I had my tonsils removed and have been recovering for the past two weeks and what started off as completing a backlog game of XCOM 2, I had the itch to move into RTS and had the urge to play Starcraft 2. A game I owned but never gave the time to play through the campaign.
JUST WOW! Truly, one of the best games I have ever played. Each campaign so brilliant with characters and story and mission variety. I am sad that I am finishing it today. You can tell that Blizzard treated this game with so much care and respect.
This makes me wish so so so badly that Warcraft 3 reforged wasn’t a mess. I really would love to go through those campaigns but purchasing reforged does not look worth it until they finish their promises.
I made a post on Reddit when I was going through Wings of Liberty calling the game one of the best I have played, and now at the end of Legacy of the Void it truly is an absolutely amazing game. I don’t know if I will ever try online play but I may go back and try my hand at higher difficulties and achievements. Thanks Blizzard for a truly outstanding game.
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The original StarCraft is free without the updated graphics and the art during the interludes that were previously just text. Otherwise you can purchase it with Remastered or Cartooned(Carbot Animation) graphics.
WarCraft III Reforged development got outsourced to Playside Studios and they’ve done a pretty good job fixing Blizzard’s mess. They’ve restored the online features that were lost during the “reforging” so technically the promises have been fulfilled although I definitely prefer setting it to the original graphics and campaign missions. Playside might be doing more to touch the game up but they haven’t shared any specific plans yet.
Also, StarCraft II does have an additional 9-mission campaign called Nova Covert Ops if you haven’t tried it. And Co-op mode is a really good half-step between campaign and Versus with three commanders completely free and the others free but capped at Level 5.
All the single player stuff for these games goes on sale now and then. The best deals tend to be the week of Thanksgiving. Of course, you’ll probably be fully recovered long before then.(I got my tonsils removed when I was five years old and I don’t really remember how long it took before I was eating crunchy cereal again.)
You also might want to keep an eye on the game Stormgate which is still in alpha testing right now. Some of the Warcraft III and StarCraft II people are behind it.
As a long time fan of Warcraft III’s game technology ecosystem who happened to stop by the Starcraft II forums, you make me sad. According to leaks, PlaySide studios basically published the work of the 2020 people who were terminated, and they did so without sufficient bug testing. They literally had a PTR in the spring of 2022 where users could report bugs, and then they realized they didn’t want those kind of bug reports and changed the test realms to private. Then they published the same code live in the fall of 2022 with the same bugs that were in the spring PTR, and used the live client as a guinea pig to try to fix things that were horribly broken for months after that, making fans of the Warcraft III game ecosystem suffer again in similar or perhaps worse ways than what they had to experience in 2020.
To say that PlaySide Studios have “done a pretty good job fixing” the Reforged situation glosses over the nature of Activision. And I would surely prefer that you refer to it as “Activision’s mess,” simply to do honor to the people who are the true source of the problem.
Putting it simply, I play Starcraft 2 and Age of Empires games like a lay person. I open the game and I play the versus mode. And I think that what PlaySide Studios have done with Warcraft III is to try to make it work for that same use case, and largely and over a long period of time they have been somewhat successful at that narrow objective.
But Warcraft III was originally a game with a rich custom map editor. (And I experienced it as a user of that editor!) One way to see it, I would say, is to draw the parallel that Starcraft 2 map editor is like C++ in a world where Warcraft III map editor is like Python. In C++ it takes longer to get things done and you get a better product, but in python people could spew out mostly functional results much more quickly. Originally, Warcraft III map editor was like that; you could spew out mostly functional results much more quickly than on a lot of other systems.
But Reforged made those “mostly functional” results less functional, despite some developer efforts to the contrary that did not appear to have been appreciated by their management. And the PlaySide Studios version of Reforged, in my experience, made those “mostly functional” results even less functional.
And it is thus that while I cannot entirely tell you that you are incorrect, I can say that subjectively in my own personal biased and perhaps warped experience I am left feeling that you are very incorrect. If you want a technological documentation of just one problem created by the PlaySide Studios version of Warcraft III: Reforged, here you go:
Reforged isnt that bad. The new graphics are pretty good, people are just exaggerating. AoE2 colors are worse to distinguish than in WC3 Reforged.
