…It’s just not as Reforged as they originally wanted to do last year. They had to scale it back. Official word is that they did it because people wanted the old voice acting to remain (which is believable) but I think it’s actually a combination of that and whatever setback they suffered earlier this year that caused them to not release the beta during the Spring.
Basically we’ve gone from this:
Writer Christie Golden, who has worked with Blizzard on multiple novels set in the Warcraft universe over the past two decades, is helping to bring “parity” to the stories of Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft , which will require retconning some of the strategy game’s story. Those changes will bring “renewed focus to a few central characters that we thought deserved a little bit more time in the limelight,” Stillwell said.
“There’s been 16 years of evolution of this franchise outside of this game,” Stillwell explained. “Some of that, especially central characters like Jaina and Sylvanas, these people who mean so much more to the world now who didn’t get as much focus [in the original Warcraft 3 ] because we just didn’t know where they were going to be.”
To this:
Matt Morris, senior 2 game designer on Warcraft 3 Reforged, told me the team backed away from retconning the story to WoW because fans wanted to hear the original voice actors and sound effects. “Sounds from clicking on the grunt to hearing Arthas and Illidan’s voice, that was what they didn’t want changed.” If the team was able to change the story and still preserve how the voice actors sounded all those years ago, maybe the fans would have been open to story changes. But because fans were adamant about keeping the original voices, it made the team think about how else they could connect Warcraft 3 to WoW.
They ended up redesigning certain locations in Warcraft 3 to match what exists today in WoW. The look of locations like Silvermoon, Stratholme, and Dalaran had evolved in WoW while they remained the same in Warcraft 3. “We spent a lot of time leveling up the looks and the aesthetics of these missions so that players familiar with the Warcraft story can say, ‘oh, this is where this event happened’ or ‘I raided here.’”
TL;DR – Map changes and lore character cameos are still in. New side content that required them to completely re-do the voice acting in the campaign is not. Neither are the new cinematic styles.
Now, I know folks are upset by this, but please hear me out. Ultimately this is a best of both worlds situation. We still get our HD graphics and the Reforged campaign, and the Purists still get their HD graphics and sparsity of WoW retcons.
I consider myself a “purist” I haven’t bought/preordered Reforged cause Im happy with the original/classic game. However, I was not bothered by the new campaign, and I thought most people were excited for it. It didn’t seem like that many people were complaining about the new campaign IMO, and I find it crazy how the “purists” keep getting blamed.
Personally, I think its a shame because I liked the idea of having 2 different campaigns, as long as there was the option of switching between them with ease. But now we only have 1 campaign, I am worried that we wont be able to still play the original unless we use a separate patch download, since they are still changing things.
Since they have scrapped much of the advertised content, I wonder if that means we could see a new campaign DLC at some later point in time? I guess it depends on the success of Reforged versus the number of cancelled preorders.
All I really want is a cool new CO-OP campaign that is completely new from the ground up, not something like SC Commanders, but something more challenging fun and styled with WC3 gameplay. Also with better AI, and maybe a new fully playable race (but not necessarily as part of ladder)
Personally I think “blame” is a strong word but I understand the sentiment. I did see a lot of pushback on these forums against the lore changes though.
I think the two versions of the campaign are still going to be in. The buttons were datamined along with everything else. The article’s pretty vague – perhaps intentionally – about what all is going in beyond what they’ve confirmed, so we might be surprised by the differences. I do remember hearing something about the Sylvanas encounters during the march on Silvermoon being tweaked during the panel.
Unlikely, but possible.
Not sure how I feel about an additional race. I don’t think Blizzard would want to add a new race without adding it to the ladder.
Those articles are highly misinforming the playerbase, for once, use the panels as your source. I remember last year panel, they allways said that the changes were going to be minor, new layouts for maps like Stratholme and Silvermoon, characters cameos, new models, etc. Some people started posting “reforged = new game” and you believed them, that’s their problem, not the devs’, they didn’t lie or used fake adverticement, those guys just didn’t listen. Now, they are not scrapping all those changes, as they have shown and told once again, they are still a thing, the new terrain is there, the cameos are there and the new cutscenes are there, heck they even showed a teaser of the new Arthas vs Illidan cutscene just do your research.
The panels were both hosted by Grubby who is mostly only focused on multiplayer. The guy’s cool but I don’t think he was a particularly good host and was asking all the wrong questions.
I don’t feel comfortable linking the YouTube copy of the most recent panel to my post, at any rate. The BlizzCon VT is still up.
I know they said future DLC will come, just probably as skins and not necessarily as a Campaign, but thats still the only thing I really want is an all new Co-op campaign, or some similar style mode (it doesnt have to be a full campaign, maybe just a few challenging levels for each race)
he is paid by Blizzard and Im pretty sure hes told what to say on stage. Hes a little more candid in his personal twitch streams, same with Back2Warcraft
Honestly though – some talented person will probably make the maps you are asking for in the editor without the need for any input from Blizzard to make it happen.
They are removing a lot of the old limitations of the map editor I hear.
For instance they’re making it hella easier to make RPG maps. Before you needed to create numerous instances of a single unit if you wanted it to get stat increases. Now they’re enabling you to just give that unit stat increases.
And if Blizzard doesn’t do it, the map makers can.