Why did they remake the warcraft 3 campaign maps into completely different maps in reforged? There are now 2 different versions of each map with completely different terrain, units, gameplay etc. For instance Stratholme, Dalaran and Silvermoon maps.
What was the decision behind this? Previously there was a normal and hard difficulty, but in reforged they added a new easy difficulty called story mode which is completely unnecessary.
If you ask me the campaigns should never have been remade to have a reforged version of each map, they wasted so much time on that for nothing. Now we ended up with broken campaigns. Everything worked perfectly fine before reforged.
The reforged campaign maps are worse than the orginal “classic” versions. The camera work is terrible, cinematography, as the cinematics have different angles and are zoomed in too much in reforged campaigns. Another bad design choice they did was to merge the small maps with cutscenes into the maps with gameplay, when you scout the map with gameplay you can see awkward terrain which doesn’t fit as that part of map was used as a cutscene. It just takes you out of the story and makes each map a mess. The specific reforged maps themselves are poorly balanced and have starcraft 2 and diablo 3 gameplay which doesn’t fit warcraft 3. Stratholme in reforged allows you to endlessly farm malganis to get overpowered items and other maps have very dumbed down diablo 3 gameplay like Dalaran map. Another useless thing they spent time on is new unit animations they created for the reforged campaigns which is not needed at all, I’m perfectly fine with Kael standing still during cinematics instead of doing goofy stuff with new animations.
Another bad decision was to make the demo campaign maps with orcs rescuing the trolls from murlocs and sea witch available only in reforged mode.
They tried to make warcraft 3 appeal to wider audience and it failed totally. It would have been enough with graphics setting in options, which we kind of have now with the abillity to change models and terrain between classic SD and reforged HD. To remake the campaign maps from scratch with new triggers, terrain, units, camera work etc. was a big mistake and money wasted.
That was already a thing with the original maps, though…
That was actually missing in the original WC3 altogether. It was then added as a custom campaign when Frozen Throne released, though it was added without any voicelines. Reforged officially added it back. So in a sense Classic mode is even more accurate than you think.
Quite frankly, I think the idea they had of remaking the campaigns to fit with WoW lore was a worthwhile cause. They got axed before they could do everything because Activision is greedy.
Also the minimap icons they added for quests is completely unnecessary. We’ve been playing games for how long without those minimap quest icons? They are just a distraction, it’s more fun to have shared vision of units and areas based on whatever the quest is about instead of seeing big red icons on minimap. Instead they could have made the elements in quest window bigger/dynamic to allow more quest description to be displayed as it is limited to only 4 rows of text now, this would also be great for all custom maps. The “Help” and “Tips” are still useless in game menu, instead of adding easy story difficulty they could have simply cleaned up the “Help” and “Tips” menus which are bloated with useless information and should have disabled formation movement toggle. Would have saved a lot of money and made it more helpful to casual players.
When it comes to cinematics it was also unnecessary to remake the cinematics. Arthas vs Illidan battle, there was nothing wrong with the cinematic to begin with and we end up with a much worse cinematic. Please delete the remade Arthas vs Illidan battle cinematic, nobody will miss it and the game would be smaller file size.
Then they ruined music such as the storm, earth and fire song which they remade and added crowd cheering audio in the background which completely ruins this epic song. This was also not needed at all and money wasted.
I will end by bringing some things which were actually good changes that came with reforged: We got all regions merged in custom games which is brilliant, we got more player slots however there are bugs where you can’t trade resources to them and some actions such as vision and pan camera don’t work with new player colors, then we got friends list from different regions which is also great, and we got some balance changes but they don’t apply to campaign maps which they should have made so the campaign maps use latest patch instead of remaking them from scratch.
Because the project was a remaster, just like Starcraft and Diablo 2 which also have the original and remastered versions available.
Last I heard the missions are the same between classic and reforged except for a couple where the layouts are modified.
To you perhaps, but obviously not for everyone who plays the game.
That, and just about everything you say for the rest of your post(s), is not because the campaign was remastered. It’s because the entire Classics Project was cancelled before Reforged was completed so it had to be rushed out in an unfinished, broken state.
I think there’s only three missions and a couple cut scenes that were remade. But the answer to your question is that Reforged was originally a lot more ambitious of a project. All the missions were supposed to be updated to some extent, cut scenes were meant to have fancier camera work, and they even intended to add some new cut scenes to flesh things out. As Blizzard was looking to put a lot more investment into games that tied into Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch, they figured WC3R could function not only as a remake but also be presented as a prequel to WoW so more players would try it out.
The original announcement sounded a little too good to be true considering that Blizzard had already been scaling back their investments into the RTS genre and single player content in general. And, as most of us know, it was indeed too good to be true. Blizzard was under pressure from shareholders to announce new titles that weren’t remakes or expansions which led them to put a little too much hype into the Diablo Immortal announcement to immediate backlash. And then they moved as many developers as they could to Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 to get those titles ready for the next year’s BlizzCon. WC3R was left with a skeleton crew and a threadbare budget. But since they started taking preorders as soon as it was announced, they felt it still needed to get pushed out just a little over a year later.
The Warcraft RTS team has been doing more work on WC3R but so far campaign updates have been limited to fixing loading backgrounds. They have yet to say anything about whether single player is included in their “If something is broken, you fix it” mission statement.
“If something is broken, you fix it”. Alas, this phrase has remained an empty phrase, as no technical fixes have been made, and the new patch has once again changed the balance .
So they could make improvements. Many were actually made, in particular making Hard Mode actually hard, unfortunately the new team that handled the game after Activision fired the original one decided to revert most of the actual improvements to address crashes even though those crashes were fixable.
If you want the OG campaign experience, then play on Classic Mode, which uses the original maps.
Yes, before update 1.36, the single player campaign was indeed improved. Especially in patch 1.35, when, for example, Silvermoon and many other things were redone. However, with the release of patch 1.36, all this was cut, it is unclear why.
There was a massive revamp for hard more to make it, actually, you know, hard, instead of barely different at all. But this was reverted because of various crashes occuring in the campaign. They could have easily been fixed (and indeed fixes were found by community members) but they took the lazy path of just reverting all of it.
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