Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne - Page 64

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Historically Blizzard developed Warcraft: Legends before changing it to RTS gameplay and calling it Warcraft 3, but some concepts of that title survived in the form of the focus on smaller army combat and the inclusion of heroes. However, if you ignore this bit of historical information the decision to use heroes still makes sense. If Blizzard asked itself what would be an interesting approach to a micro-focused RTS game, the concept of special units with abilities seems like a good answer because that's something people enjoyed from the Starcraft campaign. I don't know what was the exact chain of decisions, but I think that placing heroes in your game is one of those fundamental decisions that affects the shape of the game a lot.

The obvious issue historically with having heroes in the game is that they don't scale. People often put aside heroes in the Starcraft campaign as they were a liability and would die too easily. This immediately suggests the following four ideas: 1) heroes should be able to respawn; 2) heroes should be able to scale over the course of the game; 3) units in the game should have a high health : damage ratio to avoid heroes dying too quickly; 4) unit numbers should stay relatively similar throughout the game.

Some of these points can be connected to other ideas. The first point leads to the altar building where you can then choose your hero, which leads to the higher starting resources to be able to build an altar right away. The second point becomes the idea that you can upgrade your hero, above and beyond the already existing unit upgrades. Of course the implementation chosen for this is the experience mechanic, but that doesn't strictly follow from the second point since you could imagine buying upgrades or even items too, so more on that later. The third point stands on its own, but is also related to unit design choices. The fourth point informs the need for upkeep (a tax on higher army size) and the change from growing to static economy since WCII & Starcraft. After all, if you can constantly improve your economy then even with upkeep, unless the latter is extremely taxing, you will eventually be able to overpower heroes easily, again unless heroes can become extremely strong and able to face hundreds of units.

Now you've created an environment where heroes can be used, but you haven't really created incentives to use heroes. You're also left with implementation details about the number of abilities that heroes should have. Experience is an obvious mechanic that was already used in other games, including Blizzard's very own Diablo. By letting heroes be affected by experience the player has an incentive to use his hero units in fights directly rather than indirectly.

Some ideas combine here and the leveling system as a way to upgrade the hero, based on experience points can take shape, with new abilities to purchase every level. Because the hero needs to scale, the abilities should have different levels of strength too, which is why you have three levels per ability.

There still is a problem though, maybe there are now incentives to use heroes in fights, but in a zero-sum multiplayer game you might still want to avoid fights in order to not give your opponent a chance to get an advantage. And since the economy had to be changed you can easily run out of things to do. For the game to work there need to be constant fights, since that's where heroes shine and that's what's supposed to replace the focus on economy. Creeps suggest themselves here, which by the way already existed in Starcraft alpha as a mechanic before they settled on empty maps. Hostile, neutral units that give you some reward for fighting them, which encourage you to be out on the map and which still encourage player interaction because of creepjacking.

Two additional points about the experience mechanic: there is an issue with experience in that you'll probably get more of it later on since there will be more units around, so you might have most of the game with no exp points to spend, and second of all experience counts as a positive feedback loop mechanic that doubles your gameplay advantage after killing an enemy unit. That's why you need increasingly more experience to level up as the game progresses. And of course experience should simply be given after killing a unit, which is the simplest and clearest approach, and that's what later on became last hit and denies in moba games.

Finally to diversify hero usage and to make killing creeps more exciting there would be item drops and items you could use, which of course is a standard idea in rpg games as well. This means that shops can exist in the game and it also suggests neutral buildings, different sort of shops for different types of items and neutral shops where you can buy units instead of items.

So the point is that the Warcraft III economy, unit balance and hero system seem to naturally follow from the idea to have a smaller scale, micro focused game.

Tomorrow I might do one about the unit design and the symmetries in game, based on 3point14's very interesting post on the last page.