ah yes, more of that “we know” as a way to veil what people don’t.
The ‘editor’ doesn’t exist. Plans to build one were stopped in the myriad of blue posts over the years regarding adjusted cadences for game updates, and it wasn’t made in the first place as – unlike starcraft of warcraft – the game doesn’t have a ‘set’ asset library scripted to a GUI for players to adjust a couple of numbers or script flags.
Blues have said the way they went about making new units, spells, etc etc don’t adhere to the interface people expect from an editor, so they’d have to invest the time to actually build a tool that would limit how they developed for the game, which is time that would take away from trying to finish content when they were pushing for new stuff for the game.
Then there’s the need to then make a way to share the stuff people would make. While many have relied on the “it’s just a sc2 mod” for the game over and over again, blues commented back at the Alex release that it’s simply not that simple and HotS has had to deviate quite a bit from SC2 to do the things they’ve done, and tried to do, for the game.
Blizzard is not interested in let people create things, they are angry since warcraft 3 modders made DOTA and don’t want to repeat the same mistake. There’s more and better games out there, don’t be sad.
Wow, a lighthammer post. It’s eerie how this post is still so on brand, making wildly off base suggestions and peddling misinformation how the game works.
Sad part is Blizzard could have just played the game fairly and they’d have Dota2 as an IP but instead they tried to screw the little guy and lost the IP as a result.
In hindsight, given their handling of…basically all of their franchises…probably for the best. Blizzard is not competent when it comes to IP management. At all.
They would need to transfer a lot of devs over to Hots just to build this Hots Editor. There’s a reason they denied doing it before when they had over 100 people working on Hots, they definitely won’t do it now.
Just to point out: you know we can ALREADY extra the maps from the archive files and open them up in SC2Edit already, right?
Yes, yes, there’s a TON of errors caused from not having the lots of art assets and code largely related spell mechanics / physics that arent in SC2Edit.
Blizzard even told us that they used the very same tool that made the SC2 Maps they have(had?) on the website for the HotS Maps.
I’m not even talking about the “more bizzaire” factoids we publicly know less about; such as the LAN Client that was “said to be” (largely known as fact, but there is some black magic on THIS topic) used for tournaments.
HeroesEdit is litterally tool sitting on devs desktops at Blizzard office. I don’t think we need an OPERATION KALI to sneak into Blizzard and steal it.
They could put it out tomorrow if they wanted to. There’s no question of its existance with devs having had talked about it on Reddit.
The only resource addition needed is a tutorial explaining where to throw the maps to be able to use them.
Yes, they made hots based on the SC2 engine, but that is already very very modified and different from the original SC2 engine.
Even if they have some tool to make maps, heroes and contet, it probably requires very deep knowledge to use it. Plus, they can’t just release it like that, since there’s a lot of policies/rules that would be broken. They would probably need to make a tool from scratch to the common player to use, which would require A TON of work (they won’t even make new content anymore, imagine investing hundreds or even thousands of hours from several people in the game just for a small playerbase to make some maps without generating them any money).
They would also need to remake all the UI in the game, specially the home page, and it seems like that’s very hard to do since they haven’t updated anything in years (just pictures and small stuff), even though we could use lots of improvements and QoL changes there.
Yeah, an Editor won’t happen. Even if the game was making billions of dollars a month, with thousands of devs working on it, it probably still wouldn’t happen.
Yes, SCedit can open the files which is why devs have suggested that people use that if they want to edit heroes stuff as had been showcased with aprilfool’s or the edited heroes map shared by Dr Logan for trying to get more community traction on that.
SC2 then has the structure to distribute and play the maps with systems not already present in HotS. Since HotS has the reconnect system tied to the replay scripts, that also means they’d have to circumvent that process on map parity which creates other issues for the game, some of which were noted on why the brawl rotations where stopped. That’s likely not a fix they can put out ‘tomorrow’
We’ve talked about releasing an editor for Heroes quite a bit over the years, but have been vocal about our plans changing as our game priorities shifted. While we would love to release an editor and see what amazing things the community could come up with, the amount of work required to take the tools we work with and make them fit for public consumption (and further, map publishing/curation) would severely limit much of the other work we want to do on the game. I would never say never, but there are currently no plans to do the work required to release the editor. I will echo what /u/AngryMrMaxell said and add that the StarCraft II Arcade scene is still going strong, so anyone with a passion for making Heroes-like content should definitely check that game (and its editor) out.
On one hand, an ‘editor’ already exists, and that is what they’ve pointed out for years for people to use.
On the other hand, some of the more memorable mods didn’t use a gui editor for their maps and effectively wrote code in a notepad instead (DotA). The requests have already been out for years, so if the goodwill extension for that was going to be available ‘tomorrow’ then it probably would have already happened instead of a gifted mount.
So, either there’s more work involved than you’re willing to consider – and thus more truth to somethings that have been cited here, instead of your veiled references that contradict those – or it’s relatively redundant compared to what is already available, hence why more wasn’t put forth in this regard already.
What they could do (though I know they won’t) that would work is to release it as open source and let the community work on it. There would no doubt be people that would make an editor and other things just as a passion project.
If Blizz won’t work on it, and aren’t intending to make any more money off it, they should at least let us work on it. But, of course, that won’t happen.
Yeah, that won’t happen for sure. I really liked the explanation someone gave on reddit.
There’s IOS and Android. Android let’s you do literally anything with your phone. Or you can have the Apple experience… Well, Blizzard is like Apple. So yeah, they won’t do anything like that, unfortunately.
It probably exists but is very unlikely to be released publicly for simple reason that it would stand as an embarrassment for how little they’ve been able to achieve with it.
Don’t forget that SC2Edit was a fork of WoWEdit and HeroesEdit is of course a fork of SC2Edit.
Thinking on it from that perspective, maybe I am a little naive thinking they could just plot it on us and just tell us where to put the maps to make things work.
The things I could see needing work before giving us HeroesEdit (obviously not a complete list) are:
Any references to WoW that might exist (would be a real mess if the community randomly figured out they could massively change WoW assets)
Any references to SC2 — less of a problem then WoW assets, but it MIGHT be something they wouldnt want to see us mucking about in.
The ability to assign skins to characters — might interrupt their potential cash cow.
I think those are the big ones.
I know both Blizzard and the community are probably thinking “Yea, we need a way to distribute those maps” — to them I say “poppycock” — we only need to know how officially where the maps go in the HotS folder. Let the community figure out if a big repository needs to be made or if we’re fine trading them amongst ourselves. We don’t need a fancy distribution system — at least at first. If HeroesEdit and related maps prove super popular; consider it after that.
Blizzard USED to be a very kind company to the community’s efforts to make things. That’s at the heart of the American Spirit. Let the community pick up where Blizzard left off. I wouldnt be surprised if, in time you saw the community making high quality heroes to add to the game.
I’d love to see a HotS Editor, and it would go a long way towards keeping this game alive, or even reviving it.
The problem with this is that an editor doesn’t actually exist yet. This game wasn’t created and designed in an editor the way SC2 was. They have tools for creating new content, but they’re likely not something they’re willing to release to the public due to it either being proprietary, too unconstrained, or simply not user-friendly enough.
And unfortunately, it would take a lot of effort to create another set of tools to create new content with, and it would take even more effort to change the ones they have without losing functionality.
It would be great to see an editor added, but unfortunately that is almost certainly never going to happen unless something big changes.
Just FYI, that is definitely not the comparison you think you’re making.
