Warcraft 2.5 - ACT 1 - Southshore
the third Human mission of Warcraft 2 re-imagined in Warcraft 3
[ THE GOODS ]
First, a link to download the map:
https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/warcraft-2-5-human-campaign.352688/
All future campaign maps will be posted in the same thread.
[ THE GRIND ]
Well, I said I need to pay attention to other stuff, but I'm having a hard time disengaging from this project. I'm not making any claims and promises anymore, I'll just see how it goes. Unsurprisingly, with each subsequent mission it's getting easier and becoming more of a grind, rather than an exhausting learning process, which just makes me want to keep going.
[ THE MUSINGS ]
I really do think there's something to be said for campaigns, where the individual missions are mechanically divorced from each other – both from the perspective of a player and a designer.
For the former, it gives one a peace of mind as well as the freedom to act and to enjoy each map fully. If there's continuity between the missions, and heroes and items get carried over (if not potentially other things), it pushes the player to be a paranoid squirrel – find ALL the items on every map, make sure to NOT use the best consumables, in case they are useful in later missions, get ALL the XP and stat boosts that you possibly can, AGONIZE over which items are the best to take with you to the next mission, et cetera.
There are also upsides to, it obviously, but that's what everyone seems to ever talk about – the cool, satisfying progression. Not the dark shadow of that, where players – instead of actually enjoying the game – obsess over min-maxing every map to have as much power as possible in the next one. And no matter what anyone says, that isn't "fun", it's just a compulsive fixation. It's not driven by enjoyment, clearly, but by the fear of not having enough / of missing something.
Secondly, from the developer perspective... not having this continuity removes variables from the equation. You know exactly what you're working with in any given mission. You don't have to design maps in a way that accommodates both players, who have rushed through the previous missions, as well as those, who have squeezed every last drop of hero power out of them. You don't have to consider, whether the player may or may not have this or that item and how it will affect encounters.
And that is good, because you cannot truly account for this in a meaningful way regardless of what you do. If your maps contain a reasonable degree of freedom of choice and exploration, then there will invariably be dozens of possible beginning states for the subsequent missions. This is fine if you're going for more of a casual difficulty tuning, but if you want to present more challenging scenarios, it does pose a big problem.
What if one mission allows you to find an item, which makes the hero immune to magic? Well, suddenly you have a major issue on your hands for future missions. For some players – who have found and kept the item – there will no longer be any challenge in facing even the toughest enemy casters. Such future encounters will have been trivialized for them. Whereas those, who don't have the item going forward, could easily find certain encounters to be nigh on impossible to deal with.
So what, then, do you do as a developer? If you take the easy way out and simply do not present any magic-based challenges going forward, then you have made the item in question (and finding it to begin with) utterly meaningless. You have completely ruined that for the players. And if you do decide to present magic-based challenges in future missions, then you have to keep in mind that a portion of your players is going to be struggling, while another portion will be steamrolling those encounters, getting bored in their chairs.
That isn't exactly great. What it means in real terms, is that if you want to have this continuity, you can't really afford to hand out truly powerful stuff to the players, so – in effect – you have to severely restrict the variety of content you can offer over the course of the campaign. It all has to be fairly tame, which is precisely what you see in Warcraft 3, for the most part. It’s all very gentle, you rarely get to play with powerful heroes and items, except for in the last mission or two, where it no longer matters.
Yet if you keep the missions completely separate, you are free to do so much. In every mission you are free to explore a different kind of overpowered build, if you like. You can let the players find and enjoy all sorts of items and power-ups, you can give them very powerful abilities, and it's always contained to a single mission, so none of it will ruin future ones.
I am not saying this is objectively superior in every way – obviously it's not. It’s virtually incompatible with character-driven narratives, for example. Ultimately it’s a matter of trade-offs, and it just occurs to me, that fully separate missions have gotten quite underrated in campaigns. There's genuinely a lot to like about them. So I'll be sticking with that design philosophy. It just allows for so much variety, which in turn makes it possible for each mission to truly stand out.
And thus, because of the sheer richness and variety of gameplay, a campaign can be enjoyable despite a lack of narrative. Whereas a campaign, which is very restricted in gameplay, can also be enjoyable despite that fact, precisely due to its narrative. This is the true dichotomy of (not only) RTS campaign design. Deeply involved narrative constrains gameplay, and totally unfettered gameplay disrupts narrative. It’s a spectrum and I am choosing to lean towards gameplay over narrative.
Of course, some narrative is still present. I can’t just do whatever I want with gameplay, free of all limitations. I have to respect things like factions and themes. But I am not shackled by a detailed story and lore, which does make a great deal of difference. I hope to fully exploit this freedom in future missions, as the enemies get more powerful and numerous, justifying the player having stronger heroes and units.