Review - Season1 A New Threat
(Version January 24th 2024)
Synopsis: The campaign focuses on a custom storyline of Arthas unraveling mysterious attacks on villagers, the story quickly deepens and sends Arthas and Jaina on a mission to find the root of the evil, and purge everything on the way in the classic Arthas style. The campaign resembles the classic Blizzard style, though it comes short in some areas. Still, it can offer a nice evening of simple, classic vanilla campaign play.
Storytelling: The storytelling features Korean voice lines, which is nice. English subtitles are understandable, but leave quite a lot to desire. Some sentence structures are blunt or even incorrect, but at the same time they bring hilariousness to the gaming experience: I for one love when Arthas simply tells his men to "kill them too, my soldiers", no matter what is in the way. Outside the grammar, the storytelling could flow more dynamically, with the heroes interacting more predictably with the environment: perhaps instead of Jaina just referencing "her studies" she could find some ancient scriptures on the way to reveal what must be done.
Map Aesthetics: The maps are not very consistent in their aesthetical level but reach a satisfying level of playability. The first level is compact and has a lot of classic Warcraft Campaign vibe to it. The aesthetical level of the environments becomes more disturbing over the second and third chapters, where Cinematic cameras often end up showing the edges of the map (the void/sky) as well as very empty terrain and surroundings spanning endlessly. In campaigns the terrain does not only act as a playground, a basis, but as an environment that the story should carry over and with, thus remember to use it as a tool to tell your story.
Gameplay Difficulty: I played some of the campaign's maps on Story difficulty and the first map was quite easy. I however got destroyed in Chapter 3, with the enemy naga hero bashing my heroes beyond oblivion. Based on the difficulty triggers, not much tweaking is done based on the difficulty and the Easy mode should indeed be that, easy. I'd recommend taking a deeper look into how the different difficulty levels vary. You can for example add handicaps.
Gameplay Uniqueness: The gameplay is very classic Warcraft: Play as a hero (Arthas) and some extra units, bash enemies on the way, kill bonus creeps for extra rewards, and creep up in power. The heroes are the default ones and do not offer much uniqueness in terms of how the campaign is played. The heroes, units, items, and abilities are the default ones, apart from some customization done. The enemy faction has more uniqueness put into them - this can be good and bad: on one hand, having the "default" things makes it easy for anyone to pick up and play, on the other hand, it brings very little freshness.
Other Comments: There are some loopholes in the triggers that you should fix. When playing Chapter 3, finding the naga base sends all your units to the Gold Mine, not checking whether the player has cleared it or not - this is how I lost my units: during a cinematic that was forced, that sent my units to pile of creeps that slaughtered them, while I was unable to do anything about it. Similarly, Arthas and Jaina kept walking into the ordered point and entered deep into the Naga base and got aggroed by everything possible.
The game progression is not always gated properly and can lead to very confusing situations. My recommendation would be to gate gameplay elements until the player is meant to face them. By giving the player freedom to leave things undone (before exploring) they are bound to end up in a situation where they need to go back to do something - for example, I reached the Temple Gate (Chapter 3) and had to return to destroy the Naga Base completely. Similarly, the player can reach the Naga Base before destroying the previous temples or even starting his base (to which his units are automatically sent upon discovering the Naga base). There are also some disparities with text lines: in Chapter 3 the Naga Royal Guard is referred to with a different title, something you should look into if you want to polish the campaign further.
Recommendations:
Fix the technical issues and loopholes in the triggering and story progression. During cinematics I'd recommend pausing all units/game time, excluding the required units.
The English used in the cinematics is understandable, but does not do justice to storytelling. I would recommend you get someone to fine-tune it, or perhaps you can use AI tools like ChatGPT. I took the liberty of using one line from the campaign as an example (Chapter 4):
Original: "Sisters, there's a rotten smell in the sacred forest. I'm sure my prediction is right. There must be something going on in this forest."
Updated: "Sisters, do you sense that foul odor permeating our sacred forest? My instincts rarely falter, and I fear my premonition holds truth."
Of course, you can tell what kind of style you want from the AI, I simply told it I was telling a story with a hero (whose line that would be).
Another weak point of the cinematics is the wild camera angles that reveal too much: the view expands beyond the map bounds and you can often see beyond walls and undecorated areas become visible. You could try to create better boundaries for the cameras. The overall aesthetics of the campaign could also be improved.
I'd also recommend you to come up with a more engaging name for the Campaign.
Despite all these weak points the campaign gives very appropriate vibes and has potential. The style is quite Warcraft-ish, which is nice.
Edit: Explanation given, Approved.
Approved
