We may add an additional penatly for death, but we won't decide this until we get further into play balancing. It is too early to know how many CDs the game will be on, but we fully expect it to be more than one. We don't have an exact number yet, but we're designing the game for team play, and we will definitely support more players per game than Starcraft did. We're using non-proprietary file formats for everything in the game, because we want to make it very easy for people to customize the game and do total conversions. Our geometry, animations, and unit stats are stored as text files.
Sound is in wave files.
Textures can be pcx, tga, bmp, etc. Script files ship in source code format. While we have not yet discussed what we will be doing as far as getting ongoing information about the game out to our fans will be, but we do intend to support the Warcraft community. This is one of the Orc heroes called the Tauren Lord. It is actually a Minotaur, not an Orc, and among other abilities, has the War Stomp skill.