User-Generated Content in WarCraft II

[freshfeeling]

I had never played the original WarCraft: Orcs and Humans but WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness became quite a local phenomenon at my elementary school for a while. I don’t think I’ve played any other RTS game any appreciable amount at all, but I definitely put a lot of hours into WarCraft II with its expansion. Although I loved the baked-in campaign missions and played them all, true to form, I probably spent even more time with the game’s map editor.

 

As a few points of interest, this was when Windows 95 was new and people around the world were newly transitioning to 32-bit operating systems. As I wrote when discussing OS/2 Warp games, my family volunteered to be late adopters to 32-bit Windows. Thus, it required a special extension to Windows 3.1 to allow me to (eventually) run WarCraft II’s Window 95-based level editor! This was called win32s and my brother helped me get that set up. Now I was ready to make a ton of WarCraft II maps (or puds, as they are sometimes called for the .pud file extension) for nobody in particular!

 

I don’t remember too much about my level design ambitions with this editor, but there were two main styles I liked:

• Making a map as symmetrical as possible so each player had identical access to resources… often with some hot commodity right in the middle, a Hunger Games cornucopia of sorts. This idea began with fairness but encouraged conflict. This general format was popular among others and I believe it worked.
• Epic quests! Mazes of trees or water or mountains such that a person would spend as much time wandering and exploring as they would collecting resources, upgrading and battling. I think my RPG love was getting the better of me here because this probably wasn’t actually very fun for anyone at all.

The symmetrical map style is a common one, actually, and of course it is. When I browse the currently-available PUD-hosting sites, probably like half of the maps are in that style. This includes this random one from RODY's WarCraft II Pud Archive:


WarCraft II’s expansion, Beyond the Dark Portal, introduced a set of super-powered hero characters like Alleria the elf archer and several others, many of whom I understand remained important in future WarCraft-universe lore - but I don’t know, as I’ve never played another WarCraft game. Not only were these units super powered in terms of stats, they also had unique artwork and voice clips. Sans expansion, WarCraft II already featured heroes who were featured as elements of certain quests and such but they were in no way remarkable. The fan community after the advent of the expansion made “improved”, unofficial map editors like War2xEd that allowed auxiliary features, like modifying the stats and features of any unit type including these heroes.

 

Eventually, I was drawn into the idea of giving each player in my custom WarCraft II maps a high-powered hero that the other units were simply there to support. The features enabled by these early tools were awesome, by the way, so one of my favourite things to do was replace Alleria’s arrows with dragon fire (as if she was shooting destructive, AoE fire arrows) and Zuljin the troll’s thrown axes with gryphon hammers (that erupted in awesome, AoE blue blasts), and then make the map Alleria vs. Zuljin. I must have made ten maps with some variation of this setup. I think the lack of configurable victory conditions brought things down somewhat, but it was still cool, in my opinion.

 

For a change in my personal history with user-generated content, I actually had means to distribute material I made. I had several real life friends who liked WarCraft II and we could swap levels on floppy disks. I was also part of a pretty good IRC community around this time with other players. That said, I don’t really remember ever getting other folks’ feedback on my maps so it’s possible nobody ever played them.

 

In these early internet days, like 1995 or 1996 or so, there were also early, badly-coded community websites for hosting this sort of thing. Now, you might assume, as I did, that internet archiving certainly took a while to take off and that there's no way to see what those sites were like in their prime... but apparently this isn't true. Even a lot of the older ones (from Lycos, Tripod, Geocities, etc.) are archived effectively with their original mid-90s web design charm. There are still a few more modern WarCraft II map-sharing communities still exist.
 

A specific funny thing I remember about the old WarCraft II PUD sites was a very popular map by download count was essentially a pixel art nude woman in a provocative pose made out of tree tiles. I specifically recall seeing that as a teenager. I have no idea whether it was fun to play. I tried to find it for this article but, alas...

 

I recall downloading battle maps from others and trying out a few of them. I wasn’t actually any good at WarCraft II though, so it didn’t go very well. I just liked screwing around with the map editors, official and otherwise.