Blizzard listened to the purists and developed Reforged on the original engine. The WC3 engine is nearly 20 years old and gives a clunky, poor experience to modern standards. Maybe Blizzard did this intentionally so that people go back to playing WoW once they’re done with the campaign. Personally, I think using the WC3 engine was a colossal mistake, one of the worst in the company’s history. This decision has me looking past this game, and hoping for WC4.
We all know the game was great back in 2002, but updating a 20 year old engine is almost harder than creating a new one from scratch. Blizzard would’ve had a very easy time using the SC2 engine and downgrading parts of gameplay such as pathing and collision to create a similar feeling game with great lighting, networking, skin swapping, performance, etc. It is much easier to delete lines of code than to add new code.
When Resident Evil 2 was remastered, the devs started with the RE7 engine. This of course upset the purists, but the result was totally worth it and was a huge success. When Ocarina of Time was remastered, the devs didn’t force players to use an N64 controller or a CRT TV. Dota 2? Same thing, toxic purists claimed doom and gloom because the game wasn’t using the WC3 engine, and were proven totally wrong. The remasters that kept their original engine have gone largely unnoticed.
The way Blizzard is handling this remake is criminally incompetent. They listened to old players like Grubby, who know nothing about business, game development, or programming. Those purists (who will realistically make up an insignificant portion of players) demanded the same game engine be used. But for what purpose? So that they can maintain a small competitive advantage, and don’t have to re-learn parts of the game. Or, maybe for the satisfaction of subjecting others to the unadulterated gameplay they mastered, despite its obvious deficiencies. You would really sacrifice the rest of the player base and the game itself for their selfish reasons?
I’m tired of hearing people say that they needed to do this to preserve gameplay and for balance purposes because:
- The original gameplay is NOT very well balanced.
- Altering pathing, hitboxes, selection limitations, or networking delays does not detract from the gameplay experience in any meaningful way and only works to improve the gameplay experience.
- The only reason people are opposed to these changes is because they don’t want to re-learn parts of the game, and are afraid of losing their 20-year competitive advantage at using the engine. (this is in fact a valid argument, but is not what they’ll admit is their motivation).
I understand the game is in beta, but for God’s sake, we can’t even easily bind items to hotkeys in-game. Grubby isn’t even playing Reforged, and probably never will. Why on earth would Blizzard cater their game for a very much dead playerbase that would resist even the greatest of changes? They let several man babies with no money decide this game’s future. Before they started patching WC3 again, you couldn’t even find a game on Battle Net. Nobody cares about 20 year old custom maps anymore, and those maps could have been easily recreated in a modern engine.
People don’t seem to understand just how difficult a task it is to try to modernize an engine that was developed for Windows 98 machines. Even the task of getting it to run on modern hardware without using a wrapper is enough to make most game studios give up. Nevermind the difficulty in modernizing the networking, interface, lighting, asset handling, etc. AND they want it to be backwards compatible? Simply insane. The WC3 engine isn’t even backwards compatible with previous versions of itself.
The same job that took 2 years to do in the WC3 engine could have been done in less than a month on a modern engine. Sure, they’d have to recreate the campaign missions and maps (which actually has major benefits), but brute forcing those with the SC2 editor isn’t such an overwhelming task and only requires cheap, low-skilled labour. All these extra resources could have been used to improve the game and add new features, but as it stands the game probably won’t have any sort of long-lasting success when it still plays like something from a previous generation.
Again blaming us “purists”, when Reforged was from the VERY BEGINNING made with the original game engine, you idiot! This wasnt something that anyone got to say anything about, THAT was already decided BEFORE Reforged was even announced…yet here you are blaming others 