I tried to respond to a fellow member scrolling around the forums commenting that the models are the only good thing out of the game and the rest is just bad or mismanagement but since my response grew large enough i decided to dedicate a standalone post regarding it.
The models look fantastic in your eyes but they are one of the core problems with the game.
They do not belong to the game they are made for. i debated many people on the issue of models, pointing critique on the artstyle is something i left behind because its subjectivity and the amount of different stubborn opinions on all sides drives the conversation out of a conversation and into a war.
Even though it would go against my bias, as some point out the Reforged models are âObjectively Goodâ but there is some arguments for that, beforehand i should point out the Reforged models looking objectively good, they have a lot of work put into them, exquisitely crafted silhouettes with an overwhelming level of detail.
With that said lets get into why the models are such a pain in the butt for this game:
If you need to take the models out in an abstract context outside of the game to justify that they are objectively âgoodâ youâre missing something here.
The models of Reforged are by far one of the worst decisions for the game they are made in. that doesnât make them anything to be fair.
It just makes them useless. or bloatware if you will, some can even say objectively bad if it is properly stated within the right context, which it is because its unable to be outside of the context of THE GAME. itself.
But the reality in my opinion is, there is no such thing as objectively bad or good models, the only objectivity is if the models fit the game. and the Reforged models objectively do not fit the game. functionally, visually, and performance wise.
Do the visuals and models in Ori the wisp or other 2.5-D games like Trine look amazing, magical and attractive ? yes.
Do they belong in Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto ? no. and vice versa.
This is the problem with the Reforged models but unlike the above example i will delve deeper into how does this all play out and how Blizzard at large failed to understand how Warcraft 3 evolved and what it needed.
⢠An intro to the problem:
As i stated, again, i donât really care in what artstyle they come in, big shoulders, small shoulders, no shoulders, naked.
The only opinion on art that i can give, and i assume people who are fans of Blizzard made games and their visuals can also give is:
I just want them to look polished, and clean, Blizzard game models never looked like battle damaged units with cluttered details, dents, rusts and chips and splashes all over the models, thatâs about it. its a perfectly reasonable counter argument that raises the question that why did Blizzard betray this code of honor, not even for a new game but a remaster that is suppose to transition a sense of faith to the original game.
Oh and most importantly handpainted textures that do not rely on the lightning engine, i know this is a contested argument because everyone and their mother says STORM YOU DUMB IDIOT ALL HD MODELS RELY ON LIGHTNING ENGINE NOW.
Okay, calm down sunshine, BLIZZARD models are a standout to this argument, and i believe this decision caused better performance and less eye pain when playing all of their games :^)
Do not be surprised if people raise dislikes towards the visuals of a game and that of a company that rooted itself in a form of visuals in their games, then proceeded to completely betray it in a new project.
If someone needs to put in all these cluttered details on their work just to prevent it looking bland, then iâm sorry but they are just a poor designer and they cover that fact by splashing a coat of useless details on something. and this is especially true for the situation of the Reforged models.
⢠Lets cut deep:
Now lets get into the objectivity of the wrongs of the Reforged models, to understand this you need to understand how Warcraft 3 evolved, over many years it was understood as a light weight real time strategy game with a hardcore melee (melee refers to the default game) and custom games community, both cheering for their respective niches.
One of the many benefits of the old models of the game was that they were easy to modify and re-use with different textures, and easy to use as a template for new models. the simplicity of the visuals also helped a great deal with that, its old lightning engine not exactly the best or the most praise worthy it did highlight a value in the visuals of the game.
Warcraft 3âs vanilla visuals supports the artist expressing how a model PERFECTLY looks without the game engine getting in the way of that with its lightning.
So if the artist paints metal glow on a shoulderpad of a Footman it will remain there forever with no interference, so how good the model looks is how good the author drew its texture and wrapped it perfectly like a gift around the model.
This is untapped art potential right here, and instead of Reforged expanding on this. they make a system in which first the models look worse without the ingame settings, then they look worse or good depending on the ever changing lightning reflected upon them in an RTS game that is meant to keep visual integrity and not suffer massive framerate problems with numbers on the screen.
This in a nutshell represents how i feel about the new visual overhaul and how it impacted the game.
My own quotes regarding this matter, many of the people who are falsely blinded by the visuals of Reforged always have some close comparison screenshot in their head often taken from Blizzard sources or otherwise that showcase the models of Reforged in their âPerfectâ lightning plus with a little photoshop work for added eyecandy, compared to the original models all the while theyâre zoomed in extremely close in an angle that is quite literally impossible to replicate in the actual game unless you view the models through the world editor.
But lets put that aside, Blizzard failed to understand these points, and they directed LemonSky to produce models that harmed this games visual distinction, unit readability ingame, difficulty of modifying the models because of unnecessarily increased complexity. performance/framerate issues, and model file size issues.
Visual Distinction and Unit Readability ingame: With the increased amount of details splashed everywhere on the models, its hard to identify iconic units and characters. especially when they are put togather in a fight. the game starts to look like a giant mess instead of everything standing out in their own regard.
With poor choices of team color positions on the models, and not enough care for simple and impactful difference in between them, the âgreatâ amount of details serve very little in a game where 90% of the time youâre not looking ANYTHING from the âperfectâ screenshot comparisons of false marketting, then you start to notice the blandness.
Difficulty of Modifying the models, performance/freamerate issues, and mode filesize issues: The Reforged models are created in an overcomplicated way in a literal sense when weâre talking about modeling, they also have far too much polygons and rather messy textures when you export and look at them as a standalone.
If you look at textures of Reforged models compared to Classic ones of the original game or those made by the community you will see a difference, the Reforged ones are vague and messy and unrecorgnizeable with no shading and no handpainted details.
While the Classic ones you can make out where each part goes where and there is proper shines, shading and handpainted details, details that do not rely on the games lightning engine.
Because of this change in creation and reliance on the lightning engine this way for an RTS game and providing such poor format structure for modelmakers to work with, creating models for the game is far from being a casual hobby that can actually pay off and more like being a hardcore professional model maker.
When Blizzard preach for making Warcraft 3 more accessible and user friendly then spend the entire projects goal creating a less userfriendly and accessible format for how the content of the game will be produced by the community, you know they are false advertisers.
And not only that, this also means the over reliance dampens framerate and performance. this is not an issue to be simply excused away by magically demanding more optimization, there is a healthy balance between models that work for a game they are made for and optimization, some people claim it needs more optimization because they are unwilling to give up any ground or agree on any valid compromise that the models also play a part in many of the issues that exists with this game.
This especially tragically affected one final aspect of the custom games community, the map makers, and one of Warcraft 3âs greatest features. that it was also a game where you can play maps not mods.
Whatâs the distinction here ? mods are something that modifies the entire game so that whatever changes that are inserted impacts the whole game. Maps for Warcraft 3 are something that do not change anything of the base game, they only provide a similar or extremely different experience compared to the base game in a perfectly closed off bubble. one of the benefits of this was ofc the size of the maps.
Take my map for example, multiplayer RTS map its 19MB at the time of writing. what would happen if i wanted to port my map over to Reforged ? each Reforged model is 3-10MB or sometimes more, weâll take an average of 7.
I have 24 heros in my map, all custom. unique enough to require a new model to be ported over. heck, thanks to the unfaithful models of Reforged my work kind of suffers.
They added 10 new paladins, none of them look like the original Paladin. and no Uther is not a default Paladin. he has gold ornate armor. so ⌠i have to find a Paladin that looks somewhat like uther but has more humble armor and no golden bits. this is perhaps the second critique i can give to the subjective âartstyleâ topic of Reforged, they changed so many models just for the sake of changing that people have been left with no alternatives to upgrade their maps from SD to HD which actively disencourages them anyway, many maps were made with distinct models taken into consideration if the majority of that suddenly changes for no reason then many maps will look out of place in HD. and they already do.
Back to topic, lets take an average of 7MB for each Reforged model lets say, 24 hero models of Reforged now, imported in the map. thatâs a map size of 175 MB. max map size limit is 256 btw. (rumored to be 512mb too) now ⌠those 24 imported custom âReforgedâ models are only for heros. what about the rest? the army units, the different buildings, buildings which have absurd filesizes of 10-20mb. for different factions. next thing you know making 1 custom faction is going to be a heafty mod of over 1.X GB instead of something more digestible.
This move by Blizzard makes sure that the magic of Warcraft 3âs âMAPSâ die, next time someone wants to make a great big multiplayer map they are forcing people to potentially create a map of up to 1GB in size and the game since its core engine is not remade and instead upgraded to preserve things such as the old world editor being a thousand times more userfriendly then starcraft 2âs galaxy editor, can not really handle such bizzare filesizes in a multiplayer environment, the result is going to be a laggy slide show.
Before, such great ambitious projects were tops 200MB in size, if they were singleplayer maps, multiplayer ones were far more aimed to be around 8-100 mb in size. now, with Reforged, and its decision of such heafty models with no consideration of its impact over the custom community, youâd be lucky to catch any ambitious projects of Reforged HD that are sub 700+mb in filesize.
The evolving dream of Warcraft 3 was that, in its original size of 1.5 GB with a little help from maps and community made content maybe increasing the games size to 5GB you would have the adventures and experiences of a lifetime.
With reforged, 26 GB may not seem much at first but with bigger map file sizes now the games general size could grow far, far larger, making it uncomfortable for people to fill in so much of a driver on their PC dedicated to 1 game only.
EDITED SECTION ADDED: [ I realized i might have falsely implied that Reforged HD maps can not be below 700+ mb of size, and that is not the case if people are limiting themselves to the existing models of Reforged, but the idea here is that âBlizzardâ can never truly cover for all of the imagination that content creators may hold and eventually many, if they so choose to create maps using the HD mode, will need to import in heafty models and thatâs where the impact is, very damaging. which is one of the areas Blizzard also miscalculated by trying to think they can actually create enough models to compensate for the content creators own imagination, which is why they made 2 times as more models as the original game had. instead of wisely creating a âplatformâ where content creators would actually have an easier time to produce what they want, and it would come with faster speed, not slower, since they already betrayed their promises of giving the community âtoolsâ like they claimed at the Blizzcon stage. it only rubs more salt on the open wounds of their broken lies.]
Which leads me to the last point of idea on the whole subjectivity topic of the artstyle.
Look, The idea of all of these complication togather with the basic realization that this is an RTS game, it is âfunctionallyâ more beneficial to create models for this game that look more simple, are distinct by design not overt details and take into consideration how are they going to be used and handled by an old community that has stood the test of time and smiled in the face of death when Blizzard treated this legendary game as abandonware for 10+ years before coming back and spitting on it.
There is a distinct lack of care for how all of these would play out and how would all the puzzles fit togather, something i should have never expected modern Blizzard to realize.