It was a necessary move to curb the rampant cheating they had seen in Diablo and StarCraft online play.

It has birthed three best-selling strategy games, a blockbuster Hollywood movie, a bunch of novels and comics, a mega-popular (digital) collectible card game ( Hearthstone ), and an epic, genre-defining MMO that, 15 years on from launch, is soon to get its eighth expansion.

And while most of its cultural impact and fame (and infamy) stems from that MMO, World of Warcraft, theres something to be said for the quiet legacy of Blizzards 2002 real-time strategy game Warcraft III.

It paved the way for WoW s success, kicked off the trend of bringing RPG elements into non-RPG genres, triggered a revival in tower defense games, and spawned the uber-popular MOBA genre, which was invented out of its modding tools.

Warcraft III also happened to be a great game, too.).

I spoke to eight of the roughly three dozen core development staff from the original Warcraft III team about how it was made and how it helped shape the future (which is now the present) of the games industry.

This is a compressed retelling of their many stories and anecdotes.

There was some development being done on Brood War, which was an expansion, lead designer Rob Pardo told Ars.

Then there were two other teams that went offone of which was going to work on a new Warcraft game.

We wanted to push past what we had been doing before to make something fresh, recalled Art Director Samwise Didier.

StarCraft had nailed the mass army vibe, he added, where you toss marines and zerglings into the meat grinder.

But with Warcraft, Didier argued, units had always felt more like characters than just bodies to march off to slaughter.

He and his colleagues wanted to accentuate that individuality.

Gone were the resource collection and base building of previous Warcraft titles, and this new game would utilize a camera perspective that was more pulled-injust a little further above and behind the hero character than youd get in a third-person RPG.

The culmination of the demo had you facing off against an undead dragon, which later became what we all know as the Undead Frost Wyrm, only this dragon was more of a boss fight and much larger in scale.

Since there were no tools or systems in place yet to create the terrain or cliffs, all of the environment had to be custom built and patched together.

Imagine League of Legends or Dota, and then you get additional heroes on the side of your hero, and you can use their abilities along with you, but they all sort of move as one and fight as one unit.

It had six planned races and a slated release date of late 2000.

But it was a big point of contention on the teamthat, you know, it doesnt feel like an RTS anymore.

He pulled the trigger and switched, which also caused a group of people to quit and go form a different company, a different studio, in order to realize the vision that they had, said Pessino.

That breakaway group eventually went on to create Guild Wars the critically acclaimed best-selling MMO that broke convention by foregoing subscription fees.

The change in direction generated more than a few headaches for them.

All the work that was done for the first version of Warcraft III, said Pessino.

It was for client-server, and its a fundamentally different way of approaching running the simulation of a game.

Client-server benefits For Diablo II, released in June 2000, Blizzard changed from a peer-to-peer to a client-server model for the network architecture supporting online play.

Warcraft 3 Map Fight Of Character Ai