WarCraft and Age of Empires Series

WarCraft III and Age of Mythology, first of the 3D Age of Empires games, came out the same year.

I think Warcraft makes better impression overall over one of its direct competitors.

The WarCraft III Screenshot is from a beta version, the release has cleaner interface.

Age of Empires developers later (in 2005 when graphic technology improved) made much better-looking Age of Empires III. It has good looking graphics and nice home city mechanics (mostly because this home city looks good, a good opportunity to showcase graphic power of the graphics engine). Age of Empires III however have a rather trivial story with unlikable characters.

Age of Empires III was the only game of Age of Empires series, that I played personally.

Looking back at compilation video of their games, I think Age of Empires devs made all the wrong conclusions as to why their game lost to Blizzard's one:

Instead of getting the more intriguing story, better characters and shiny glowing spells, like Blizzard do, they went for cartoonish look of Blizzard games instead.

In an ideal world we could have an RTS that looks like Witcher III, but have a plot and mission design of WarCraft III

Instead, we have flawed hybrids that try to emulate 2002 looks of original WarCraft III