While the foundations of the MOBA genre predate Warcraft 3’s innovations, they directly inspired the Defense of the Ancients mod that forms the backbone of a lot of the MOBA genre. Those characters could also spawn an entire new genre of game, as it turns out.
Where Warcraft 2 and StarCraft had armies of disposable clones, Warcraft 3 armies featured superhero-level wizards and champions who could turn the tide of a whole battle if they were controlled wisely. When it released in 2002, Warcraft 3 sharply departed from the kind of RTS designs that Blizzard had developed from Warcraft through Brood War, placing heroes at the center of each faction’s army-each of whom developed like an RPG character over the course of battle.
