Development
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The game was announced by a press conference inside the Henley-Suite at the European Computer Trade Show 1999 approximately 1:00 PM. Development started in early 1998 and development stages were presented at ECTS 1999, 2000 and 2001, E3 2000, 2001 and 2002 and on a tour where Bill Roper visited video game magazines.
Warcraft III was announced as a role-playing-strategy game (RPS) with flexible camera movement. The first version shown at ECTS 1999 had no interface however did have portraits for the heroes. Various articles showed that abilities and items were used via right-click on a unit and an appearing icon collar.
Around January 24, 2000 a video from Korea appeared on the Internet; the video showed some aspects of gameplay along with commentary by Rob Pardo. This version already had an interface concept, however most of the interface were placeholders, it had a map, icons for abilities and unit commands and an eye-shaped display for gold.
Around April 19. 2000 Blizzard released new screenshots of the Warcraft III, these were completely without interface. These screenshots showed heroes and a number of abilities.
More screenshots came around May 2000. These screenshots showed the new interface of the game, which looked like the human interface in the eventual final release, however had small cannons above the minimap and the command button space. The gold display was still eye-shaped, but the last screenshot before E3 2000 shows a rectangle-shaped gold display. Most models, icons, textures and abilities that you can find on these screenshots never appeared in the retail version.
Then from E3 2000 around May 12, 2000 to ECTS 2000 the game didn't change very much. The next major changes came between ECTS 2000 and E3 2001, when a different interface and the Night Elf race was revealed.
The next change came at ECTS 2001, when the interface became almost what it is today. The biggest changes of this version was, that lumber became a resource and heroes got an inventory, though in a video from April 2001, you could already see an item on the ground.
After ECTS 2001 Blizzard experimented with different resources and had versions of the game with gold, lumber, mana stones and upkeep or a race depending resource that represented the population like the required food in newer versions.
In the middle of January 2002, Blizzard shipped out 5000 beta versions of Warcraft III to randomly selected testers in order to help improve it before being released in stores. The beta release had all the game’s units and races; however, it was only playable over Battle.net. Single player games and LAN play were not playable on the beta version of the game.
Read more about this topic: Warcraft III: Reign Of Chaos
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