While the game is a sequel to Warcraft II, at the press conference announcing it Blizzard was not totally comfortable with labelling it as a sequel and even mentioned that they considered calling it something else. The reason behind this is that while the game is a continuation of the Warcraft story, it is not a continuation of the gameplay style, which is now admittedly becoming slightly tired. Gone is the system of spending most of your time building up a base and an army that Blizzard helped pioneer. Instead, gamers will spend only a small amount of their time in the base, none of which will be spent creating new buildings. Instead you will start with a base that is only used to prepare your troops for battle. One Blizzard representative mentioned that in the previous Warcrafts around 70 % of the players time was spent working on their town. In Warcraft III they hope to bring this down to a mere 30%, allowing the player to get into the main action a lot faster and a lot more often.

In Warcraft III, Blizzard also hopes to add a dash of role-playing to the Warcraft recipe to further remove the game from its original strategy roots. In fact, they hope to create a new genre that they've named RPS - Role-Playing Strategy. The game will include quests to find resources and special items, heroes will lead units and so on and the game setting will be much more dynamic than in the earlier games, with NPCs, neutral towns to visit, special locations and the occasional wandering monster. The strategy element will also involve control of smaller units rather than the huge sprawling forces found in Warcraft and Starcraft.