Warcraft 3: Mother of all MOBAs
Riot Games’ League of Legends is currently the largest game in the world, with 115 million unique monthly players, tens of millions in prize pools, and one of the largest — if not the largest — audience in the esports scene, with the 2019 World Championship bringing in a peak viewership of 3.9 million people. Comparably, Valve’s Dota 2 has a smaller viewership and player base — albeit still in the millions — but a much larger tournament prize pool. It currently holds the record for the largest prize pool in esports history with a total of $34,333,874 in one tournament. These games are immensely popular, and have pretty much broken into the mainstream, or at the very least have reached a world-wide audience. But where did these games come from? Did Riot Games and Valve just happen to come up with very similar games at almost the same time? The answer lies in a Real-Time Strategy developer Blizzard, and more importantly, the custom game niche within their games.
While technically originating in Starcraft (1998), the concept of MOBAs — multiplayer online battle arena — was popularized by a custom game within Warcraft 3 (2002). Made by a small team of modders and lead by designer IceFrog, Defense of the Ancients touted a three lane map, player-controlled heroes, AI-controlled minions, leveling up and buying items, a team of four other allies, and an enemy base (which was called an Ancient, hence the name) to destroy. These are all core aspects to the MOBA genre from which League and Dota were based on. While the graphics were dated and the controls clunky, it was a hugely popular custom game within Warcraft 3, with a fan website garnering over a million monthly users at its peak — which was a lot considering the time period and the size of the gaming scene. While there are no official statistics about the player count, the community perception is that more players were playing Warcraft 3 for the custom games than the competitive, intense player-versus-player game that the RTS genre is known for, which leads to another question. Besides the well-received yet relatively conventional base game, what made Warcraft 3 revolutionary?
The answer is a little bit more than the genres it created, and it has to do more with the environment it built. I’ve mentioned custom games a lot, but not how they were created in Warcraft 3. Packaged with the initial release game, players used the built-in, developer-created level editor to create custom maps, game modes, and campaigns. It let you change and customize almost every aspect of the game into the exact thing that you want, and it served as a strong foundation for creative players to produce their ideas without much effort. Warcraft 3 was also the third game in the popular Warcraft series, as well as another RTS game by the publishers of Starcraft, which, at the time, was one of the biggest games in the scene. This meant that this game had a large following, and because of its success, popularity and a wider audience followed. A larger audience means more players have access to the level editor, and more creativity can be sourced and materialized into functioning game modes. In essence, Warcraft 3’s combination of a fantastic, built-in level editor and the large audience that it garnered created the perfect storm of ideas and inspiration that lead to an extremely diverse library of custom games that birthed the MOBA genre. Its genius lies not within the game itself, but the community of developers created within it.
Games these days tend to have little to no support for mods, editors, custom games, etc., especially from larger studios and publishers. Even Blizzard’s Starcraft 2 level editor suffers from publishing restrictions, and there has been generally little support for custom games past the initial release of the editor. On the contrary, an auto-battler mod for Valve’s Dota 2 has become massively popular, spawning a standalone game as well as numerous other implementations in other games like Teamfight Tactics in League. It goes to show that giving players the ability to express their creativity and ingenuity is a good way to create new and exciting games for all to play, and Warcraft 3 was the frontrunner of that idea. It created some of the biggest games in the world, brought in millions of new players, and grew the gaming scene more than we can really appreciate. That’s what made Warcraft 3 so revolutionary.
