Warcraft III has long stood as one of the greatest creative sandboxes in gaming history. Its World Editor and custom map ecosystem have produced some of the most iconic experiences in gaming including entire genres such as MOBAs and tower defense games.
Today, a new generation of map developers continues this tradition, pushing the boundaries of design, storytelling, and community engagement. However, the current 500 MB map size limit has become a critical obstacle that threatens the growth and innovation of Warcraft III’s custom game scene.
- Rapid Asset Growth: Modern mapmaking demands higher-quality assets (HD models, textures, music, voice acting, as well as many other aspects of customization to deliver a quality product for the playerbase). These quickly exceed legacy size expectations.
- Our Case Study:
- One month ago, our project, one of the most daily played maps in the custom games scene was 350 MB.
- Today, through rapid development it is already 410 MB.
- At this rate, we will hit the 500 MB ceiling in only a few more development cycles, long before our vision is fully realized.
I am trying to get your attention for this technical limitation and not for our project in any way and this is why I will not mention it by name.
- Optimization Exhausted: Every asset that could be compressed or optimized has already been reduced to its smallest possible form without sacrificing critical quality. We are no longer limited by inefficiency, but by the hard technical cap itself.
- Creative Restriction: Developers are forced to cut quality or features to fit within the cap, reducing the potential impact of projects.
Please raise awareness for this critical topic that will soon affect the vast majority of the warcraft 3 custom games scene.
28 Likes
Please let custom maps be bigger!
9 Likes
The forum commenter should instead read the post before commenting, which isn’t a hard thing to do but can be time consuming for some
9 Likes
People with a lack of awareness should keep their worthless opinions to ones self.
Now back on topic, Map size limit should be increased to 2GB to future proof the next few years of development. Technology and speed has advanced significantly and 500mb map size is honestly laughable.
9 Likes
Improve the size of custom maps so that creators can do even more beautiful things with the map´s and that many more great and cool ideas still happen.
6 Likes
I feel like it should be increased to 10 or 20 GB since you are creating a new game inside the editor i feel like this should be doable even for blizzard
5 Likes
The original Warcraft 3 game and everything in it back in 2003 was about 1 GB of storage. The audio and cinematic videos accounted for about 600 MB, and the remaining 400 MB were the game graphics, icons, textures, models, and so on. I once did a hobby project where I played with this, removed the audio and video, and then removed superfluous files and used community mod technology to compress the game graphics down until only 100 MB remained but the 100 MB game installation was fully compatible with the Battle.net online play and custom games back in its day, and had working character art for all of the iconic Warcraft III units.
Have you investigated if your map is 500 MB whether it might be possible for you to use advanced fan-made compression technology to reduce this size?
Hi Retera,
It would be possible indeed to squeeze a bit more size through a lot of work and even more meanings of optimization for our project but the scope of this post is to address the general issue that lies with the limitations of the game for now
6 Likes
add me on bnet and I will tell you MYM#2330
2 Likes
Bump , this should be taken into consideration i don’t see why blizzard would not allow more size
3 Likes
Bump, this is really important.
3 Likes
bump, who are we kidding anyway everyone been lag spiking like crazy and desyncing like crazy for a week now I see it on every warcraft 3 streamer they can’t hold their servers together with a duct tape, we expect actual map size increase? lol
2 Likes
taking a moment to mention the latest update is pretty benefic for custom games community however we still very much require the map size limit increase, up
4 Likes
Up, increasing the map size limit would
Help benefit anyone in the custom scene 
4 Likes
Increase limit to 2 gb and if you worry about servers load just decrease download speed after 500 mb
3 Likes
Implementing such a feature without a popup box letting players know whether a map is above or below a certain size so they can agree or disagree to proceed with downloading it would be very absurd.