In anticipation of the release of the Warcraft III Expansion Set, the Blizzard Insider sat down with Lead Designer Rob Pardo to talk about the development of The Frozen Throne.
Blizzard Insider: There have been frequent comparisons between The Frozen Throne and Brood War™, the StarCraft® expansion set. Brood War"s new units and features ended up making StarCraft a lot more balanced. Were there specific imbalance issues in Warcraft III that you thought had to be addressed?
Rob Pardo: I think Warcraft III is a very balanced game, but certainly over time hardcore players will find advantages to exploit in any RTS. For example, a lot of the new units focus on anti-casters because one of the prevalent strategies in Reign of Chaos was to go with all casters. There are definitely other examples as well. We wanted to make sure every race had the ability to siege islands with just air units. So even though we don"t really have a lot of island maps, there are some, like Lost Temple, where a player could run to an island and turtle up. Under these circumstances, it would be difficult for some of the races to successfully siege that island and land. So, we made several changes to the existing units like the Frost Wyrm and the Chimaera, and added new units, like the Bat Rider and the Dragon Hawk, to make sure that every race could do that and to make island maps more viable. So, there were a lot of little tweaks: casters, island sieges, trying to add heroes to existing races that didn"t have that type of hero already.