What made Warcraft III successful is hard to see by just installing the game, I believe. I began to remember when I installed Reign of Chaos Patch 1.00 from our family CD. The Unit Editor in that version is simple, elegant, and straightforward for players. This Unit Editor was inspired by the Warcraft 2 editor and is very simple. It presents a list of game units organized by race, and offers the ability to edit their basic stats. There is nothing too complex in it. There are no “Rawcode Unit IDs” (these are heavily used in our “modern” map development), and you cannot change the ultimate design of a unit. Sheep cannot attack and cannot be changed to attack. Heroes are heroes and cannot be changed to non heroes. Heroes have an inventory and units do not. Units have a set of voice lines per unit that cannot be changed. You cannot Copy&Paste a unit to make a new one, although there is a menu option to launch a wizard to make a new unit inheriting data from an original one, but with a new name.
In this Unit Editor, you cannot make new abilities and you cannot change the text on what abilities claim to do. Its only function besides editing unit stats is to edit items, which are pivotal to the feel of the game and the Heroes. For items there is just a basic list of options that lets you modify what icon they show and what text they display, as well as some other stats such as Gold Cost. You can also give items “abilities” from other items, so you could change Orb of Fire to also give you “Item Damage Bonus (+5)” which is an ability that means the item gives 5 more damage to the hero when carried (on top of whatever it already did).
In that old game version, you can also change the model of a unit to the model for any other unit. It uses the same dialog that the Icon chooser uses, letting users pick the unit to inherit the model from based on their in-game icon.
Almost every statement that I just made is contradictory to their modern counterparts in The Frozen Throne. Why? Because everything was changed to be more complicated in Frozen Throne to “feed the beast” and to make players more able to mod the game. Blizzard in 2002-2004 tactically eased their player base into understanding the map editor by gradually improving its complexity, and they generally landed on a sweet spot in The Frozen Throne were it was easy to do 80% of the work of making World Editor content pretty quickly in a way that left the user able to test each change and each step and to take joy in their work.
The recent patches push that same agenda for “feeding the beast” even further. Now every unit or object in the World Editor shows its rawcode ID next to it, scaring away new players by declaring that “a World Editor user must be aware of the complications of rawcode IDs.” The game now supports new hacked-in functions to load UI table of contents files in the ancient 2002 format used internally at Blizzard for defining UI. It allows players to hack apart the hardcoded game UI, and makes it possible to make a Diablo 2 style inventory popup on the screen with the injection of table of contents files even though changing heroes to have 9 items per hero inventory instead of 6 per hero inventory is immensely difficult.
Reaching the end of the spectrum where “anything is possible, but everything is complicated” is the reason that I did not like Starcraft 2 modding. If Starcraft 2 had kept the easy edits to the game simple to accomplish, it probably would have absorbed the Warcraft III modding community especially considering that Starcraft 2’s engine has been modded by fans to play a full working replica of the Warcraft III game inside of that engine.
But even knowing that Warcraft 3 replica exists on the Starcraft 2 engine, and that the Starcraft 2 engine is more fully featured, is not enough to bring the Warcraft III community to that game. It is not enough because the Warcraft III map developers probably do not honestly understand how the Warcraft III replica that runs on Starcraft 2 was created because it is too complicated – because Starcraft 2 is itself too complicated to develop maps easily.
So, in my opinion, the future of map and mod development on Warcraft III is grim because Blizzard is willing to give the players what they ask for: complex new modding APIs. By the nature of their complexity, the new APIs bring the game closer to the Starcraft 2 problem.
So, the thing that Warcraft 3 does better than Starcraft 2 is fading. But people do not change easily, so we still play Warcraft 3.