Blizzard Entertainment today offered up some new details about Warcraft III, a new game headed to the PC and Mac later this year. The details are revealed in the form of a gameplay preview. It’s a self-contained movie file for PCs stored in Bink video format, but Mac users who download the Bink Video Player from RAD Game Tools can play it as well.
Warcraft III is the continuation of a story first revealed in the enormously popular real time strategy games Warcraft and Warcraft II, in which Orcs and Humans are pit against each other in a strange medieval fantasy world. Blizzard has described Warcraft III as a Role-Playing Strategy game, or RPS.
Blizzard explained that Warcraft III combines the individual combat and interaction normally reserved for role-playing games with the tactics needed to win a strategy game. This is reenforced by the gameplay shown in the downloadable movie, which depicts smaller groups of characters confronting each other, rather than the massive hordes sometimes clashing in previous Warcraft titles.
Blizzard Entertainment used last summer’s Macworld Expo in New York to announce that they would bring Warcraft III to the Macintosh. At the time, the company had just recently begun to ship the Mac version of Diablo II. For the first time in Blizzard’s history, the company shipped the Mac version of a game less than a month after its PC counterpart — up until then, the Mac to PC release schedule gap had been months — in some cases, more than a year.
Earlier this month at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Blizzard Entertainment’s Brian “Doc” Love provided MacCentral with a few details about Warcraft III for the Macintosh, as well as a look at the forthcoming Diablo II Expansion Set.
“For Mac-specific information about Warcraft III, people should direct their attention to Macworld Expo in New York this summer,” said Love. “We are planning to show the game running on Macs in New York.”
Blizzard also plans to focus showgoers’ attention on Warcraft III at this spring’s E3 Expo in Los Angeles, which happens in May.
The Warcraft III gameplay preview movie can be downloaded from mirror site links on Blizzard’s Warcraft III Web site. The downloaded movie is about 14MB and runs for a couple of minutes.