Warcraft III: Reforged - now with lowest user metacritic score of all time

[MWaser]

That is actually 5-year-old me's idea of garbage disposal in the near future.

I always was a fan of dumping all trash in one big pit and nuking it. Much cheaper than orbit insertion @ $4k/kg. And eco-friendly!

Go Master of Orion 2 style: Core Waste Dump. Dump all the trash into the planet.

 

[Silly Germans]

Fools,
all that quality shit is recycled. I leave it to you to figure out where it ends up again.

 

[Beastro]

I still can't believe the main menu runs on google chrome.

Web apps are a plague. Soon even toilets will use chromium or node.js to run "apps" depending on five billion java script libraries just to flush water.

Soon?

 

[Citizen]

So I decided to play warcraft on pre-reforged patches for built-in widescreen support and stuff, encountered shitton of bugs in sp campaign: npcs doing crazy shit, dropping items in cutscenes, heroes can't equip items. I googled for solution and found this: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/warcraft3/t/bugs-in-warcraft-3-since-1-31-update/6906

It turned out that wc3 singleplayer was already dead before reforged even arrived, what a joke. So now if I wanted to replay SP campaigns I either had to go back to good ol' 1.26/1.27 versions with screen tearing and 4:3 aspect ratio, or find an elusive patch 1.29.2 which is considered less bugged (at least for campaigns) and works nice on big screens. I had to find an archived copy of torrent file on a russian torrent tracker to find it and for now it works okay, no major bugs encountered.

Modern blizzard is such a fucking embarrassment, and I remember Blizzard being basically a quality mark of videogame world

 

[whydoibother]

Don't forget the colorful palette used in WoW which to this day is a negative influence on art direction.

I disagree, I think thats the main reason the game's visuals haven't aged like your mom. Cartoony graphics have longevity, while also not requiring a big artist budged for the developer, nor a big hardware budget from the player. WoW is played in Russia and China too, the few hundred dollars for a graphics card there used to be more than a month's wages at the game's height.

 

[Olinser]

So I decided to play warcraft on pre-reforged patches for built-in widescreen support and stuff, encountered shitton of bugs in sp campaign: npcs doing crazy shit, dropping items in cutscenes, heroes can't equip items. I googled for solution and found this: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/warcraft3/t/bugs-in-warcraft-3-since-1-31-update/6906

It turned out that wc3 singleplayer was already dead before reforged even arrived, what a joke. So now if I wanted to replay SP campaigns I either had to go back to good ol' 1.26/1.27 versions with screen tearing and 4:3 aspect ratio, or find an elusive patch 1.29.2 which is considered less bugged (at least for campaigns) and works nice on big screens. I had to find an archived copy of torrent file on a russian torrent tracker to find it and for now it works okay, no major bugs encountered.

Modern blizzard is such a fucking embarrassment, and I remember Blizzard being basically a quality mark of videogame world

Blizzard is dead and buried. It's Activison Blizzard now.

 

[Zeriel]

Don't forget the colorful palette used in WoW which to this day is a negative influence on art direction.

I disagree, I think thats the main reason the game's visuals haven't aged like your mom. Cartoony graphics have longevity, while also not requiring a big artist budged for the developer, nor a big hardware budget from the player. WoW is played in Russia and China too, the few hundred dollars for a graphics card there used to be more than a month's wages at the game's height.

Lineage 2 came out before WoW, has in my opinion a much prettier art direction, and isn't overly colorful. It ultimately comes down to artistic direction and quality, not color. The RTSes were designed for readability, but that's a separate topic from WoW's (imo quite terrible) artstyle.

2004 in Korea:

2004 in the West:

Even if you hate the weeb influence, just look at the environments and tell me which one you prefer. If you say "WoW", I'd honestly be surprised, but I know there are a few people out there with taste that bad.

 

[Citizen]

More gold from blizzard forums:

If you paid attention to the news surrounding Reforged, you’d know that feedback was not favourable to how they ‘altered’ the game as much as they did. Originally the plan was for much more in depth changes to cinematics, animations and the like.

But the feedback was pretty clear. Folks wanted WC3 with a new coat of paint. They didn’t want a remake. So while the bones of the Culling cinematic and the map is there, the rest of the game remained as close to the original as possible. A few changes here and there to camera angles, but ultimately, they tried to stay as true to the base WC3 experience as they could.

So, if you want someone to blame for the fact that Reforged has been changed from Blizzcon to what it is now… look in the mirror. You lot asked for the game to remain unchanged, they listened.

 

[whydoibother]

It ultimately comes down to artistic direction and quality, not color.

Color is part of art direction. Its why Morrowind, which is in all other ways visually creative, looks ugly. It just came out during the rust&brown era, so its color scheme is awful. You can argue it serves to portray the mood of the setting, but I think black&red would better suit it. Fuck, purple even, for the devious underground magickings. Its a high fantasy setting, go high with the colors, don't be a turd.
I feel similarly towards WoW. Its mood is more playful and fancy, so its colors being brighter and imitating a comic book rather than real life suits it. Escorting a robot chicken to safety from pirates is a plot that needs bright colors.

 

[Zeriel]

Right, I guess my point is the colorful aspect is separate from the *quality* of WoW's art direction, which I would argue is quite poor. I think it's something that works a bit better in 2D art, if I'm being honest. It's the same sort of fucked up abortion that goes on when you see 3D renditions of 2D comics. Where it tends to work better is when you have 3D renditions of live action versions of comics (i.e, toned down) or going full stylistic and replicating the comics into a 2D form (see, Comix Zone).

Then again, Lineage is based on a manga series, and they did the transition swimmingly, so I guess I come back to the fact that I just think WoW's artists were not particularly smart when it came to execution. What's funny is that there are screenshots of pre-alpha versions of the game floating around where some of the character art looks better. Maybe this comes down to taste and I just completely disagree with what you find appealing, or what the designers found appealing. I dunno, though, because I quite liked Warcraft 2, and the art in the manuals, while nothing to write home about, was quite nice.

 

[Multidirectional]

It turned out that wc3 singleplayer was already dead before reforged even arrived, what a joke. So now if I wanted to replay SP campaigns I either had to go back to good ol' 1.26/1.27 versions with screen tearing and 4:3 aspect ratio

https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/renderedge-widescreen-fix.293641/
It works great on 1.27, getting no screen tearing either. Though I imagine you could simply force V-Sync from graphics card panel, just like you can force AA?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Don't forget the colorful palette used in WoW which to this day is a negative influence on art direction.

I disagree, I think thats the main reason the game's visuals haven't aged like your mom. Cartoony graphics have longevity, while also not requiring a big artist budged for the developer, nor a big hardware budget from the player. WoW is played in Russia and China too, the few hundred dollars for a graphics card there used to be more than a month's wages at the game's height.

Lineage 2 came out before WoW, has in my opinion a much prettier art direction, and isn't overly colorful. It ultimately comes down to artistic direction and quality, not color. The RTSes were designed for readability, but that's a separate topic from WoW's (imo quite terrible) artstyle.

2004 in Korea:

2004 in the West:

Even if you hate the weeb influence, just look at the environments and tell me which one you prefer. If you say "WoW", I'd honestly be surprised, but I know there are a few people out there with taste that bad.

To be fair, Lineage 2 looked fantastic for the time it released. It was one of the best looking games I played at the time, and hell it still looks pretty darn good.
Especially considering this was a game that would regularly have 2-300+ people on the screen at a time, especially during raids or sieges.

weeb influence

It's korean, which is probably why it doesn't look like anime trash

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the real reason to play lineage 2

Spoiler

Spoiler

this was pretty damn good eyecandy for 2004

 

[Citizen]

It turned out that wc3 singleplayer was already dead before reforged even arrived, what a joke. So now if I wanted to replay SP campaigns I either had to go back to good ol' 1.26/1.27 versions with screen tearing and 4:3 aspect ratio

https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/renderedge-widescreen-fix.293641/
It works great on 1.27, getting no screen tearing either.

Woah, pretty cool. It's a shame that it stretches the UI, but if I encounter major bugs in my current playthrough on 1.29.2, I will definetly switch to this

 

[AgentFransis]

Starcraft BW is superior to SC2 in every aspect.

Sure it is. And WC2 is superior to WC3 in every aspect while WC1 is superior to WC2 in every aspect.

Because this is my nostalgia. There are many like it but goddamn this one is mine.

SC and BW are better than SC2 story-wise.

They added a few interesting gameplay improvements in SC2, but overall it wasn't groundbreaking (I'd say it was somewhere on the level of BW), so SC2 felt as a lot worse game than it actually was for people who were let down by the continuation of the story.

Never played BW seriously and SC2 not at all but I used to watch tournament commentaries occasionally and BW is much more interesting to watch. SC2 tended to devolve into deathblobs a-moving into each other while BW has much visually clearer map wide action. And of course better art style and music too.

A few classic bits:

Great comment:

0:03
"Really?!"
"Yea!"
"Are you sure?!"
"Look it up!"
"AAAHHH PLAAAYYGUUUU"

Hero dragoon:

 

[Delterius]

 

[Olinser]

More gold from blizzard forums:

If you paid attention to the news surrounding Reforged, you’d know that feedback was not favourable to how they ‘altered’ the game as much as they did. Originally the plan was for much more in depth changes to cinematics, animations and the like.

But the feedback was pretty clear. Folks wanted WC3 with a new coat of paint. They didn’t want a remake. So while the bones of the Culling cinematic and the map is there, the rest of the game remained as close to the original as possible. A few changes here and there to camera angles, but ultimately, they tried to stay as true to the base WC3 experience as they could.

So, if you want someone to blame for the fact that Reforged has been changed from Blizzcon to what it is now… look in the mirror. You lot asked for the game to remain unchanged, they listened.

That's one of the most idiotic fanboi posts I've ever seen.

They LISTENED? The entire reason this failed so catastrophically is because they DIDN'T LISTEN and FUCKED UP THE ORIGINAL.

 

[Dakka]

That's one of the most idiotic fanboi posts I've ever seen.

They LISTENED? The entire reason this failed so catastrophically is because they DIDN'T LISTEN and FUCKED UP THE ORIGINAL.

This is the sort of craven bootlicker fanboy that gets repeatedly bent over by AAA companies and begs for more. I wouldn't pay him too much mind.

 

[cvv]

I don't believe for a second they planned "more in depth changes". For every big corporate studio the plan is always to push out an MVP - minimally viable product. Meaning as little work as possible, as fast as possible, preferably for the full price.

If they really had feedback calling for keeping the original as intact as possible that would be music to their ears.

 

[Citizen]

That's one of the most idiotic fanboi posts I've ever seen.

They LISTENED? The entire reason this failed so catastrophically is because they DIDN'T LISTEN and FUCKED UP THE ORIGINAL.

Yeah, you have to be deranged to believe that. "You asked for the game to be unchanged, they listened" They didn't listen to anyone lol, it's just a bunch of incompetent retards, that are named after a once great gamedev, making a very cheap cashgrab. I wouldn't even care if it was sold as a separate product and old TFT wasn't touched, but they just literally erased the old game from history (and from the customers' hard drives lol), and now make classic users play this turd

 

[Citizen]

I don't believe for a second they planned "more in depth changes". For every big corporate studio the plan is always to push out an MVP - minimally viable product. Meaning as little work as possible, as fast as possible, preferably for the full price.

If they really had feedback calling for keeping the original as intact as possible that would be music to their ears.

I doubt the team assigned to this was even capable of doing a good remaster. I would be honestly surprised if any of them even played wc3 before, because you need to be a heartless son of a bitch to massacre a beloved childhood classic like this

 

[cvv]

I wouldn't even care if it was sold as a separate product and old TFT wasn't touched

This is completely incomprehensible. If they created a true remake, in modern visual standards, and kept the original game on the market, they'd make everyone happy, both old and new audiences.

I would be honestly surprised if any of them even played wc3 before, because you need to be a heartless son of a bitch to massacre a beloved childhood classic like this

Well it was outsourced no? At least that's why I read, might've been a rumor tho. But if true, then zero wonder that it's all fucked up.

Btw even if it came out solid, outsourcing one of the most beloved games in history to some kids in China? That alone should get that fat long-haired idiot fired.

 

[Theodora]

Is there any chance or sign of them fixing it, or did they literally just say fuck it, give into refunds, and stop caring?

 

[Jaedar]

Is there any chance or sign of them fixing it, or did they literally just say fuck it, give into refunds, and stop caring?

Pretty sure they already wrote the whole thing off as an unsalvageable loss.

 

[Danikas]

Is there any chance or sign of them fixing it, or did they literally just say fuck it, give into refunds, and stop caring?