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Kith posted:Almost all of the things that Reforged dropped weren't because of time constraints, it was because of the massive backlash to them changing. The only reason the art style remained instead of going back to a more cartoony/WoW aesthetic was because Blizzard already made the vast majority of models and couldn't shoulder the cost of refactoring them. Nah, this is one of those things that has no basis in reality. If you go back and look at the Youtube videos from Blizzcon, there's no strange dislike ratios, there's no comments of people saying the new stuff looks bad. Then you sort comments by newest and there's a lot of them from people saying things like: "Why aren't they giving us this?" or "Don't worry, it's just a beta, it will look like the Culling demo when it releases." The Blizzard forums are overwhelmed with threads from people saying to actually give people what they saw in the demo. Like, was the backlash so massive that they just... threw out all the stuff they openly advertised? Even though all it's seem to do is make people angry, cancel their pre-orders, and insist to themselves that what they saw in the demo is still coming? I mean, they're still kind of advertising features that they've said aren't coming: Blizzard posted:Relive the events of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne. Enjoy an epic saga retold with over four hours of reshot cutscenes and updated voice-overs... Zaphod42 posted:Yeah but you just know its Activision pressuring them to deliver something so they have a skeleton crew working on remastered This is far more likely, and I'd say Blizzard vastly underestimated the work it would take to update everything in Warcraft 3 while keeping it backwards compatible. Half of Dracula posted:I wonder if they fully realized how many models and doodads they would need HR remasters for beyond the models used in actual melee games. There are a lot of unique units in the campagins that don't appear in ladder matches, and when you're already crunched on time and budget, I can't imagine wanting to spend much on units that appear for about three minutes on one Kael'thas map And not just that, they're actively making new models for the units that share models - like the Gnolls and Kobolds and a billion different types of demons and such.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 11:10 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 18:41 |
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Have there been actual announcements mentioning the throwing out of stuff or is it just kind of assumed based on what’s been datamined?
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 15:02 |
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Zaphod42 posted:Yeah but you just know its Activision pressuring them to deliver something so they have a skeleton crew working on remastered Yeah. Cheaper, faster, and easier. This is far more likely. I don't put the blame on Activision anymore though. I don't think Blizzard even exists as a separate entity at this point, and even Blizz management are probably just stooges. The infection runs deep.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 16:46 |
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Horizon Burning posted:This is far more likely, and I'd say Blizzard vastly underestimated the work it would take to update everything in Warcraft 3 while keeping it backwards compatible. I think its mostly this, although I would be more likely to blame spaghetti code and features that sound simple on paper but are actually incredibly difficult to implement because of the spaghetti code. For example Blizzard seems to be redoing the entirety of the localization for this game to conform with the official WoW translations even though the original localization is totally serviceable. It definitely feels like one of those things someone comes up with during feature planning as a simple update then it turns into a huge endeavor with all sorts of issues. Horizon Burning posted:Nah, this is one of those things that has no basis in reality. If you go back and look at the Youtube videos from Blizzcon, there's no strange dislike ratios, there's no comments of people saying the new stuff looks bad. Then you sort comments by newest and there's a lot of them from people saying things like: "Why aren't they giving us this?" or "Don't worry, it's just a beta, it will look like the Culling demo when it releases." The Blizzard forums are overwhelmed with threads from people saying to actually give people what they saw in the demo. Like, was the backlash so massive that they just... threw out all the stuff they openly advertised? Even though all it's seem to do is make people angry, cancel their pre-orders, and insist to themselves that what they saw in the demo is still coming? There's definitely a strong feeling amongst most of the pro/competitive players I watch that the new graphics are way worse than the old (mostly in terms of readability). Even with non-streamer competitive players I see complaints about many different things and I think Blizzard (rightly) cares more about these opinions then they do about Joe Schmo in the Youtube comments. https://clips.twitch.tv/RenownedBoredPineappleTebowing This clip is from 4 days ago but considering they have only made improvements within the past few months you can imagine how Grubby and others felt about it before all the recent fixes. I think they made the decision to focus on getting the base game as good as possible in light of this criticism and shelved anything else. And even then, if they do release on the 28th, its pretty much guaranteed we're just going to get Beta 2.0.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 18:24 |
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Half of Dracula posted:I wonder if they fully realized how many models and doodads they would need HR remasters for beyond the models used in actual melee games. There are a lot of unique units in the campagins that don't appear in ladder matches, and when you're already crunched on time and budget, I can't imagine wanting to spend much on units that appear for about three minutes on one Kael'thas map Yeah the game probably has 50 times the art assets of Starcraft.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 18:26 |
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:Yeah. Cheaper, faster, and easier. This is far more likely. Yeah 100% Blizzard we knew and loved is dead and they're just Activision: California now. Mike leaving was the true death knell. It was already getting bad but he still had some integrity. Now that he walked its just pure corporate control.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 18:28 |
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I wouldn't be surprised if some of the devs were taken off the W3R project temporarily to help get the new D3 work out the door in time for Blizzcon, either. It does seem like there was a while in early 2019 where there wasn't really any news at all coming out about W3R, which would be when the panic was to make something to counter the dont-you-have-phones thing.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 20:26 |
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Horizon Burning posted:Nah, this is one of those things that has no basis in reality. If you go back and look at the Youtube videos from Blizzcon, there's no strange dislike ratios, there's no comments of people saying the new stuff looks bad. I played the demo at Blizzcon 2018 and provided feedback directly to some of the developers during an afterparty. The overwhelming feedback from the Blizzcon demo about the UI was negative, especially the 2x6 Command Card and the floating portraits. Horizon Burning posted:Like, was the backlash so massive that they just... threw out all the stuff they openly advertised? Yes. You are drastically, drastically underestimating how many people bitched about how Reforged was retconning the story and was ruining their nostalgia. Half of Dracula posted:I wonder if they fully realized how many models and doodads they would need HR remasters for beyond the models used in actual melee games. There are a lot of unique units in the campagins that don't appear in ladder matches, and when you're already crunched on time and budget, I can't imagine wanting to spend much on units that appear for about three minutes on one Kael'thas map They were well aware. One of the biggest reasons that Warcraft III was such a hugely successful game was because it was basically an engine with thousands of free assets and a pre-built framework. One of the primary reasons that Reforged is happening is because the Warcraft III Custom Map scene is still going strong, whereas Starcraft II's has floundered. Kith fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Jan 18, 2020 |
# ? Jan 17, 2020 22:43 |
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George H.W. oval office posted:Have there been actual announcements mentioning the throwing out of stuff or is it just kind of assumed based on what’s been datamined? They've mentioned it in interviews and such but have made no announcements, no.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 23:14 |
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Kith posted:Yes. You are drastically, drastically underestimating how many people bitched about how Reforged was retconning the story and was ruining their nostalgia. But god knows how many years of wow had already done that? The changes were to ones that had literally already been done.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 23:19 |
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Hey, I didn't say it was smart. In my opinion, Blizzard should've kept the gameplay changes/updates to the campaign - playing the demo and having minibosses show up was cool, there were a ton of easter eggs to find, and the story would actually line up with modern WoW. The problem is that you can't please everyone, so Blizzard decided to go with pleasing (what they view as) the larger group.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 00:09 |
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FoolyCharged posted:But god knows how many years of wow had already done that? The changes were to ones that had literally already been done. I think there's a pretty big distinction to be made between retconning through new games versus going back and replacing elements in a older game. None of the changes that WoW makes have any effect on Warcraft 3 as a standalone game, nor are they required knowledge to enjoy the story in Warcraft 3. Say for example that Sony Pictures decided they were going to remake parts of Terminator 2 with a different director to match the canon of the proceeding films, and that was the only version you would be able to easily obtain going forward. Wouldn't you find that at least a little hosed up?
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 01:16 |
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I know we're going in circles here, but it makes no sense to suggest that Blizzard saw WC3 hardcore's who dislike WoW elements as a bigger pool of possible players than WoW players themselves. The reality is that they cut what would have been some really cool and popular, but likely very expensive features.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 01:19 |
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BattleHamster posted:I think there's a pretty big distinction to be made between retconning through new games versus going back and replacing elements in a older game. None of the changes that WoW makes have any effect on Warcraft 3 as a standalone game, nor are they required knowledge to enjoy the story in Warcraft 3. I get what you're trying to say, but I'm too busy laughing at you spinning that scenario together when you could have just said "lol, the star wars remasters"
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 02:18 |
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I thought about the Star Wars remasters but in that case it's the original director making the changes which feels different to me.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 02:54 |
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Pararoid posted:I know we're going in circles here, but it makes no sense to suggest that Blizzard saw WC3 hardcore's who dislike WoW elements as a bigger pool of possible players than WoW players themselves.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 03:07 |
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Kith posted:It's about nostalgia, nothing else. Nostalgia is why they made WoW Classic happen, and nostalgia is why people want the original Warcraft III story to remain - even if it's not "accurate" to the modern depiction of events, they just want to re-live their previous experiences. At this point WoW is so old that running a warcraft 3 campaign stratholm that more closely mapped to the wow dungeon would be just as nostalgic for a larger audience.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 03:10 |
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WoW was literally built out of the bones of Warcraft III, so that's... pretty accurate, actually.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 04:17 |
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If they cut out all the small changes and little easter eggs I'll be pretty disappointed personally. In terms of design, the Culling demo was exactly what I wanted from a WC3 remake. Hell, just have a classic campaign that's identical to the original WC3 and a Reforged campaign with all the bells and whistles.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 04:51 |
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From the look of the UI I saw datamined late last year, they were going to have exactly that - a toggle for either the original campaign map, or the reforged one.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 06:40 |
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Blizzard is also going through substantial employee churn and is trying to hire people at way less than market so it's entirely possible they have a bunch of unfilled vacancies and stuff just isn't getting done. Also, whoever greenlighted the wc3 remaster probably figured it would be comparable in scope to a BW remaster, which is uh hugely not the case. BW in retrospect was almost the perfect game to do a reskin, extremely minimal bugfixes, and then resell for $30. Like none of what made that easily feasible applies to WC3.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 10:22 |
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1stGear posted:If they cut out all the small changes and little easter eggs I'll be pretty disappointed personally. In terms of design, the Culling demo was exactly what I wanted from a WC3 remake. That's basically what I was hoping for. I have no interest in the new lore and voices, but I'd be curious just to see what's different. The other thing is, like, if Reforged was going to be backwards compatible... then if you wanted to play the old maps, you could just extract them from any old installation of Warcraft 3, chuck them in the maps directory as a custom campaign file and bam. It wouldn't be impossible to play the original campaign again.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 16:02 |
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I was really looking forward to the new stuff. I play Warcraft III every year or two and like I have no qualms about playing the original story and voices, but I've already played it a lot. I really liked the concept of being able to switch between them with the new graphics either way. I'm not particularly invested in WoW's weirder retcons, though I used to be pretty up on WoW-era lore (as bad as some of it can be), and it would've been really neat to see how they handle a lot of the stuff and how the subsequent personality shifts in characters affected the original interpretations, and how some of the worse elements of WoW leaked into the rewrites. Yeah I know that kind of looks like saying "lol i wanted to see how bad of a trainwreck it was," but I legitimately think it would be fascinating to see how years of lore and tone shift, and writer turnover, would affect the changes.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 16:18 |
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Horizon Burning posted:The other thing is, like, if Reforged was going to be backwards compatible... then if you wanted to play the old maps, you could just extract them from any old installation of Warcraft 3, chuck them in the maps directory as a custom campaign file and bam. It wouldn't be impossible to play the original campaign again. I've already seen people playing through the original campaign with the Reforged models doing exactly what you said.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 17:37 |
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My understanding is that they're not retconning plot elements and such. That doesn't mean the maps won't be getting redone. Like, WoW-layout Stratholme is still happening. You'll still be able to choose between original campaign and Reforged version. And I'm okay with that. I'm genuinely excited to see what changes will be made to the maps, even if they won't be quite as sweeping as they might have originally potentially been.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 23:37 |
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So, what does the Reforged version entail then? Two different maps? I guess it's possible that since Blizzard hasn't announced any dropped features, they might be still doing them and lied in interviews to mollify the crazy pro players or whatever, but that's still going to create problems. Even the Warcraft 3 subreddit has a stickied post that is basically like 'What's in Reforged? Well, we don't actually know conclusively due to all this conflicting information.'
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 00:31 |
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Well, it comes out in 10 days. We'll see for sure in the not too distant future.
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 03:35 |
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Note: Plot points not getting retconned does NOT prevent them from overhauling a lot of maps. Very few plot points are integrally integrated into map layout.
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 11:14 |
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one of my favorite parts of this game is doing something embarrassing to a player once, then later on doing the same thing and getting the exact same result
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# ? Jan 21, 2020 02:02 |
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i think slowly being devoured by a kodo has to be the worst way to go
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# ? Jan 21, 2020 02:32 |
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Considering Blizzard's target audience (the people who are still playing Warcraft III) it make sense that anything that upsets that target audience, for example nostalgia breaking updates to maps or plotlines and additional cutscenes, regardless of how good the improvement is will get canned on a time constraint basis. It's dumb, I'm not happy because the updates were cool, but Blizzard are targetting this at people who already own Warcraft III, and hoping that the nostalgia will sell it like hotcakes.
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# ? Jan 21, 2020 06:25 |
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I've been trying out A Year Of Rain with a buddy recently and... well. Y'know how the saying goes "you don't know what you have until it's gone"? God drat, does that ring true in this case. A lot of things that AYOR does are cool and good. For example: it has a diverse cast, a reasonably decent storyline (as far as we can tell, anyways - we're about 8 missions into the first campaign), and really solid art direction overall. On the other hand, i miss blizzard pathing so much, holy poo poo if you think starcraft pathing was bad, you haven't seen sixteen worker units occupying the same space and then becoming permanently idle and unselectable because they got shunted underneath the map terrain
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# ? Jan 21, 2020 15:12 |
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YoR is kinda weird for shipping on early access with broken pathing. It is like the most important part of an RTS. As far as I can tell they felt the heat from WC3Rs rapidly approaching release and felt like they had to ship. Or maybe they were financially out of options idk
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# ? Jan 21, 2020 16:43 |
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Mata posted:YoR is kinda weird for shipping on early access with broken pathing. It is like the most important part of an RTS. It was both I think. They released their first beta and got lukewarm at best reception so just shoved what they had out the door to cut their losses. The game is just warcraft 3 but less.
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# ? Jan 21, 2020 20:49 |
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Perhaps the worst pathing error I've seen outside Sc1 was enemy infantry outright running through solid stone walls in Black & White 2. That poo poo was infuriating, and the patches never totally fixed it.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 00:52 |
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drat wish i had found this post when it was fresher
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 03:47 |
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I re-installed old WC3 and played a few games last night. Forgot how much I enjoyed the Tinker. Sprinting around the map destroying buildings and running away laughing maniaclly is way more fun then building an army and having fights.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 15:49 |
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Dear Team Towa, How are you? I'm doing well myself. I'm trying to teach a friend of mine how to do the horrible things that you folks do so we can try it for ourselves. I have some questions I would like you to answer so he can learn from the masters themselves instead of getting my half-baked explanations. 1) Why is the combination of Human/Orc preferable to just Human/Human? 2) How important are Orb types? 3) What are good Neutral Heroes to use for Towa Tactics? 4) What stats are most important for certain heroes? (He noticed that Mantles of Intelligence always go to the MK). 5) Are there any Mercenary units you'd ever consider using? Thanks! Kith fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Jan 24, 2020 |
# ? Jan 24, 2020 08:38 |
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Orc towers have longer range than Human ones, which I imagine plays some part in it. There is also no better late game assassin than the Blademaster so when it's a hero vs hero stalemate you always want a Blademaster on your side.
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# ? Jan 24, 2020 11:35 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 18:41 |
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Kith posted:1) Why is the combination of Human/Orc preferable to just Human/Human? it's not totally critical to have an orc (human towers are way better in almost all situations, mostly thanks to masonry), but they do bring some nice-to-haves like bats and lightning orbs. bats are a nice get-out-of-jail-free card if the enemy applies a threatening amount of heavy air, and lightning orbs are the best orb for our economic attrition pick off single units style. quote:2) How important are Orb types? quote:3) What are good Neutral Heroes to use for Towa Tactics? quote:4) What stats are most important for certain heroes? (He noticed that Mantles of Intelligence always go to the MK). quote:5) Are there any Mercenary units you'd ever consider using? quote:There is also no better late game assassin than the Blademaster so when it's a hero vs hero stalemate you always want a Blademaster on your side. if you're like me and weren't really paying attention to the balance changes that started in 2018, you can scroll through the patch changelogs (1.29 through 1.31.1) here
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# ? Jan 24, 2020 17:12 |