Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne

Don’t get too excited – Warcraft IV has not been announced. Yet we can bet that at some point, its release will be inevitable. Now that StarCraft II has officially left the room (of Blizzard’s main development office), there must be a bunch of designers twiddling their thumbs and trying everything they can to not get assigned to World of Warcraft. Sure, StarCraft II still has two expansions coming, along with tons of patches, but if we know Blizzard, Warcraft IV is probably at least partly in development. Hell, StarCraft II was probably in some stage of development infancy in tandem with the tail end of Warcraft III.

A few of us at GamesRadar were seriously hardcore into Warcraft III. It may have never achieved the legendary status of StarCraft, but dammit if it didn’t steal our hearts with its lovely hero-centric, nearly economy-free take on traditional RTS gameplay. Some people weren’t happy with the de-emphasis on macro and the sharper focus on micro, but we loved it to its low-poly bones. We’re not saying it’s better than StarCraft; we’re saying it’s different, and that’s what makes both of them great. We still have some gripes with Warcraft III, though, so here’s what we want to see in the next Warcraft...

Warcraft is now 15 years old, and few have been more instrumental in its development than Chris Metzen. Starting on the original game as an animator, he moved over to writing and design with Warcraft II and has been responsible for expanding the story and lore since Blizzard decided to turn its real-time strategy game into a massively multiplayer epic. He’s now Blizzard’s vice president of creative development.

Pac-Man and Mario owned the 1980s. Sonic, Lara and Snake took over for the 1990s. Their games are considered classics. Their names are timeless and iconic. Their images are burned into the memory of every gamer, even those who were born after the characters themselves.

Now we have another ten years worth of heroes, villains, sidekicks and love interests to occupy our imagination. Which, however, will remain there?

Now that the veneer of freshness is drying off of our copies of Modern Warfare 2, we can fully devote ourselves to complaining about the lack of dedicated servers, and just how much the maps suck because our piss poor ranking certainly isn’t due to a lack of practice and the statistical disadvantage of playing against millions of people, no! Which got us thinking: What multiplayer maps reign over all others?