de had the chance to meet and talk to Bill Roper in Frankfurt.
Roper was kind enough to answer some of their questions and tell them some more things about the upcoming Warcraft III expansion "The Frozen Throne" (TFT).
He informed them that the Nagas, so far only know to beta players and only through the neutral hero, the Naga sea witch, will represent a new race in the single player campaign of the expansion pack, though only as enemies and not playable.
He also revealed that the new campaign will be at least as long as the one from classic Warcraft III and consists of a Nightelf, a Human and an Undead part (in this order). The Orcs will get their own, seperate campaign which is unrelated to the story of the other three races and supposed to contain many role-playing elements.
Furthermore, the difficulty will be considerably higher than in classic Warcraft III.
As usual, you can expect interludes in gameplay graphics between the missions and one render sequence each before and after the campaign.
If you don't understand German, you should at least check out the screenshots from the single player campaign.
Also be sure to take a look at the screenshots on Gamespy.
One day earlier, Blizzard had released the latest patch 306 for the beta version of "The Frozen Throne".
It includes, beside many balance changes, two new neutral heroes (the Pit Lord and the Beastmaster), a newly introduced tournament system via Battle.net, a completely new item type (runes) and a new way of map choice in ladder games, where "thumbs down" really prevents that map from being played, but you can only rate up to two maps "thumbs down".
The expansion is supposed to be released this summer, probably early in Q3 2003.
Links: Warcraft3.de | Screenshots (Gamespy) | Screenshots (Warcraft3.de) | TFT Beta Patch 306