, and he gains a skill point he can use to learn or improve a spell. Each hero has three skills, which he can learn as he gains levels, as well as an ultimate spell that can only be learned from level six and cannot be improved. Spells are specific to each hero, the orc master may for example become invisible, split or have a chance to make a critical strike while the human archmage can increase the speed of mana recovery of his allies, summon or trigger a blizzard that affects all units in a chosen area. Heroes can also carry up to six items that the player can find by killing certain creatures, or that he can buy in one of the shops.

With better graphics, Reign of Chaos is an instant success

The game is distinguished from its predecessor by its fully three-dimensional graphics but also by the introduction of a hero system inspired role-playing. On release, the game is very well received by the trade press, and it quickly has a significant commercial success with over a million copies sold a month after publication and three million copies sold in less than a year . The game has been rewarded many times in the year of its release including six titles of best PC game of the year and many titles of best strategy game of the year awarded by sites and magazines.