I’ve been observing the forum for a while and now I would like to share my own perspective. Hopefully, I can address all big concerns over W3R.
Firstly, I would like to talk about the “product”. In my humble opinion, this remake is lacking unity and passion and I shall attempt to show you why. Please, take a look at an interview featuring some of the original creators: - YouTube
I recommend that you watch the whole video. Listen to how they are talking about how they started out, their thought process as well as their aspirations at the time. While being a “business” all of them were obviously passionate, looking forward to unleash their creativity and create games that they would actually like and would want to play themselves.In comparison, this remake is not a product of people with chemistry. Allegedly, the graphics were created by a company called Lemon Sky Studios. An employer of that company spoke up in reddit and actually said that some of those who worked on the graphics were first-timers. Fresh out of college, they were hired by this sketchy company which assigned to them their first EVER project, Warcraft III: Reforged. Furthermore, he/she said that Acti/Blizz did not give them access to the game, meaning that they could not even test the graphics that they had created in-game. Note that I do not blame them, they might be as passionate and as creative as the original creators were. The thing is that they were working blindly on a puzzle without having all the necessary pieces. When creating a game, one must test, improvise, adapt and ultimately, unify the environment with the models and the gameplay through trial and error. In our case, this was not done, because Acti/Blizz hired that company and they did that for two reasons. They wanted to save money and launch the game as fast as possible. The former is understandable, but the latter, why? The law of some countries dictates that a business accepting pre-orders for a product, must release that product no later than one year after accepting pre-orders. I am not familiar with the law, so the exact conditions may vary. Therefore, it is evident that this game (hereafter, “product”) was created to a great extent by random people under circumstances of lack of coordination and treated like a third rate product.
Secondly, the performance aspect of this “product” is worrisome. Many players have reported frame drops, freezing, stuttering and crashes on high-end hardware. I am also experiencing these. Reportedly, the wc3 engine was “updated” in order to be able to render high-res pixels at high resolutions. However, we are experiencing these problems which ruin the fun, given that a single 2-seconds freeze can cost you the match. (some players are blaming the cache flushing for this) Furthermore, it appear that chrome-based menus or something like that is draining a lot of CPU resources unnecessarily. Moreover, not only did some old bugs remain, but new ones are also surfacing according to a lot of players. I am not going to elaborate on that since the dev team is supposedly working out bugs. Trust me, this is also understandable. It is far easier to create a completely new engine rather than update a 17+ years old one. The wc3 engine is buggy and requires A LOT of fixing.
Thirdly, the visuals of this product are out of place. Whilst they are mostly looking nice, they break the experience in various ways. For example, one cannot easily recognize the icons of ghouls and fiends in the selected team at the bottom, Dark Ranger is not recognizable, Naga etc… Regarding the UI I am speechless. I think that I don’t have to repeat what so many have stated about profiles, clans, tournaments, channels, commands, etc… In my humble opinion, the classic UI and particularly the channel view is far better in all aspects. Either way, the graphics require fixing.
Fourthly, it is sad looking at the legal changes concerning custom maps. The use of content of third parties like in the case of naruto, pokemon, DBZ maps should not be a problem as long as they are not used for commercial purposes. Additionaly, Acti/Blizz owning your work is not really encouraging. Of course, the legality and effectiveness of these changes remain to be seen. The aftereffects, however, will soon hit us since the leftover map makers will be extremely restricted and their creativity will be suppressed.
Finally, a few words regarding the community. Acti/Blizz should realize that introducing the profanity filter and removing certain voice lines is dumb and will only make things worse. Nowadays, kids have their personal darknet collections. These changes are not helping them. If you would like to appear family-friendly then follow youtube’s route and make a kids’ edition of W3. As for new players, they are going to suffer a lot. If you guys are reading, please do not take the W3 community seriously. These guys are rage quitting and cursing all the time. This is why the profanity filter was introduced. They are salty people who are paying $50 for maphacks while crying over their $30 “hard earned” money they paid for reforged. There’s a reason why the “product” costs $30, the LAN functionality was removed and classic was merged. These guys have been ruining the community month after month, year after year by creating hacking tools and using zMaps, tiehacks, drophacks, ddos attacks and spambots. Here is a video displaying Russians using anti-spambots to defend against a “load” attack with the help of a bug: - YouTube
Not to mention that a few years ago they upgraded wc3 servers to mitigate ddos attacks. The fact that this “product” is getting so much attention is alarming for Acti/Blizz, because old school hackers are going to storm the place asking you for a monthly subscription for their latest exploits and hell will break free.
NeoN: _https://i.imgur.com/z7NXTC5.png
After all, just remember that you are playing “Warcraft”.