Overall:
Hello I am a bad Warcraft 3 player that tried to play a little competitive Warcraft 3 back when it was first out, but was never any good. Here is my feedback.
This is a very cool project, its great to see Warcraft getting some love after all these years.
I just hope the remaster doesn’t try to remake Warcraft 3 into a companion game for world of Warcraft.
Graphics:
Some of the new graphics look too cartoony. Even though the original was cartoony. I don’t know why. Possibly it’s the altered (more realistic) shape of the units contrasting with the colour scheme.
The old graphics made everything clear and distinctive, but the new style seems to make things too complex to look at from a distance, turning them into a mess of colour and shapes.
For example the necromancers have a lot of doodads they are wearing which lowers how identifiable they are.
And the Footmen seem over designed. Especially their shield and massive shoulders. You need to simplify the shield, removing most of the cross thing on the front. Just give it a simple spike like the original. Also the original white shield border helps unit readability, instead of the dull grey.
And reduce / remove the Pauldrons, since they make it hard to pick out the footman’s head. His head just disappears into his shoulders and doesn’t look like a footman anymore.
Hero units (Arthas at least) seems small, even though they are taller. It might be because their proportions are different now.
Now that Arthas hair is longer / more detailed, the fact it lacks physics and just sticks to his armour is very off-putting.
Jaina seem to be in a World of Warcraft outfit instead of looking like her Warcraft 3 version. Could that be corrected to use something closer to her original Warcraft 3 outfit (the larger over the shoulder cloak seems to be missing).
Looking at the new blademaster, he appears to have a tiny head.
Same with the grunt, his facial features are really small.
The dreadlord seemed to covert into the reforged version pretty well. The only thing that looks out of place is the giant fleshy wing claws. They should be sleek wings instead of scary monster wings. Because dreadlords are supposed to be smooth vampire masterminds.
The new buildings look ok, but now that they are more detailed, they don’t fit with the landscape anymore. Whenever you up the visuals of one part of this game, everything else adjacent to it also needs to be changed to fit. I assume the terrain and buildings will look like then belong together in the final game.
Comparing some specific buildings
The new altar of storms is over detailed, like some of the units. The new one has added spikes and and banner that were not present on the old building. I think these new things make it harder to identify the central focus of the alter, which should be the statue in the middle. The new coloured banner especially steals focus from the statue.
The new scout tower has way too many spikes.
So overall for the graphics, you need to remove the new excessive details on units and buildings that clutter the view from a long distance. You should focus on improving the fine details for cut scene close ups and possibly remove them when the camera is in rts mode (as the fine details should be small enough to not show up when looking down from above anyway).
Also don’t go crazy on the shoulderpads like you have from Arthas and the footmen, bring it back to a sane level. They need to turn their head.
And fix the scale of characters heads, overall they seem too small (like the units are taller but their heads are the same size)
New in game cinematics:
Adding coughing peasants to the intro was nice.
But otherwise the new cinematics seem worse than the originals. Since characters take up most of the screen instead of wide shots appropriate to an rts. The new style is kind of like you only remastered the talking portraits in the cinematic subtitles.
Also, the new cinematic doesn’t appear to take place inside the game. Arthas just teleports out of the cinematic to your base instead of it being a smooth transition from cutscene to gameplay.
You messed up the line order, and the new cinematic completely omits the first few lines of dialogue.
The new strathholm mission seems to take place on a sunny day for some reason? Even though it was raining in the original?
Also, Arthas delivering his later lines from a hill with his face in shadow is much more powerful than the new cinematic direction.
I think having more detailed and animated cinematic models is a good change, but don’t mess up the Cinematography.
Sound:
New voices would be a bad idea. There needs to be an old voices option if you make new voices for existing characters.
Cinematics:
The infernal in the opening trailer. There is too much stuff on it. Like random things floating near it’s shoulders for no reason.
It’s fallen prey to the should pad addiction that permeates the art team. Shoulders are too massive, head is too small. And now it has some silly rock halo? or something that makes it’s head not the highest point on the model.
Finally, the opening trailer infernal roar is not very impressive, like it needs to flare up slightly or do something. The original seemed to ‘heat up’ when roaring.
I heard there would be an Arthas / Illidan cut scene reforging. I hope it means a classic blizzard cg movie (To make it like the rest of the game).
UI Feedback:
Overall the smaller UI is probably a good change. Hard to tell without using it.
The borderless portraits look really weird.
Reforged Campaign:
Altering campaign maps is a fine idea to make a rerun through the game more interesting.
However, keep the world of warcraft people as far away from this as possible. The need for things for players to fight in World of Warcraft poisoned the lore. Any campaign changes should be based on the needs of an RTS, not of an MMO.
Make wow an alternate timeline please. Minor cameos from wow is fine.
Stratholm is tiny now for some reason. It was a expansive city before, more like an actual place.
Adding the new ‘hidden’ bosses was cool. This would be the way to reference any lore from wow you want to canonise.
You can add little things to try and entice world of warcraft players over, but don’t make drastic changes just to emulate world of Warcraft.
The dev grubby had on his stream excitedly pointing out the scarlet citadel and other wow references makes me worry.
From polygon: 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.
This article is a huge a huge danger flag and makes the game a wait and see. Retconning the high point of the series is not a good idea.
this is warcraft 3 not “we gotta make it match WoW so lets change everything”
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