Warcraft III Should Have Had a Console Port

Good game or not, I really am sad that WC3 never got ported to console. Having a way to play on the go with my Switch would have been cool, and one of the best parts of Diablo 3 on Switch was how Amiibo were made and you could get a treasure goblin figure.

Another day goes by without any console Warcraft content, and no nice Arthas Amiibo for my collection. :frowning:

Without a keyboard and mouse, competitive would be rough but campaign would work just fine. I guess you could just match Switch players with other Switch players to make competitive work too.

Another natural port is an iPad version, with similar caveats to a Switch version. It’s practically done already too, since iOS is almost identical to macOS and WCIII already runs on Macs…

There’s been console ports of RTS games in the past with varying degrees of success. Age of Empires was on PS2, Populous and Powermonger were on SNES and Megadrive (Genesis), Command and Conquer on just about everything, and even Warcraft 2 made its way onto Saturn and Playstation. The older ones tended to survive the translation better, mostly due to their being simpler.

That said, don’t be tempted to think the touch screen would help too much without some serious reworking. I’ve tried to play StarCraft on a touch screen laptop, and the little trackpad was a far, far better interface option.

Do you think this could be remedied by adding proper touch support (multi-touch, gestures, etc) for various functions? When using touch on a 2-in-1 laptop most programs will treat your finger as a plain old mouse cursor, which rarely translates to a good touch experience regardless of the program in question.

At best I can say ā€œmaybeā€. I mean, all the elements seem to be there, and it feels like they should work. Just it doesn’t all quite fit together. The map is too small to really use it to navigate via touch (and border-scrolling is basically impossible), there’s no ā€œquickā€ action if you don’t use the command card, and you basically have to throw any concept of unit selection accuracy out the window.

Two-finger-drag scrolling (as to differentiate it from drag selecting units), for example, might negate the map/scroll issues. So multi-touch would definitely help there. But I could see arguments against making just random touches trigger a quick action, and fingers just aren’t accurate enough for such small units (zooming in is an option, but could very quickly feel restrictive).