From the launch of Reforged up to now, I’ve been living under a rock while playing through the original campaign for the first time in many years. While it wasn’t as big a difference as SC’s remaster, it also didn’t have as far to go, as I never thought of the original WC3 as an ugly game, even by today’s standards.
Even still, there were several points as I went through the first few campaigns where the new art really added to the experience. Knights, crypt fiends, necromancers… these were as remastered as I could hope for them to be.
At launch, the game did seem bare-bones to me, just as (frankly) Diablo 3 seemed bare-bones. The low-res splash page and menu bars seem archaic, I’d have hoped for more SC2-style alternate skins to start with, and for performance in big fights it seems there’s some optimization to do, but seeing that Blizzard’s reputation for long-term support of a game is the best in the business, my first thoughts were 1) these kinds of things are probably coming and 2) I’d rather it launched like this now and get updated later rather than have nothing until those kinds of things are ready.
Halfway through the fourth campaign, I wondered what people were saying about the game, and what might be coming in terms of the kinds of “modern” features I figured they were working on. I didn’t think it was perfect, or particularly inspired, but where my expectations for a remaster aren’t very high I was floored by just how negative the reaction was to this game.
As such, I just wanted to say here that I’ve been enjoying this remaster. The artists did a really good job with a lot of these units, I appreciated the modernization of some of the campaign mission elements, and I have a generally positive view of the game overall.
campaign is only a small fraction of the problems, and the fact is the majority of the complaints are from blizzard scrapping so much content (or at least delaying it without any notice)
they scrapped 4+new hours of campaign cutscenes
they have not mentioned anything about the new ingame UI/HuD
the main menu UI is kinda sloppy (or unfinished)
they said they would increase unit selection for custom games (hasnt happened yet)
the world editor has barely been improved
matchmaking isnt ranked and we dont have clans
they shutoff the original games servers so longtime players have lost their profiles and stuff
theres lots of problems with custom games, many maps are no longer compatible, creating new maps is very limited
and thats not even mentioning any of the smaller bugs, plus many people experience crashes
if you havent played the game in years or you didnt play online multiplayer very much then you wouldnt notice these things
I imagine the difficulty of creating content for an RTS is that they need to make it worth the money for such a broad range of players who look for content in such different areas.
Someone who only plays ladder will want the improvements to ladder to be worth the price. The same is true for someone who only plays campaign. So, they’ve got to focus on many different fronts and do them all very well.
If you’re like me, and just wanted to play the campaigns again while skipping the cutscenes (I always skip cutscenes), and if you’ve been lucky with bugs, then there’s not a lot to complain about. I just thought that perspective was needed in this sea of rage posts.
do you think it would have been better if Blizzard had just originally decided to only improve the graphics for campaign, and have never suggested all of the other new content I suggested?
You also are not considering all of the longtime players who have lost their profiles, and are no longer able to play many older custom maps on the new server. you seem to have only read my first sentence and then ignored the large list of legit complaints I posted above
thats like, such a small fraction of the game though. if 10 people say the game is lacking features and a few people say its broken/buggy, but only 1 person is saying “at least campaign without cutscenes works for me” so you really think that makes the other peoples complaints invalid?
I think a lot of people realize the single player stuff works fairly good, and patches will come out to further improve the game, but just saying a small portion of the game works doesnt negate all the other stuff that is lacking or buggy.
