Please, less shoulder pads and fake cloaks, and please don’t use any character designs from WoW as reference. The fact that every armor set in WoW had to work like a lego set makes them objectively inferior to what you can do with a full body character design.
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look at warcraft II art, how footman looks. Art style was established in wc2 ![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://dou48tnq0ocoa.cloudfront.net/en/warcraft3/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
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I seriously hope they don’t change it to the typical cartoon style all their other games have. Maybe change the tone of the game to give a bit more grim feel to it.
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I couldn’t agree more. It was my dream since I was a child to play this game that would look the same as its amazing cinematics. And this feels to be exactly it. Im really tired of all the cartoony childish mess that is dominating the entire gaming industry atm. I could never get into WoW not only because I didn’t like the genre, but because I couldn’t stand the graphics. I was insanely dissappointed to learn that they’ve gone even further away from my dream to create this blocky looney-tunes skin for the best universe in the history of games.
Therefore I also beg Blizzard to continue the path that they have taken with the artstyle for the remaster. Its awesome!
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I very much agree with OP. Growing up with Warcraft 1/2/3, I’ve always looked at the concept art of those games as the real indicators of the actual or natural look of the Warcraft world. I always viewed the game units on screen as nothing more than symbolic representations of the actual characters from the cinematics. So naturally, I’m very happy and excited to finally see a more realistic representation of those units in game. If the technology finally allows them to implement higher fidelity, more naturally-proportions models in the game, then why not do so?
During the Reforged panel at Blizzcon Biran Sousa mentioned that they chose this look specifically because it truly speaks what Warcraft is. Also, they saw it as a smart thing to do in today’s market in order to avoid using the same old, ultra-stylized, hand-painted, “Pixar” look that Blizzard along with so many other companies have been doing over and over again for more than a decade…
Overall, in my opinion the more realistic that they can make the art style while still maintaining readability and similarity to the old models, the better. I personally love the new look, the use of PBR, and the metal shader they currently have… though shoulder pads and hammers could perhaps be a little bit smaller : )
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Personally, I absolutely agree with that.
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Yea I agree the artstyle seems fine. My only complaint in that department is that some models dont look like an updated version of the old model but a completly new model all together. Like if you compared the necromancer side by side would a person be able to tell its an updated version? I dont believe so
I find this post more offensive than constructive, but understand where it is coming from. Please be more constructive than rather than attacking and degrading other people’s opinions. Art isn’t a science, one isn’t better than the other, it’s up to the eye of the beholder.
Even tho I do like HOTS art I do also like the direction the art style is going here. I think this style was chosen because they already have very approachable art styles in other projects and due to this one being more serious in story and gameplay it fits nicely in a more realistic setting.
It’s important to note that I can speak from experience this art style is significantly harder to nail which is what I think the root of most of the art topics here are about, not so much ungrounded cries for lack of toonness like this post implies. There is a level of polish that needs to be hit with this HD reforged that I don’t think Blizzard has nailed (YET) and it’s important for the community to be vocal about what details are being missed. Often for performance reasons everything is later optimized, sometimes the optimizations can leave features or details cut and degraded, if something isn’t syncing up with the rest of the composition then be vocal about it!
For instance, I don’t think they nailed the lighting at all in the game, the game play trailer specifically had some really weak lighting that made me not even want to share it with friends because it looked more like a indie machinima than a blizzard product. This is where you saw terrible reflections on Arthas’s armor because that scene was just super blown out. Thankfully it was just the trailer and not the actual gameplay but it definitely left me uneasy about the project’s position.
The level of detail on the Orcs is amazing but I don’t think the assets around them are of the same fidelity, it’s very hard to get fantasy assets of this fidelity to all match and look the same. I’d love to see all the orc builds looks as good as the Orc in the demo mission looked but it seems like they are on different levels. (seen from grubby’s play thru)
tldr; the community is right to speak out about issues with the art, not all of them are an attack on too much toon. We still need to be critical of how these textures, shaders, and animations should be tuned. It is very hard to nail a realistic style in a bright fantasy world, one of the hardest parts is consistency of fidelity between assets and asset groups, be mindful of that in your future posts.
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They both look different from their original selves now, but they do look different from each other as well. The Footman has far more armour, huge pauldrons (with his team’s colour on one), a metal shield (instead of a wooden one).
Learning things anew should probably be considered a negative, and yet I doubt the units don’t look too indistinguishable if you focus solely on Reforged and forget about the original. But nobody can say for sure at this point, we need practice.
If you look at the old Footman Model you can clearly see that his helm looks a lot more detailed and realistic than the rest of his body. Its very clear that his helm looks like metal and the rest of the body is just white and black colors.
May this be an indication that they did originally intend to make them have a more realistic look but decided to make only the helm because they had no time/resources or other reasons?
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100% agree. Please keep the look we saw in the demos, its perfect. People who liked the old graphics are not forbidden from playing the old version. If you dont want anything to change, why play reforged? So please blizzard, dont listen to them, we really love the new style - its not even all that different, it doesnt look grimdark like 40k at all. Just not as ugly as they used to be. Which we never realized by the time because we had no comparison.
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Completely disagree! I am one of those who complain about the reforged style, no, do not misunderstand me, the graphics are beautiful, I only complain that the style itself, the atmosphere is lost, the whole game looks like a Disney mobile project, seriously, I don’t associate it with Warcraft I played in, I also play Warcraft 3 for 15 years now, and this is a game that completely enchanted me. I never thought that there was such a mysterious, gloomy, intriguing, but at the same time saturated universe, Warcraft 3. All the original cinematics, the whole gameplay, it was all a certain style of play, a certain atmosphere, which by the way was lost, for me when moving to Vov. As I said earlier, you do not need to reinvent the wheel, you do not need to try to do better what is already perfect. It is just necessary to do better what is, to improve the original, and not to rethink it, otherwise it will not be Warcraft 3. It will be another incomprehensible fun bright rainbow toy for children. I just ask Blizzard to keep the style and atmosphere, to keep it as it was, dark, gloomy, but at the same time quite contrasting and rich. This style of warcraft 3 is even difficult to describe in words. So, dear, the experience of the game for 10 years and participation in the creation of maps is not an excuse to speak on behalf of the entire community.
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The giant shoulder pads are clearly influenced from WoW. I like WoW, but the character designs from it should be ignored. Not every character needs to have shoulder pads and a backwards bib. If you’re going to make a cloak, make it a real cloak, not something that has to fit in a generic equipment slot.
P.S. I hate that they gave Jaina shoulder pads and a fake cape.
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Orc’s art style are completely correct in Reforged. Really like their realistic leather belts and armor.
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But isn’t the whole idea to make the original cartoony look less Disney by making it more realistic?
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So the fact of the matter is that it has become more realistic, but at the same time it is even brighter, more colorful and more “rosy”, although it should have been the other way around.
Is it? The terrain, the trees and the buildings look far bleaker. The models don’t strike me as brighter either.
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Yes, they are clearer, and it makes me very happy, but the color scheme, the lighting, personally, for me, made it not so dark, mysterious and atmospheric, as it should seem.
Only in the old gameplay footage did it look that way. They clearly changed thing and desaturated the terrain since then. It looks awesome in the demo.
Sorry, I don’t mean to offend, but is it that you just haven’t played Warcraft III in a long time? Because the new game is desaturated, not more colorful and rosy. (and I hate it)
The third one is what I think it should look like. There’s no need to desaturate it…
Although I admit brightness =/= saturation. Maybe tone down the brightness.
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