When eventually the scene erupted with a bunch of standalone competitors, including the eventual winner, League of Legends, these were ideas that had been honed, hacked, balanced and mastered in years of beta testing and iterative development within Warcraft 3.
People would download a DOTA map and then edit it, making their own balance changes or adding their own heroes and assets, or even just fixing things so they couldn’t lose. The three lane structure, the autoattacking waves, and players placed in charge of a single hero – there were thousands of versions out there. You might know that DOTA – Defense of the Ancients – was originally a Warcraft 3 custom map. It was an unprecedented, user-friendly gift of fire that was usable even by a teenager who had never coded before. There were some Starcraft 3D models in there in case you wanted to literally recreate a Starcraft campaign mission inside Warcraft.
You could change the size of models, creating giant skeletons, and change their colour according to a full RGB slider. The mapmaker came with all the assets and abilities of the full Warcraft 3 campaign – a truly shocking range of powers. It came bundled with an enormously powerful set of mapmaking software. See, Warcraft 3 was more than the ladder and the campaign. No, we were doing something far more important: We were going into the Custom Games. And it’s not like we were playing competitively we were on Australian dialup, we might as well have been trying to fight Neo in the matrix. How did we not become sick of it? We did this for years. This is the year where three brothers share two computers. Even the remaster of Warcraft 3, which should have been the easiest of slam dunks, became a horror story the nightmarish contrast between what was and what is never illustrated more viscerally than Thrall auto-attacking a single butterfly into the unimpressed chest of a demon lord.īut this is 2002. Blizzard were the rockstars of the video game world and the outro credits literally featured a rock and roll concert as an in-engine cinematic.Īnd much like a rock star, twenty years on from that dizzying concert where everyone was chanting their names, 2022 Blizzard is a broken, drug-addicted husk with reprehensible political views and a litany of sexual harassment claims, trying to cash in on their past glory.
Nobody had a bad word to say about Warcraft 3. It also represented the height of if not Blizzard’s popularity then its reputation – WoW would come later and be an even bigger hit, but people complained about WoW. It was the magnum opus of, at that point, gaming’s most beloved company – Blizzard Entertainment, pioneers of the incredible strategy of ‘don’t release a buggy unbalanced piece of shit’. It brought the RTS genre to the height of its popularity, with a four part campaign and a competitive multiplayer scene. Today Thanqol is talking about Warcraft III, which released in 2002 and would go on to change the face of games as we know them. Welcome back to GOONHAMMER ’02, where we look back at the games and media that we loved 20 years ago.