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

Add to that the upcoming Tib Dawn and Red Alert remaster which is very promising. When EA is better at listening to fans than Blizz...

 

They don't even have feet, wtf.

 

I haven't really heard anything like that and I'm pretty sure everyone played the HD edition before DE was released.

 

Don't know it might have had flaws but it added content at least. And honestly it is hard to do worse than blizaard here. They removed content, destroyed the classic version and the only addition are female death knights...
Warcraft 3 was my favorite game and I was not even motivated to buy such a shitty remaster. And when I first heard the news I was so happy at the idea of doing all those custom game again.

 

Mmm, let's be honest here, this remaster looked shit the moment they revealed what it's going to look like.

 

Both AoE2 remakes were fine and had new content which was entirely up to par. if they had major flaws, I think they were ones which concerned only people dedicated to multiplayer.

 

Though, can you think of any remaster of a 3D game that went beyond widescreen fix/modern OS support and ended up good? Once you start remaking models, costs climb really high and I think Activision/Blizzard announced the project without thinking how much it would cost to do it right and then they said 'fuck it, let's release it and forget about that'

 

Maybe MediEvil? I've never played it but the remake looks fine, I guess. I personally prefer the early 3D, but I'm weird like that. Refunded failed to retain the original aesthetic, which is a big no-no when attempting remakes/remasters.

 

AoE2's HD edition introduced a fresh wave of bugs and performance issues into AoE 2 that it didn't have before, and wasn't very HD either. It was basically an excuse release to charge a big price, which made it fairly unpopular with the oldschool AoE crowd. The multiplayer started running a lot worse too. Have a list. These aren't small bugs.

 

The Resident Evil 2 remake seems to be quite widely beloved, at least? Though I'm not sure what the circlejerk opinion about it is on this forum.

 

Maybe, but that's a list from 2013. I didn't follow AoE2 HD edition at all before the DE was announced, and from my limited experience I think everyone was playing HD at the end?

 

The short end of it is: AoE 2 HD edition was a botched launch that was much buggier and less playable than regular AoE 2 was, with development staff blatantly ignoring the majority of bug reports and complaints. Age of Mythology's HD edition is also more popular than the original (re-releases have a way of doing that), but the original is still a much less buggy experience with its own multiplayer community (on voobly). It just so happens that when HD re-releases are done, the original non-HD versions suddenly become difficult to get a hold of. If the HD edition were as good as you impute, they would likely not have done a DE re-release with a different developer. It's not like AoE2HD's dev (Hidden Path Entertainment) has gone out of business.

 

Modern Warfare (COD4) remastered

 

It always amazes me that remastered versions that are only supposed to replace graphics somehow manage to introduce new defects.

 

This would not happen if they literally took every sprite/frame and upscaled it. The trouble starts when they change the animations, change their timings, etc. That's where the programmer becomes very tempted to "fix" the code to match the changed timing in the animation. Which starts the chain of falling dominoes.

With 2D games it's possible to not break anything if they take that very strict and conservative approach. With 3D games with a large graphics generational gap, they cannot avoid drastically altering the visuals, and in many cases, skewing their carefully tuned timings.

 

I think it's much simpler than that. When you hire remaster projects you are more likely to have incompetent hacks who are not good enough to make games for budget saving purposes than actual talent and you will have a team that feels compelled to do work for the sake of saying work has been done (the entire HD project being treated as little more than a filler of busywork in order to say "it has been enhanced") and so you have people fixing shit that wasn't broken and breaking shit because they didn't understand what they were doing and didn't really care either. In the case of Age of Mythology HD they actually liked the fact that they added bugs to the game because it gave them more work to continue "enhancing it" and treated it like it was a clever stunt somehow because now they could keep putting out patches saying "progress was made." This was the actual company position on it. That's the degree of parasitic fuck-ups you had working on it. They were an entire company of the kind of programmer whose contributions are negative because the sheer technical debt they inflict on the project means that their bad work will result in 2 more programmers being needed to fix all the bad shit that comes out of their work and it would've been easier if one of them could just toss out all of their work and rewrite it in a way that actually makes sense, except corporate prefers to plow on ahead than throw out a hire's work. But at least those shit programmers wrote a lot of lines of code (most of it because they do not understand how to write loops, much less algorithms). That's important, you know. HD remaster projects overwhelmingly tend to go to this kind of shovelware firm that makes a name for itself being cheap and terrible but people buy it anyway because the original game was decent so they keep getting contracts. That's also why a lot of HD graphics somehow end up looking worse than the original. They just half-ass it without giving a shit.

 

Ok, I'm really craving some WC3 action. Has this reforged bullshit been patched and improved or is it still a steaming pile of shit? Jesus fuck it's such a missed opportunity I just can't accept it.

 

Several weeks ago it was still possible to install the classic client through Public Test Realm. I do not know if this is still the case.

 

I haven't heard anything about it and I think they've more or less abandoned it. This isn't going to get better. The horrible undercooked state it was in at release just screams "we don't want to pour more resources into this", so why would they continue improving it after that? A Final Fantasy 14 situation this ain't.

 

It's functionally abandoned. They have like 1 asshole that occasionally pops up on the forums and releases fuckaround bug fixes, but they STILL haven't released the features that the original had that people actually wanted like Ladder or Clans, and at this point its highly unlikely they're going to.

Activision had the bean counters look at this and determine that the money and effort to make it actually playable is more than they'd make from sales from an actually functional game, so they abandoned it.

Blizzard is dead, it's Activision Blizzard now.

 

If that's the case then I think this really deserves the title of worst "upgrade" of all time, since its all but removed the possibility to get a functional copy of the game outside of arcane, legally-dubious methods.

 

Yep. It's a janky mess of 'upgraded' visuals that are WORSE than the originals for actual gameplay (half the ranged units you can't tell who the hell they're attacking), and they actively removed features of the original game.

We're how many months from release now? And not only do they STILL not have a ladder THAT WAS IN THE ORIGINAL GAME, they have NO PROJECTED DATE for when it will actually be in place.

This is beyond lazy incompetence, they actively destroyed the original.

 

"The chosen ones" custom campaign I thought was pretty good, though it's less RTS and more RPG.

 

Do you think we'll eventually get a "new coke" type deal, where Warcraft 3: Reforged is so loathed and so reviled, that a grassroots movement akin to the WoW: Classic one will emerge, pleading for an official re-release of the pre-reforged client as a separate product? (As opposed to just using the older client and not connecting to battlenet). People have already asked for this in large numbers, but I have to wonder if, given enough time and interest, Blizzard will try to sneakily earn some goodwill by giving us back something we already had.

 

At this point? HELL no.

People have basically forgotten about this. Only the die-hard Warcraft 3 fans care anymore, everybody else has simply abandoned it. Reverting to Classic would require an explicit admission that Reforged was a piece of shit, and 1) they're too arrogant to ever admit that and 2) publicly admitting that you knowingly sold a faulty product could land you in serious legal trouble in a number of countries, GUARANTEEING that you would have to issue refunds to anybody that bought it regardless of time played.