Warcraft III Tidbits

There are a couple interesting pieces of news regarding Blizzard’s upcoming Warcraft III today, including a new preview of the game over at Invisible Dreams that includes the following snippet:

WarCraft III picks up a few years after WarCraft Adventures ended, including the previous game’s storyline and characters (such as Thrall, the Orc Chieftain). And, this time around, strategy will be more of the focal point in this upcoming title rather than the usual Role-Playing progression. However, this shall not be a clone of StarCraft dressed in fantasy clothing. There will be less emphasis on town building as its sci-fi counterpart, and will instead focus on spell casting. Quests are required to fulfill in order to complete missions, although the player can ignore some quests without jeopardizing the mission at hand. With four races to choose from, there’s no doubt that gamers will want to play WarCraft III over and over again just to experience the different sides of the raging war.

In addition to the preview, GameSpot has received a new screenshot and is reporting that the game is going to be entering beta in the early part of 2002. Here’s a quote from their site:

Blizzard Entertainment’s upcoming 3D real-time strategy game, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, is expected to reach the beta stage of development in early 2002, according to a company representative.

Definitely good news for those of us who have been waiting patiently =).