By the time Warcraft III was released, Blizzard was basking in the success of back-to-back hits with Diablo 2 and Starcraft, two games that defined their respective genres. My expectations were high for this next installment in the series that brought me on path to computer gaming, and I was very satisfied. The third battle between Orcs and Humans now had two more distinct races, upping the complexity of RTS’s in a familiar fashion, but it was the addition of heroes to the battlefield that would prove most influential.

Prior to W3, I saw RTS’s as an arms race of who could produce a game with the most differentiation between playable factions, and this was the metric by which I compared games. The original Warcraft and its sequel each had two races, Starcraft upped the ante with three, and now Warcraft III had four. In comparison, The Age of Empires franchises used incomplete tech trees and unique units to separate between races, while games like Age of Mythology and C&C Generals fused unique playstyles with aspects of hero units. With the success of Diablo 2, Blizzard saw a demand for character progression, and when they encapsulated that theme within the confines of a real-time strategy game, it was a smash hit.

Blizzard leap-frogged the RTS arms race with the addition of hero units that evolved during the course of a game.

Heroes were good-looking too

With the addition of heroes that could gain experience, neutral creeps for heroes to kill, and items for heroes to use, the game of Warcraft III became centered around these units. They started off weaker than normal units in the early game, but as the game went on, they became absolutely devastating. I recall one of the most satisfying things to do in the game was to have a high level metamorphosed Demon Hunter rip through the other guy’s mass wyverns all stacked on top of each other.

The progression of a hero from killing small creeps to leading an army against the other players was very important. When it came to killing things with impunity, typing “e=mc2 trooper” just didn’t feel the same as winning the game with the hero you trained from level one. Starcraft hero units were usually just reskinned versions of normal units, but heroes in Warcraft III had unique abilities that got stronger as the game went on, and could hold items. They had stories. They felt special.

When it came to killing things with impunity, typing “e=mc2 trooper” just didn’t feel the same as winning the game with the hero you trained from level one.

Starcraft expanded the scale of the RTS with the 8-player 200 pop carrier vs battlecruiser battles, but the design of Warcraft took a step back from the large scale RTS’s that were coming out then like Empire Earth and Rise of Nations. Warcraft III shifted the focus back onto you. The game purposely had a lower population cap, introduced things like upkeep to punish massing units, and tabbing through units to micromanage their skills. Heroes were the centerpiece for this change, and it was reflected in custom games lobbies.

Just like in Starcraft, if you give the community a powerful modding tool, custom games of all sorts naturally pop up. People will take what they believe is most fun and make those parts more accentuated. The preeminent genre of games that naturally arose on the hero-centered Warcraft III were Hero Arenas. Modders took the heroes that everyone loved to play, removed everything RTS around it, and stuck them all together on a map to fight it out. Like custom games in Starcraft, they were themed, and one of the most popular ones that circulated on Bnet was a heaven-hell themed map called Angel Arena.

Depending on the version, Angel Arena had over 50 different heroes to choose from, which you used to kill camps of neutral creeps, take objectives, and fight the other players. It was fun not having to worry about other units and only control your hero, but there were a few shortcomings. The first was the presence of tomes, items that could permanently buff the stats of your hero without taking item slots. Thus, there was a way to make your hero stronger infinitely. I, and other people as well, quickly realized that playing agility heroes was broken because you could cheaply increase your agility with these tomes to the point where you could be hitting like a machine gun in a game with swords and arrows. Hero arenas rapidly became degenerate.

Angel Arena had a lot of heroes, but the variety among them was in fact very low. The original heroes that Blizzard designed had a nice albeit simple balance of skills, but the heroes in Angel Arena just took these skills and mashed them together with no coherence. There were many heroes with duplicate skills, and because of the presence of tomes, the random skills your hero had didn’t really even matter. Finally, the manner in which you progressed through the game was very confusing; there were objectives, but it was never clear what the objectives gave you, and they were trivially easy when you had access to tomes.

If you wanted to kill God, all you had to do was buy tomes of agility + 2.

Like RTS’s, I lost interest in Hero Arenas when it was clear that they hit quickly a cap in terms of complexity. The sheer number of heroes available to play kept it interesting, but was supplanted by the fact that they had the same skills as normal ladder heroes, with less coherence in design. So I played a variety of custom maps on Warcraft III during this time, and my favorites were generally the popular maps such as Footmen Frenzy, Battleships, Wintermaul, LTW, etc. As I refreshed the list of games to find new ones to play, this one map name kept popping up over and over again. When I decided to try it out, and clicked on “join game”, I was immediately kicked from the lobby. This happened time and time again, frustrating me endlessly. Why wouldn’t the host let me play? The name of the map was Defense of the Ancients.