Warcraft 3 vs Starcarft 2 #101

[Deleted member 219079]

101st thread about this...

Presentation of both

Starcraft II was built around eSports. It's fast based, offers great replay and observer mode, WCS finals are hosted by Blizzard themselves, there's Grandmaster league for the best of the best and they want to keep the game as balanced and exciting as possible.

Warcraft III had its last patches in 2011, 1.25a to 1.26a. There is no news about W3 from blizzard anymore, W3 is also unpopular on twitch, and the W3 tournaments are not that popular either anymore. The game is running on slower pace than SC2, and the units are considerably bigger in screen size than those in SC2.

Features of both

Starcraft II has a player base of ~0.5m to ~3m. It has very, very powerful editor and support for pleasing graphics. It has one expansion yet to come, so more features will come. Campaign's voice acting was gorgeous, and there's a lot of beautiful CGI cinematics. It has free arcade (custom) games, so user-generated content is open for anybody who has 15 GB worth of free space on their HD, and likes RTS's ... and is spoiled kid / wasted grandpa's testament / does lots of work to earn money / goes to work so actually can afford a good PC.

Warcraft III offers... well to the level of this decade, decent feature list. Its overall graphics are outdated, editor doesn't offer from game-to-game support, OOP script syntax, UI editing (only re-texturing) or any other good stuff, it even caps the maps to 8MB. This was of course a perfect deal back in 2002 when the game came out. Campaign offers /just/ good CGI's, yet nice story. Player base consists of barely ~10k players, your favourite custom game might not ever get a full lobby, your firends list is full of offline indicators and you feel kind of abandoned when playing it.

Comparison

Starcraft II wins in editor, graphics, campaign, popularity, support, player base growth (it decreases at lower pace than w3), rank sorting, new content, tournament support, user generated content... actually let's just say everything. Warcraft 3's outdated graphics and engine is the nail in the coffin to be honest. So which I'd be more likely to play? That's obvious, Warcraft 3 of course. I've played myself to the Gold league in Starcraft 2 2 times, then stopped. Why? It got WAY too serious for me to enjoy. For me games have always been about entertainment, not competition. Although it's nice to have leaderboards and leagues in games, it's not my thing to always need to play better and better. That's why I stop playing SC2 for half a year once I reach Gold. The other reason is unpleasant environment. I don't like the idea of being in a suit in order to breath and never seeing a birch when looking to the horizon in summertime. I'm the kind of person who easily empathizes into game (which is a plus when playing horror games, hehe ).

What Warcraft III does offer is unique RTS experience. The game focuses on lesser amounts of units, just perfect game pace, and different races. And the heroes, oh, the heroes! All the heroes (expect the goddamn BM, what have my acolytes ever done to you?) adds something to the game. They all feel quite unique and they're voice acted perfectly. Graphics are polygonish and cartoonish, but I've got used to it. Although custom games are quite bummer nowadays (even all caps lock named lobbys are getting abandoned D, melee is nice experience even now. It's not enough casual looking game to attract anybody anymore, but it had its times...

I'm looking forward to new RTS series by Blizzard, they know their shit. After I finish with my last projects on WC3, it's time for even me to let go of it, as it's sadly been decaying for years.

 

[Ezekiel12]

Player base consists of barely ~10k players

Apart from the fact "wc3 has 10k current players" which is wrong, a good small sum up.
Only DotA 1 has probably way more than 100k active players.

 

[Deleted member 219079]

If you read it like that, why didn't you call sc2 player base into account?

I'm missing word continuous from front of it, continuous player base

 

[gorillabull]

how do you know sc2 has a 3 mil playerbase ?

 

[Zwiebelchen]

how do you know sc2 has a 3 mil playerbase ?

It doesn't.

 

[Radicool]

I think your comparison is very vague. For instance:

Campaign offers /just/ good CGI's, yet nice story

This is a poor analysis of a campaign. There is more to a campaign than CGI and storyline. It's like watching a movie and revolving your critique on the special effects. How shallow you must be...

user generated content

Debatable. Despite the editor being more powerful, a lot of users have found the Starcraft 2 editor to be far more complicated to use than Warcraft 3's editor. I wouldn't be surprised if Warcraft 3 produced more maps than Starcraft 2 per player in their relative prime time.

 

[Aeroblyctos]

I like wc3 way more than sc2.

 

[gorillabull]

whats its playerbase like 8k people ?

 

[Eagle XI]

ze have opened box'o pandora!1

I've played myself up to the Gold league in Starcraft 2 for 2 times, then stopped.

Good on you, because could get actually promoted!

What you didnt tell is that the MM is still broken, many cant even get promoted despite performing miracles. Even then being ranked higher doesnt have any meaning because when you are actually #1 of division truly yours, are actually world #125737 or something.
Not to forget most of the rivals youll get through the random matchmaking are portrait farmbots that will always do the same cheese strat every single time you go against.
Also the melee balance of that game has never been on spot. OK, this one may have been more of a personal opinion than fact since i strongly disagree with nearly everything theyve done to my favorite Terrans.
Never to mention that some design choices like unlimited amount of units to be selected at a time turn the round into a deathball-fest past a certain minute mark in team-games.
Most melee maps are horribly designed, almost always you start on a plateau, have one or more 'ramps', that allow you to easily wallin. Mostly the expansions are on seperate plateaus too. That neutral observation post capturable they added kills scouting on maps where its present.
There are maybe 3456780192 custom maps but only a handful of them will ever get played, thanks to the useless popularity system effectively preventing new works from reaching the daylight, ever.
Its graphics are matter of taste too, look at those units then tell me its not like McDonald toys, if you can that is.

 

[Deleted member 219079]

@Eahle I got to high gold

@gorillabull I mean the player count I see when I log into the game. I've saw ridiculous 3.75m one day, but didn't put it there because it's not the continuous number. Last day I saw 2m there, from time to time 0.75m etc. It varies a lot with SC2.

@Radicool Why do you want to debate about my comparison of SC2 and WC3? Why not just put your own review here -,-

 

[Radicool]

@Radicool Why do you want to debate about my comparison of SC2 and WC3?

Nothing. I was just ponting out your arguement is flawed. No offence.

Why not just put your own review here

There is value in promoting or demoting a review of something. People may or may not be influenced by somebody's review. I don't have the time or patience to review WC3 against SC2 myself, but I have found it worthwhile to comment on your review.

 

[rulerofiron99]

I'm just more comfortable working with War 3 WorldEdit.

SC2's trigger editor was amazing (scripted an area-effect 3d knockback in a matter of minutes ), but with that object editor I quickly lost interest before making any actual maps.

At the end of the day, I make maps for the enjoyment of making stuff. And war3 does that for me.

 

[Deleted member 219079]

The object editor is full of encrypted code by NSA. It's a secret plan by Blizzard to use consumers to decrypt it, as time goes. They've just staged it to act like object editor, so we'd have no clue about its real purpose. Every time Arcade map is uploaded, it goes through super secure connection into Blizzard HQ to gain more intel about NSA.

I'm not smart enough to conquer the object editor, sadly. It's nerdy place...

SC2 Object Editor

 

[gorillabull]

it looks so powerful. its nice to see blizzard making their games more and more open to modification

 

[A Void]

SC2 has a very advanced editor, I dislike some things about it such as: Object Editor is completely a mess, it is hard to figure out what you are doing and what is necessary to edit. There are so much of useless data and selections in there that it is very much open to all kinds of modification. If you want to make amazing project and a map without any limits and obstacles then you should learn Galaxy Editor (SC2). If you want to have a nice painless time to make your map in a limited engine then choose World Editor (War3). Sc2 has better graphics, better terrain painting, bigger environments, no map size limit, freedom in triggering anything and an interface change freedom. SC2 Editor is as good as game creating software. War3 World Editor has old graphics, slow engine, many limitations: graphical, interface, unit number, game-play mechanics, model limitation, texture size limit. With War3 you do not have freedom in creation.

 

[Deleted member 219079]

You guys don't take wc3's decaying into account. In that light we can't just recommend wc3 to our friends, it doesn't meet the standards anymore.

 

[Linaze]

Going back to War3's melee gameplay with its clunkyness, stupid pathfinding, limited unit selections etc. has proven near-impossible for me since playing hundreds upon hundreds of Sc2 games.

A shame, really.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Only DotA 1 has probably way more than 100k active players.

Not anymore as the number has fallen over the last years due to the abundance of dedicated AoS games that now dominate the gaming industry nicknamed MOBAS or something stupid.

I would recon less than 10k DotA Allstars players at any given time, closer to 5k if lucky. These players do not count anyway as they believe they are playing a game called "DotA Allstars" and not "Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne".

how do you know sc2 has a 3 mil playerbase ?

Current usage statistics (measured at time of posting) state that SC2 has 8,000 active games. Seeing how solo games are uncommon it would likely be that that is at least 16,000 players active at any given time. Since games often have more than 2 players the figure may be closer to 30,000 active players at any given time.

This may seem unhealthy compared to the 100,000 WC3 used to have in each of 3 regions (never measured Asia) at its prime but you must remember that the gaming industry as a whole has changed. Few people own computers capable of running SC2 well in favour of smart phones and game consoles.

Also just because 30,000 people are active now does not mean only 30,000 people play regularly. The number could easily be in the millions of the number of players who play at least one game per month.

I wouldn't be surprised if Warcraft 3 produced more maps than Starcraft 2 per player in their relative prime time.

99% of the user generated maps in WC3 were rubbish. They were spoofs of open source maps with profanity, Kirby or cheat codes added. Remember the age of mauls? Of green TD? Of LoaP? Sure there were more maps than SC2 will ever make but most of them really should not have existed in the first place.

a lot of users have found the Starcraft 2 editor to be far more complicated to use than Warcraft 3's editor

I believe these are the same people who find doing a screw up complicated or struggle to turn on their TV remote or forget that you need to plug a distribution board into a mains wall socket and not itself for it to work.

There are maybe 3456780192 custom maps but only a handful of them will ever get played, thanks to the useless popularity system effectively preventing new works from reaching the daylight, ever.

Please do not post about stuff you have no idea about. They got rid of the popularity system about 2 years ago. The current arcade system is far superior to the WC3 battlenet system as ironically they have traded places. Now in SC2 you can find only games that have at least 1 player in a lobby for them where as in WC3 you can only play popular games as robots have flooded the lists with games no one plays (ghost games).

@gorillabull I mean the player count I see when I log into the game. I've saw ridiculous 3.75m one day, but didn't put it there because it's not the continuous number. Last day I saw 2m there, from time to time 0.75m etc. It varies a lot with SC2.

Unfortunately if you read carefully it says "Players on BattleNet". This includes WoW players and Diablo III players since both use BattleNet and can communicate with each other. This however is to be expected since even in WC3's prime a BattleNet server like US East had 300,000 users on it of which >200,000 users were either StarCraft (1) or Diablo II.

The reason SC2 has fewer players than WC3 is purely because there are no players who think they are playing a game called "DotA Allstars" and that times have changed and people do not play PC games as much.

I'm not smart enough to conquer the object editor, sadly. It's nerdy place...

Which is surprising seeing how I am sure one could train insects how to use it. Unlike WC3 everything is not only logical but super logical. There is no hard coded bull**** that WC3 was full of. The reason for so many fields related to the same function is because they are structures where each field is a member of it.

Turn on XML view and all becomes super clear as you can see what the data editor is doing. This is the total opposite of WC3 where you had to prey and perform strange rituals in the hope that your changes did what you wanted.

it is hard to figure out what you are doing and what is necessary to edit

You know that change you want to make? You edit the catalog entry containing data related to that change. Make a new unit? Unit catalog. Give the unit some graphics? Actor catalog. Give the unit an ability? Ability catalog. Make the ability do something? Effect catalog. A passive effect like a buff or unit function? Behaviour catalog.

It really is that simple. If people stopped pretending it is WC3 and learnt from scratch it is far easier to do some things than WC3.

If you want to have a nice painless time to make your map in a limited engine then choose World Editor (War3).

As one of the guys who hangs around the WEHZ picking up the pieces of WC3 mappers, this statement is so untrue.

Why does my Holy Light not work like intended despite setting targets? : Highly restricted target field.
Why can my builder not construct Wall targeted units (not Wall and Structure)? : Hard coded construction target.
Why is my map crashing? : 3 poorly written GUI Damage Detection systems in parallel causing crash due to excessive leaks.
Why is my map crashing? : Creating a quest during map initialization.
Why does my hashtable not work? : Failure to initialize a hashtable object.
Why is my map crashing? : Infinite loop using triggers to pickup a dropped item immediately in response to a dropped item event.
Why is my map lagging? : Shadow string with cast time set to 0 as cast time actually determines the damage interval.
Why is my map crashing? : Creating a player at an invalid index (Player(16)).
Why are my units not moving when ordered? : Path finder overload due to too many units owned by the same player.
Why can I not bind X key? : WC3 game engine limitation.
Why is my map crashing? : Infinite loop as a result of a unit moving between two regions due to a teleporter system gone wrong and putting units by displacement back into the return teleporter region.

How is that painless?! SC2 is virtually impossible to crash yet in WC3 a huge number of threads are made every year asking about crash solutions.

 

[SA Dashie]

^Haha I should go back and check out some of the things you said in the Sc2 editor sometime.
This is inspiring.

One of the things that have kept me in the Wc3 community is that I enjoy the simple cartoony graphics that look nice (to me).

It's also kept pretty simple and contains a lot of stuff that I already enjoy using.

Looking through the Sc2 editor should be entertaining again though, I did have some fun with the terrain editor the last time I tried using it at least.

 

[Dr Super Good]

A new crash to added to the list (and this one is possibly a pretty serious security risk?).
WC3 doing a dynamic function call into memory pages that have not been allocated. Worse is it appears to be jumping into the heap like address ranges which could easily be reached in a leaky map.

All it would take is someone to enter a chat message producing the right machine code and to manipulate that call to jump onto it and they will have full process control to do all their evil work like download malware, install key loggers, steal personal information etc.

What is causing this is still unknown but still it could potentially be serious.

 

[A Void]

A new crash to added to the list (and this one is possibly a pretty serious security risk?).
WC3 doing a dynamic function call into memory pages that have not been allocated. Worse is it appears to be jumping into the heap like address ranges which could easily be reached in a leaky map.

All it would take is someone to enter a chat message producing the right machine code and to manipulate that call to jump onto it and they will have full process control to do all their evil work like download malware, install key loggers, steal personal information etc.

What is causing this is still unknown but still it could potentially be serious.

Starcraft II will have it's time for modding, it is not yet.. I am highly enjoying working with World Editor, tough Galaxy Editor is many times a better choice. But SC2 has a terrible modding commiunity compared to WC3. The answer as to why SC2 has terrible commiunity about modding and support is that it is too complicated, it is very advanced. Why use SC2 Galaxy Editor when you can use Unity, Unreal Engine or any other cross-platform game creation system programs. The morale of SC2 modders is low, because of lack of support. Blizzard however tried so many ways to encourage players to mod, sadly it did not work.

 

[Deleted member 219079]

Unfortunately if you read carefully it says "Players on BattleNet". This includes WoW players and Diablo III players since both use BattleNet and can communicate with each other.

Wow, blizzard games are that unpopular?

 

[Dr Super Good]

Wow, blizzard games are that unpopular?

A million odd players all the time is not what I would call unpopular.

Especially in this day and age where PC gamming is slowly dying to mobile and console gaming.