Great work with the new graphic, Blizzard!

There has been so much criticism on Reforged even since its released and in my humble opinion, the tide of hatred that some players are having dumped down several aspects of the game which I deemed to be worthy of praise. The most notable one is the graphical recreation of the game which I believed to be the one thing which Reforged team undoubtedly put the most effort in.

To put it short, I am extremely pleased with the graphic that was delivered. Not only that it is VERY beautiful but I can see clearly that the team tried to keep the spirit and the world of Warcraft 3 intact. It takes me almost no time at all to recognize all the models in Reforged and almost everything looks clean and authentic. Even in 4v4 crowded battles, things are easily distinguishable and great to look at.

This comes to me as a surprise truly, considering how some of the games that Blizzard made recently didn’t strike me as much, aesthetically speaking. Heroes of the Storm, for example, had good individual models but the overall tone of the game was a bit messy in my opinion. It’s somewhat understandable since it tried to mix all the Blizzard universes together; mismatch is hard to avoid. World of Warcraft is a game that I never played but I watched a bit of it in some streams on Twitch. The graphic was understandably dated which makes me refrain from trying it out in the first place. Overwatch seemingly had a more “modern style” of graphic yet I’m not quite fond of; most likely due to taste more than anything.

If we go back a bit further and address game like StarCraft 2 and all its expansions, there are even more to discuss. The graphical transformation from SC1 to SC2 is overall decent in my judgement. However, some people pointed out that by abandoning this realism theme of StarCraft universe, Blizzard missed an opportunity to realize the game to its fullest potential. I agreed with this view. If I’m not mistaken, there was a trend back then in the RTS genre to make things more cartoonish. Blizzard chose to follow this direction and they successfully created the graphical version of SC2 as we see today. Some of the famous RTS of the time also tried to pursue this direction but I remembered games with much lesser success in this regard. I’m thinking of the transformation of Red Alert 2 to Red Alert 3 and the transformation of Command and Conquer 3 to 4 (the later was a huge failure to many and to me). Yet I deem the graphical transformation from Warcraft 3 Classic to Reforged an even greater success compared to the transformation of SC1 to SC2. Not only that Reforged looks overall more beautiful than StarCraft 2 (perhaps also due to the gap in graphic design technology then and now), but everything was kept a lot more authentic and true to its original version. StarCraft Remastered to me is just a higher resolution of Starcraft 1 so I don’t address it.

Therefore, from my point of view, Warcraft3: Reforged is perhaps the most beautiful game that Blizzard has been making in the last decade and one of the most beautiful RTS out there. This is of course my personal opinion. Others may disagree and I hope they do so respectfully.

Reforged currently has many issues especially regarding its multiplayer as many players pointed out but some people go as far as to claim that Reforged graphic is worse than Classic graphic. It’s quite insane to me how this thought is processed. I only ask them to open their eyes and judge with their honest heart and mind. How is that possible that Reforged graphic is worse than Classic graphic? Warcraft 3 Classic graphic may have been revolutionized for its time but it’s undeniably dated now. If you zoom into each model you see that they don’t have many textures. Compared to Classic, Reforged is mile away aesthetically. Now I’m aware of the very strong mentality in the West that adhere to the “good old days” values but this degree of self-delusion is absurd.

I’m motivated to write all this after browsing though thousands of Reforged models in World Editor. I’m relating this to a game like League of Legends to give you a better view. Back when I played it, with every patch they release a few skins (models for your hero) and many of them are quite great. League of Legends must have had a much bigger budget compared to the Reforged project. Yet with a single release, they have thousands of new models, the vast majority are very well made and polished. Is this not something to be acknowledged at the very least? I played many RTS and even games release nowadays can be very timid when it comes to total unit models. I see many games that are made in 2D, they barely have much texture and yet with some decent gameplay they were praised and hyped for. In my eyes it’s unfair for the people that made all these thousands of models in Reforged just to be dumped down like this. The artists and designers that work on the Reforged project did a wonderful job at recreating the Warcraft 3 universe. Browsing through the models in WorldEditor, I’m happy to know that the creative power of Blizzard is still there and the people that worked hard on this need to be acknowledged for their effort.

With that said, Reforged is still a game that needed much improvement, especially regarding its multiplayer aspect. I’m a 4v4 RT player from Asia so the online experience has never been good for me. Just as with Classic, around 50% of the games either I or my teammates or opponents had connection issues and is kicked from the game. Of course a lot of the time players just quit the game out of rage but I already take that into consideration to factor this 50% number. The game now with a reporting system seemingly has a lot less trolls compared to what it used to be. That is certainly an improvement.

The latest patch is also a very odd patch which makes me doubt the current effort being put into the game. While I see some new icons and supposedly some quality of life upgrades, the new map that was brought back (Banewood Bog LV) uses the old game data hence is currently getting vetoed nearly 100% in online play. Was the patch tested at all?

The game is having improvement but at such a slow pace. The patches are scarce. Please maintain and reinforce the effort towards this game. It is still the best RTS existing in the market.

Yours sincerely.

5 Likes

Yes I agree with the models look badAS, now some female DH not so much but the core heroes and units look great. My only critic on graphics is with the terrain or shading/lighting that causes it to look unreal, ugly and too bright. Also the trees in some variations look like 1st timer made a model of a tree, so t ree models arent good. And the colors are what make it look worse in my mind. again see Diablo 3 Secret Pony Rainbow level… well not that green but that’s how such badAS models look on some bad colors terrain. Which is why some offered the lighting seen in 2018 Demo looks better.

Why all the rest critics? I recently made a post in a thread where someone mentions alternatives to Bnet.

SC2 BNet gives no reason any1 to play other platform than BNet (yes partially because no LAN) but because

  • SC2 BNET is stable, as stable as it can be
  • War3 classic Bnet was stable but I see matchmaking was bad recently
  • New Bnet is non existent and while they are making it, will it have a low chance to desync or drop ? that is the source of worry and it is LEGIT because it questions the idea of playing it

As for SC2 cartoonish, yes I wouldn’t mind if units (like tanks) were made more realistic but I guess they gave them slightly more realism as they improved graphics a bit from WoL to lOtV

Of course Reforged will look resembling more to the original… it is a remaster, HD, while SC2 is a new game.

An outsourced company

2 Likes

So you mean to say, “Thanks Lemon Sky!”

Blizzard hardly even gave them any direction when they outsourced the work to them. Please don’t make the mistake believing that Blizzard poured blood sweat & tears into the models – they didn’t, at all.

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Thanks to lemon sky for making a beautiful models, and actiblizz for paying them, I mean gamers who paid for this Alfa version of game. So no much of credit should go to bliz. You can credit bliz for false commercial and fooling gamers…

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Thank you Blizzard for making a high quality 2008 game!!!

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So the models were made by an outsourced company named Lemon Sky. I have to give credits where it is dued and they indeed deserved this. Well done on this part, Lemon SKy! I hope Blizzard support this game better so the efforts are not wasted.

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I agree. The graphics are great. However, the game lost some of its original features, like custom campaigns.

The mentioned Blizzcon 2018 Demo lighting: Blizzcon 2018 ReShade (final version (for now))

Ye I got to give props to the LemonSky Devs! They put in a good hand of work! Love the graphics!

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Graphics are literally the only good bit about this trash heap.

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I only have classic, but I’ve seen videos of the facial animations of units talking, and it looks…off. The updated graphics and synced lip-moving looks nice, but everyone has the same talking-head animation, and it looks so dull.

Compare that to classic portraits, and each unit’s personality shines through when they speak. I know the animations are exaggerated at times, but everyone had their own character.

3 Likes

Agreed. Portraits are booty.

Everything looks great cept Paladin. Dumb flatop lookin thing.

I honestly think the graphics are terrible and an eye sore. I can’t tell what’s happening especially when im playing against the same race. The spell animations and attack animations are very bad, reminds me of a mobile game at that point. At night time the game is unplayable. All of the icons for the spells have the same blue as everything else and it blends together to create a mess. There’s not a single thing from the Reforged graphics that I prefer over the classic graphics. The game is ment to be played at a top down view, bird’s eye view and Reforged graphics are a mess. Sorry but you don’t play RTS’s or dota zoomed in

Buildings, units, terrain, portraits animations and everything else looks way better in classic. The crypt lord looks cool but that’s all I’ll give them. Everything else was a downgrade in my eyes. I disagree with every word you said

1 Like