OK. So, I love my WC3. I’ve played the death out of it.
I have only played reforged on a friends account at his place. I didn’t purchase it.
And it felt ‘wrong’.
I then left for a while. Played neither. And today had the thought occur.
Has WC3:Reforged hit “Uncanny Valley”?
That moment when it is close to right, but not quite right and thus we immediately distrust it. Google up Uncanny Valley if you don’t know what it is. It typically relates to robotics. But could it also relate to memories?
Many WC3 players have many wonderful memories of this game.
Reforged comes out and it’s… Not. Quite. Right.
Which triggers our uncanny valley reflex. We hate it because it’s not right.
Is this what has happened?
Note: I’m still playing original from installing from CD and not updating. I’m just guessing from my couple of hours at a mates place and then pondering for a few hours.
My thought that leads from here:
Blizzard really did a dis-service to themselves by not changing the cut scenes and conversation scenes because they are ‘too similar’ to what happened in the past, but not different enough. And this triggers our ‘uncanny valley’ response.
If Blizzard had actually changed the cutscenes/conversation-scenes dramatically, then they could have dodged this response and people would have accepted it more.
I’m just pinging 2c into the well of thought here. Happy to hear people contradict me. This is just a thought that is in my head.
More like “Uncanny pile of crap”
The game runs bad and took away many features from Classic Wc3
I don’t know, but I’m sure Freud would despite the Reforged graphics.
No, reforged just broke our beloved game
I played on the test realm until they murdered it. The new graphics are subpar, but they aren’t the problem, since they can be disabled. What killed the game are the non-disable-able “upgrades” that came along with it.
In a way. That’s my point Moonfog. Did they make ‘too-small’ an upgrade? Was it too close to the original that we immediately distrusted it?
No, to me it wasn’t the lack of new things added, but the things that got lost in the translation to the new client.
Old War3 was “handcrafted” there were few polygons, but every single one of them was carefully placed. It is a bit like pixel art, an extremely limiting medium, but high artistic effort. In old War3 you could play for years and still find some detail that makes you say “I can’t believe they thought of that”.
Granted, now I’m talking about the graphics in particular, and they can be disabled, but the “handcrafted” feel was in more than just the graphics. Inside the campaign many Easter eggs simply have not been ported over, not even to the classic version of the campaign. They allow for female death knights and demon hunters even in classic mode but neglected to give them an own icon (in classic mode). And the two new models for them really stick out for being badly designed.
I would describe the difference as like between having a genuine old painting in your House and having a poster of the same old painting. Reforged in Classic mode is just a thinned down version of War3. It takes 30 GB and seems to require more resources, but it feels like a bad port for an iPad. It feels diminished, compressed.
And then there are the bugs …
So… Uncanny Valley?
This is why I mentioned it.
Uncanny valley is when things “don’t feel right and thus feel creepy”
It’s so close to ‘right’ but not there. IT feel creepy rather than right.
Think of it like that. The entire game. Not just appearance, but behaviour. It’s not ‘quiet right’. It’s nearly there. But it feels odd because it’s not quite there.
This is my thought process anyway. I think you have said the same.
I’ve disregarded the 30Gig updates. I’m just purely talking gameplay. Not even including graphics.
The gameplay is ‘uncanny’. Not quite right. Nearly there. And thus creepy.
I didn’t really know what you meant with “uncanny valley” since I heard the term just to describe the absence of humanity like when Lovecraft described Night-Gaunts as having no faces where faces ought to be.
But a human touch got lost when they ported it over to the new client, so yes it’s a fitting description.
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