What a difference a day makes.

I was bemoaning the lack of documentation in Warlords Battlecry 3 yesterday and I discover today my complaints were being addressed.

Infinite Interactive’s site is back up today and while there’s still a paucity of useful material right now, it’s a start.

I particularly liked the overviews of the races in the game. There are 16 playable races in total and casual gamers are unlikely to become familiar with each race’s strengths and weaknesses without these write-ups. There are only three races covered at the moment — Knights, Plaguelords and Dwarves — but it’s a start.

There’s also a map pack consisting of the four maps used for the IGN preview. Hopefully, more maps will be made available in the coming months.

In the pipeline are several utilities including a hero data extractor and a music editor. Neither sound exciting to me but intriguingly, the utility download page also promises “many other things that haven’t even come across your minds” will be released in the coming months.

It’s a shame Infinite Interactive didn’t bother to create a unified reference document with everything updated to reflect changes made in patches but one player has taken the initiative to do just that. The 103kb PDF file is a work in progress — it’s missing unit data right now — but again, it’s a start.

I’ve mentioned some of the positive aspects of Warlords Battlecry 3 and I think it’s time to address the some of the negatives.

First and foremost, the game is poorly documented. The manual does a fine job in introducing you to the main concepts but it doesn’t help you get well-versed with the nitty-gritty aspects of the game.

There are bits and pieces in PDF documents on the official site, various online FAQs and forum posts. (There were also some useful posts sticky-ed on the publisher’s forums but these were wiped out when the forums were upgraded.)

However, it’s exasperating to have to sift through all of them to get a particular snippet of information. F’rinstance, if you look up a Doom Knight’s abilities in the Units PDF document, you’ll discover they sow Chaos but that naturally raises the question of what Chaos does. Where do you begin to look for that information? The manual? Another PDF document? In-game? The forums? The readme.txt file? (Answer: manual.) I would have loved a single comprehensive document (or alternatively, a bunch of hyperlinked HTML files) that’s updated to reflect game balance changes made in the patches.

The game manual also promises:

Further information, including FAQs, extra scenarios, battle reports and other extra material can be found on either the Enlight website: http://www.warlordsbattlecry3.com or the Infinite Interactive website:http://www.infinite-interactive.com

Or not.

http://www.warlordsbattlecry3.com redirects to the publisher’s web site and unfortunately, there’s little there aside from a single FAQ, the patches, one desktop wallpaper and a few dozen screenshots. There’s no sign of the promised bonus scenarios, battle reports and other extra material.

Infinite Interactive, the developers, are in the midsts of switching ISPs and their site is currently unavailable as of writing.

Despite all that, this is an enjoyable game and this equally enjoyable battle report by game reviewers Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk serves to highlight that fact.