• Introducing Role-Playing Strategy. Players wage war in a fully interactive world that incorporates non-player characters, wandering monsters, neutral towns, strongholds, temples, and environmental effects.
  
• Six different races to command including Orcs, Humans and Demons, each possessing unique units, magical abilities and weapons of war.
  
• Skeletal and skinning animation process allows infinite frames of animation resulting in true fluid movement of 3D models.
  
• Advanced world design tools allowing players to customize every aspect of the game including tile sets, character art, quests, mission objectives, and unit types, AI, attributes, special abilities and spells.
  
• Expanded multiplayer options over Battle.net™ including a larger number of players per game and multiple game types including team play and questing.
  
• Warcraft III is expected to release by the end of 2000 in Windows 95/98/2000/NT formats.

The story...

Many years after the Dark Portal that bound the Orcish homeland of Draenor and the Human world of Azeroth was destroyed, a young Orc named Thrall was captured and raised as a slave by humans who followed the ways of treachery rather than those of honor. 

Using the skills driven into him by his captors with his own natural strength and courage, Thrall escaped his wicked masters and, once free, set out to find his stolen heritage. Finding his kind forced to live passively in controlled settlements, the young warrior sought out the few, scattered Orc clans that managed to evade the wrath of the Alliance. From their camps in the harsh wilderness, Thrall swore to lead his brothers back to the status their heritage demanded. Under Thrall's leadership as the new Warchief of the Horde, the Orcs rediscover their abandoned Shamanistic culture and use this newfound power to revolt against their cruel wardens. 

As civil strife rages through the nations of the Alliance, the lands of Azeroth undergo strange changes, and the threat of a new, unseen foe draws near. Finally, in an unholy firestorm from the heavens, the Burning Legion arrives. Cursed to roam the greater realms forever to consume the primal energies of magic to survive, the Legion has ravished world after world in its mad lust for arcane power. Cunning, sinister and seemingly unstoppable, these dark slayers come to not only drain this domain of its magic, but to eradicate all life within it, as well. 

Now, in the face of an even greater invasion, the reunited Horde and the armies of Azeroth have shifted their focus from conquest, betrayal, defense or honor to that of basic survival…

previewed by: Todd Alexander