Runoff, 2002, Game of the Year

[UnderwaterFunktown]

Pajderman said:

This is a difficult year that saddens me a lot. The game I played the most from games released this year is by far Warcraft 3. The campaign is awesome but the mods and community created content is what elevated this game to legendary status. So many spin off genres started or got popularized in the Warcraft 3 motor. But then Blizzard in a spiteful mode for loosing the Dota name effectively killed the mods in the update released with the train-wreck Warcraft 3 reforged. Any mods would automatically be Blizzard owned going forward. Old maps and mods disappeared. It is still possible to play on private servers using one of the older patches of the game I've heard, something I have yet to try out.
If it was not for the fact that I try to judge games based on my enjoyment of playing them today in their current state Warcraft 3 would be a top 10 game ever for me.

The thing about that is though that Blizzard has technically always owned all custom maps according to the games eula, but it's seemingly not enforcable in practice. DotA 2 isn't the only case of a W3 custom map turning into a full game and afaik they've never (successfully) claimed the rights to any of them.

Also the majority of older custom maps (maybe ~90 %) still work in Reforged, almost all of the high profile ones do. It's still kind of a shit show compared to the original, patches usually break as much as they fix, but it's certainly better than the launch state. Definitely playable for melee/campaign and most custom maps and there are still some solid new ones being made.