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When Blizzard first started making Warcraft III, they wanted to depart from the time-honored tradition of the RTS game where all you have to do to win is simply out-produce your opponent. As an aside, this is an actual military strategy, and the US used it when they triumphed in WWII. Instead, the folks at Blizzard initially focused more on the hero characters involved in the story line, as well as on squad level management. They wanted players to actually care about the characters that they were playing as, and not to simply use them in the standard cannon fodder way. This strategy also allows you to use spells and exploit the unique characteristic of the units. Because there are so few units on the screen at once, it is advantageous for you to capitalize on the full potential of a given unit instead of attempting to simply rush up the tech tree. To accomplish this goal and build an RPS (Role Playing Strategy) game, the designers locked the camera around a specific hero in the game. Some problems eventually arose from this due to the fact that all you could see was the immediate vicinity around the hero, and if you wanted to look around, you’d either have to rotate the camera around the hero, or you’d have to actually rotate the character inside of the game.

Eventually the designers of Warcraft III realized that this method was simply not going to work (refer to the part in the Preface about Blizzard’s practice to not release a game until it’s satisfactory, and studying what the competition is doing with games of a similar genre). Therefore, they changed the camera’s position back to a floating camera that is free to move from the hero or party, and can take in a much larger portion of the map. As a result, Blizzard was forced to scale down the size of all of its characters, and to redo the textures for them. Not surprisingly, they have accomplished this task with the utmost perfection, and there is no trace of any conversion problems.