Memories of the lead up to WC3? Ah, this is my wheelhouse :) Many of you already know all this but for those who may not...
WarCraft III was announced at ECTS 1999 as a "Role-playing strategy" game with 6 races - they initially announced humans, orcs, and demons (the Burning Legion). The developers revealed that this was not a traditional RTS game. Bases were extremely limited. Your unit cap would be determined by your hero's "Command" stat, and indeed the camera was even locked to your heroes. You'd roam the map fighting tactical battles and recruiting allies/mercenaries rather than building up a traditional army. Gold was the only resource, etc.
This is the period where we got a bunch of low-angle screenshots of groups of units out adventuring.
In May 2000, Blizzard announced they were going back on a lot of the original vision to create something more in line with traditional WarCraft. Free-roaming camera, free building placement, etc. This was also when they announced that Undead were the fourth race and that the sixth race had been cut. This period saw the announcement of a ton of cool ideas and features that never made it into the final game. For example, Undead would have a single Necromancer instead of peon units, he could cast global spells instead of building buildings, and Undead would use corpses and the Necromancer's mana as their resources (what use do the dead have for gold and wood?). Vestiges of this design remain with the meatwagon corpse-gathering feature and the Graveyard's corpse production mechanic, even though you pretty much just use corpses for creating skeletons in the released game.
During this period they released more traditional overhead angle shots, generally without any UI but later with some UI prototypes that were a bit heavy on the hero stats.
In late November of 2000, Blizzard officially revealed that the 5th race would be the Night Elves (spoiled by a leak from a French gaming magazine). From here on out the game as we know it began to rapidly take shape. Extraneous heroes were cut and/or demoted to regular units (Orc Warlord, Human Crusader, Elven [Human] Ranger, Undead Crypt Fiend and Abomination, Night Elf Archdruid). On February 1, 2001, they announced that the Burning Legion wouldn't be playable and we were only getting 4 races. Mechanics became more traditional - Night Elves and Undead began harvesting wood/gold, flying heroes were forced to walk (Farseer, Priestess of the Moon), max hero level was reduced from 15 to 10. By summer of 2001 Blizzard was releasing screenshots that basically look like WarCraft III today.
What a time to be a WarCraft fan!
