[Tea Monster]

Surprise - NOT. Activision Blizzard have screwed the pooch again. They are still advertising features that were cut out of the betas as still being in the finished product. I loved to play this game, especially Tides of Darkness.

Why? I don't understand. This makes World Tour look like a finely polished product.

Remember kids, DON'T PRE-ORDER, OK?

https://arstechnica....ere-hoping-for/

[NightFright]

It was supposed to be a quick cash grab. What did you expect? That they invest millions into polishing this when they can't charge full retail price like they'd like to? Since Activision took over Blizzard, things went south with them. By now you shouldn't expect anything from them any more, it's a profit-oriented company like any other. And they will screw up more of their old brands. Just wait for D4.

[Tea Monster]

I was kind of expecting what was promised in promotional materials and in the cut scenes that were shown off before release.

I was a fool for thinking that Bobby Kottick wouldn't do us dirty. Silly me!

[Darkus]

I read that even the original Warcraft III has problems with the latest update. Fortunately I still have the original CDs.

But what kills me the most is that they changed their "terms of use", so everything you make with their editing tools will automatically belong to them.

[NightFright]

Well, if anybody is still stupid enough to mod for WC3 by now, or any other Blizzard game for that matter, probably deserves to be stripped of their creative rights. It's like going to a brothel, but they actually cut off your dick there. And before that, you declare you are OK with them doing it.

As if that compensated for all the bucks they lost with DotA or LoL. I just wonder who at Activision or Blizzard thought fans would applaud to these restrictions and keep modding as if nothing changed.

[Zaxx]

I pre-ordered because I thought that they are capable to do what they did with SCR at least... I was wrong, had to refund after 30 minutes of playing. Play AoE 2 DE instead, that's an excellent remaster.

[MrFlibble]

I wasn't particularly excited when they announced Reforged because Warcraft III is not my favourite part of the series, but I thought it'd be cool if they reworked the campaign cinematics and levels using the experience and methods from StarCraft 2. Never followed the development at all, and was quite surprised that all the new stuff they had advertised got ditched.

I can quite understand the disappointment of the fans. There's practically zero new content if you discount the new models and textures, and some minor tweaks to campaign missions that are of very dubious value to me. That there are bugs, glitches and missing features was sadly to be expected, it seems like releasing an incomplete game is normal these days, now that patching it up in the process is easy.

What bothers me more is that to me, there's an evident clash between high-detail, next-gen models of everything, and the relatively low-detail design of the campaign levels themselves which were not remade from scratch but just touched up in some cases. It's not super striking and rather tolerable, but it raises the question why they bothered to make this half-finished product in the first place. Personally I was quite fine with the original stuff, it was all measured and almost everything in the design was carefully done within the tech, memory and hardware limitations that were in play back in the early 2000s. Here, we have super advanced models against a backdrop of still-early-2000s mission and cutscene design. It's not that this kind of design is bad, but wouldn't it be nice to leave the entire thing as it was and appreciate it for what it is?

And on top of that there's stuff that just feels lazy and incomplete. Here's an example, from the Undead campaign. Notice how the Kel'Thuzad's ghost model clearly disappears from the screen after fading out with a slightly misaligned spell effect animation, then the Lich version reappears out of nowhere after a second's pause. One would think they'd be able to do a full-fledged animation of how he transforms from one state to another. Now compare to the much less ambitious but "cleaner" original version. I know maybe I'm a bit subjective here but the new version, clearly made with some of the early-2000s limitations, is a bit below what you'd expect from something released in 2020.

Another thing I fail to understand is this: there are so many new plot lines in World of Warcraft, certainly one or two could have been used to make entirely new campaigns on the basis of Warcraft III, with remade models and all, and the same multiplayer as in the base game. This could have been released as a stand-alone expansion (possibly with more campaigns made later on as add-ons/DLC) and would probably receive a much more favourable reaction, whereas the original Warcraft III parts could've just been updated with a proper widescreen patch (last time I checked it stretched the UI; but in Reforged the UI is just rendered at 4:3 ratio, centred, while the rest is at 16:9 or 16:10 depending on the host display). At least that would "win" on having genuine new content, even if partially recycled from WoW.

BTW, I was surprised that Lowko at least did not know that Chapters three to five from the Prologue campaign come from the demo version where they have voice-overs, unlike the Frozen Throne custom campaign re-release that does not have the voices somehow.

[OpenMaw]

NightFright, on 01 February 2020 - 01:02 PM, said:

It was supposed to be a quick cash grab. What did you expect?

For it to not be a complete pile of dog shit, and it's unacceptable that people just expect things to be dog shit. Fuck that. You want my money? You give me quality.

[Zaxx]

Commando Nukem, on 06 February 2020 - 10:55 AM, said:

For it to not be a complete pile of dog shit, and it's unacceptable that people just expect things to be dog shit. Fuck that. You want my money? You give me quality.

Not only that but really, the price they are asking for Reforged is just wrong for what's on offer. That 30-40 euros would be fine for what they advertised in 2018 (4 hours of fully reworked cutscenes, changes to the missions based on the lore differences in WoW, new UI, new balance, potentially new content) but for a bare bones remaster where the main difference is just higher res models and textures it's not. It's overpriced garbage, compared to this you can buy AoE 2 DE for 20 bucks and you get a ton of modern features and 300 hours of campaign content.

And the worst thing is that a lot of people only found out about all the content they cancelled since 2018 after buying the game since all the marketing material still has the 2018 stuff. Fuck em.

[NightFright]

Well, don't forget: They already asked for 15 Euro when the D3 Necromancer DLC first came out. Basically a new char and two stash tabs, with some other needless extras. People bought it.

So for twice the money an entire game? Even if it's "just" a remaster, you had to be at least a bit sceptical. Admittedly, if all the promised features had been implemented, the price would have been more than justified. As it stands now, you get the undoubtedly still excellent singleplayer campaign in slightly polished form again. Multiplayer and modding features are more or less FUBAR. There are people who can live with that. Apparently not too many, though...

[MrFlibble]

I haven't followed Warcraft III modding for a good while and with Reforged having been released I realised that there's a mod that also boasts updated graphics:
https://www.moddb.co...aft-iii-rebirth

As far as I can tell it looks pretty decent:

[Jimmy]

The problem with Reforged is that it's worse than the original game. We can all abide by a lackluster re-release, but to somehow make the game worse is unacceptable and shows disregard to the consumer.