Warcraft 3 Reforged - HD remake

a year ago I would have been excited about this. Now, fuck Blizzard

It seems intermittent. I’ve been able to log in a couple times, and also hit the problem.

Warcraft 3 is strong competition for my favorite game of all time, and almost certainly my most played.

Not even thought about this since blizzards China fuckup. Ugh.

Yup. Went from an easy buy to an easy skip in one incredibly poorly handled incident.

War 3 happened to come out at exactly the right time for me, and I can confidently say that I was better at it than any other multiplayer or even semi-PvP game that I’ve ever played. I loved the campaign, the custom maps, and I sat near enough the top of both the 1v1 and team ladders for most of late 2002/early 2003 that 35-year-old-me is frankly embarrassed at how I was spending my time in lieu of frat parties and experimental coeds. I am exactly the target audience for this remake.

Also completely out on it after the China/HK episode.

I put about an hour into it and am so far having a really, really fun time with the campaign. I played and beat it at launch, so a very long time ago (same with the expansion) and almost none of this is familiar to me. It looks really good, too - far better than it looked in some of the beta streams I watched a few minutes of (probably compression doesn’t help there).

I can totally respect someone wanting to boycott Blizzard, but this is exactly what I wanted right now, seems like. I’m taking a break for a bit only to get a little (late) supper, and then I’m going to try and wrap up the Orc/prologue campaign yet tonight.

Wait – Hong Kong right? Just checking on the incident.

These are screenshots from the new one? Wow. I thought the old one looked like crap when it came out (I played through the campaigns on launch week). Good to see that it still looks terrible.

(Explanation: I hate that art style, and it makes sense that they didn’t change it).

Correct.

Degraded visuals and animation

They back pedaled on plans to redo the in engine cutscenes

They announced that ages ago, it wasn’t a surprise.

What happened here?

Modern, cost saving, no-frills Blizzard doesn’t have the resources to remaster the work of old school, ‘it’ll be out when it’s out’, maximum attention to detail Blizzard. They copy pasted animations and messed up the visuals, apparently, among other issues.

I know when the beta started there were news reports that the performance was awful, so maybe they had to scale back a little? It doesn’t look anywhere near that dark on my screen, though I was excited about the UI changes so not seeing them in the full release is a bummer - I’m pretty sure I saw them in the odd beta video I was watching, so that’s confusing.

The models look fantastic, the animations are the same (I assume for parity with the original game, which you can play vs. other classic owners - which is a bummer for me as a guy that only wants this for skirmish/single-player I’d have preferred updated animations as well), the sound and quality of life stuff is welcome indeed (some of which may have been patched in over the years, admittedly - it’s been a decade since I played this).

It was only thirty bucks, so I don’t think I was expected a Final Fantasy XII Zodiac Age type remaster or anything, and in that regard I think it’s pretty good and looks great - and it’s been a treat to get back into, as well!

They actually aren’t. For whatever reason, a whole bunch of animations were copy pasted and many were lost in the process.

I feel like Age of Empires 2 DE puts this to shame.

That’s shitty, though to be fair I haven’t noticed it myself. Not that I might have, really - it’s been awhile since I played this. But I was playing when your reply popped up and I was enjoying the look and feel of the animations we do have - like Water Elementals look fantastic, they ripple and shit, it’s cool.

I haven’t tried this, but it’s on my wishlist. This kind of RTS isn’t really my thing any longer - what appealed to me about Warcraft 3 years ago, and still does, is the smaller unit counts and hero units that leveled up and had items to use/equip. I still think that’s cool. I’ve always been more of a Warcraft guy than a historical setting guy, I suppose.

Just to clarify - I’m not trying to defend Blizzard’s release of the game. Folks here really seem to want to pick it apart and want it to be bad, and I don’t want to try and rain on that parade. I’m just saying I grabbed it last night, played it a few hours then and then this morning, and am enjoying my return to Azeroth. All that said, I’ll let you guys look around for some ways in which it falls short to discuss. Enjoy!

I don’t want it to be bad. As much as I dislike Blizzard’s politics, I don’t want this to be a poor version of the game. I loved Warcraft 3, and I wanted a good HD version that would entice new players to discover the greatness of the campaign, and maybe encourage them to try other games in the RTS genre.

I’m glad you’re enjoying it, but you have nostalgia on your side. This release just seems like a half-baked port of the older version, especially when compared to the work the contributors made for AoE2DE. Maybe Blizzard should’ve just handed the reins off to some fan devs? I don’t understand how this release justifies what they previewed.

I was on the fence, leaning to not buying this because of Blizzard’s terrible-ness as a company. But now seeing how shoddy and half-assed this thing looks…yikes.

No way. What the hell happened to Blizzard? In other days, they’d never release something this poorly thrown together.

This just looks like a terrible money-grabbing cash-in.