This wound up giving us several advantages: we were able to tell the 'real' orc story instead of coming up with some way of forcing them into the main storyline, we were able to try out several new level-design concepts, and in general we were able to just break away from standard RTS conventions and inject a lot of new gameplay elements into the campaign.

We decided to separate the orc storyline from that of the rest of the races and to approach their campaign in a fundamentally different manner. At some point in development, a light bulb went on over someone's head, and we decided to connect these two things. Additionally, over the course of creating Warcraft III, we had generated many ideas that were simply unfeasible for a normal RTS campaign - but were absolutely begging to be tried. However, none of us wanted to make a Warcraft game that didn't feature a storyline for the orcs - it just wouldn't have been Warcraft without them. Even though we really wanted to fit them into the main storyline of the Frozen Throne, we realized that in order to get it to work, the orcs' portion of the story was bound to wind up feeling very forced and contrived. Can you walk us through the reasoning that led to the creation of the bonus RPG orc campaign in The Frozen Throne? Tim Campbell: Unfortunately for orc fans like myself, their storyline just didn't work well with the Arthas-versus-Illidan direction that we took in the expansion. In his answers you'll find all kinds of goodies about the difference in gameplay, role playing elements, what to expect in these next two acts, and how the whole thing ties into the upcoming MMORPG World of Warcraft.

Tim Campbell, one of the level designers from The Frozen Throne was nice enough to sit down for a Q&A session about this campaign. Role-playing elements received a big boost and heroes became the focus with normal units only taking a mercenary status.

The bonus orc campaign from The Frozen Throne was certainly a bit of a move away from the traditional RTS involving building, massing, and attacking, but had a whole appeal of its own.

Warcraft 3 frozen throne co op campaign