Using the WC3 Engine was a Mistake

General Discussion
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But if they’re making visually modern game - Why not just add new Cinematic and Cutscenes? It makes sence and it’s not as hard as

Time and money. One cinematics team, a 6month+ development cycle for cinematics, and multiple projects with higher priority than reforged such as D4, Overwatch 2, Shadowlands and whatever is left unannounced that is left to come.

We have like 30 min of cinematics to have redone. And it won’t sell more games because of the cinematics, consider that anyone who wants Reforged already knows about it and or has seen the Reforged teaser redone cinematic. For everyone else, they’d just watch the cinematics on youtube later. Redoing all cinematics is not worth the investment considering there is a budget, and its better spent on development rather than cinematics.

Yes, this is not the answer you want to hear. But as someone who works in the industry and has worked at Activision and have seen almost finished projects shut down because it was not deemed worthy to spend marketting money on, there is a significant business factor that you’re missing by simply believing if fans want it then we should get it.

All of these come at a cost, and even having the game delayed is a cost to them. Added time to dev, missing a holiday season for sales, and worse yet, losing preorders. This is not something they do lightly, and we take it for granted because we aren’t in Blizzards shoes.

I only see this because I have the experience of knowing these factors having worked on games. From a fan perspective, Blizzard has billions so they shouldn’t be failing; but its very far from the truth. If anything, it was not easy to persuade this project to get greenlit in the first place considering they could be making something far more profitable like another Hearthstone or a Autochess clone.

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I’m not saying Blizzard has to listen to me, or you, or anybody. Actually, I wish they didn’t. I know for a fact that the best video games are the ones that the developers wanted to make and play. When you develop a game or movie based on balancing outsider opinions and expectations, you end up with a stale, safe, uninspired product.

If you work in the industry then you should know as well as I do how much more difficult it is to redesign a very old game engine and preserve its assets while also implementing all new [modern] ones than to just use a mature editor to remake all the levels. Maybe this was keeping with the team’s vision of preserving custom games and gameplay, but I still think it was a mistake and overly ambitious. Kudos to them for pulling it off. It’s just my opinion, but I think the gameplay would’ve been better and there would’ve been more headroom for improvements if they didn’t do that though.

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It doesn’t. It actually means remodelled, so it’s the perfect name for a remaster.

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so much crap here, this new players comming too warcraft, want a new game cause they know that they will never get on that skill level of people playing this game for almost 20 years.The gameplay of the game is great and the engine is good, if they change that old players inclued me would be pissed, the bodyblocking, the microing, upkeep all that makes the game intersting its not a easy game and thats why it is so much intersting cause you need too spend aloot of time too get better people just want for one day too become pro, whats intersting in that, thats why warcraft has a huge potential for big esport scene, cause the game is not easy, and its way more intersting then sc2 where macro matters the most, in wc3 fights are way longer and its all about micro and decision, and if you fail you still can tp, in sc2 one mistake you lose the game.I agree that the pathing is sometimes frustating your units blocks another units that happens often, but after playing many games you can master it so it dosent happend.And blaming grubby who did alot for wc3 community is really bad from you, he didnt devolp the game and he just gave some feedback too blizzard and im pretty sure he will play reforged when it comes out, cause this beta is too laggy and no ladder, he even bough a new pc for reforged, so you are a liar.

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Nobody here actually cares about gameplay - We mostly want only campaing single-player changes for a bette imersive sim

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You are legitimately only able to speak for yourself on most occasions.

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Everyone here speaks about Campaing stuff and Singleplayer features
No one here was talking about changing the gameplay

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No one cares.

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Requiring Bonjour to even be able to play the campaign offline is a mistake, not the engine.

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my prospective: they wanna keep the game as classic as it could be, while they might prepare the new engine for the warcraft 4 in the next 20 years or early… anyway the game is already happened, what could u ask for but complains… if blizzard really care about fan, they might gives a little more treat when they realised about their mistakes ! God bless America !

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What a cluless tard OP is. Knows nothing about game development , doesnt understand what remaster(the only reason I see it’s called reforged is to sound more warcraft-ish) means and thinks someone can just make in such short time (1 year or 2) a game on a completely new engine with all bnet perks. Also, it is a more delicate problem too because you want to make the mechanics play the same, that will likely differ on a different engine…

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I’ll be fine with them using the old engine and just updating it, but I do think that is a mistake in the long run. The amount of effort it will take to remaster everything and fix all the glitches caused by trying to use the old system is significant enough that it’d be worth considering just making a new system that mimics the old one. Since they have the current one as reference, it’s not the same as making a brand new game.

Using the old system, they’re most likely going to run into limitations that can’t be simply fixed without redesigning the whole system, it’s an unknown factor now, but that is something that could easily screw them for trying to use the old system.

Again, I’m happy with their plan now of just remastering the old system, but it’s not something I would do if it was up to me. It might be a different story if the war3 engine wasn’t made nearly 20 years ago.

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The one good thing they have about it is the fact that the WoW engine is heavily based on the same engine they used for WC3. That is what allows them to backport a lot of features fairly effectively.

If it weren’t for the existence of a modern-updated version of the WC3 engine, a new engine may have been a better plan.

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Your title doesn’t even earn enough credits to justify me reading the entire topic.

completely disagree with you, using the Wc3 Engine was LITERALLY the only right thing they could have ever done.

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Hi guys, I understand both position, but I thought that the game is primarily for players like me who once played W3+Frozen Throne, had nice memories, but the game is too long obsolete. I also hoped that some new modern engine will be used, my 3440x1440 monitor will be supported, maybe they throw few new quests on maps, few new upgrades, definitely new cut-scenes, maybe bonus campaign, etc…

I understand hard-core players who play W3 regularly, but I dare to say that there are 80-90% of players who planned to pay to see and re-play W3 campaigns in modern way (and that would be it), not just polished classic without anything new really. Call me stupid but I am genuinly upsed and already asked for refund. If core players insist to have W3 reforged like it is, then they should finance it alone since apparently the game was made only for them.

Massive negative feedback from those who purchased it and asked for refund - like myself - is basically a clear message. I would expect that the game for minimal price of 30 EUR/USD would be up to standards of time it is released (or at least close to it). For me it is total disaster.

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Ok… Then if it is only remaster, why not ask for 5-10 EUR?
30-40 EUR just for improved graphics while you already paid for the game 18 years ago is a joke. Where are new cut-scenes? I mean I started the game and besides a bit higher resolution I cannot find anything new… so I still search for 30-40 EUR value in it on top of the classic and cannot find it. Pls help! :slight_smile:

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Blizzard knew that we wanted more than just a reskin. They even claim that they went to Europe and China and everyone there wanted MORE. Listening to pros like Grubby was a grave mistake but that’s just Blizzard’s excuse.

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Sadly i don’t even think you know what you are talking about since Reforged runs on the Starcraft 2 engine, the same engine as Heroes of The Storm.

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Despite many of its shortcomings, this game would have been better redone in modified SC2 engine, the one they are using for HOTS. Also the art style there is much more enjoyable and reminiscent of what WC3 represented.

Bringing Grubby into the conversation makes no difference. He is running a business and that’s exactly what his stream is. Also he is a type of person that will accept a paid promotion for a trash mobile game and pretend as if he is enjoying it.

Being a person of influence that he is, he was to afraid to criticise Blizzard for what looked like a train-wreck since the moment they revealed the project. Smart businessman decision, because he didn’t want to ruin his chances of getting invited at future events, but from a fan’s perspective it was pretty disappointing because what it took was only one public figure to rally criticism.

Now he is handing out copies of the game like candy, I really doubt if it’s from his own pocket. The only difference between us and him is he has a financial incentive not to say what he hates about the game, because many other competitive players are tearing it apart with their words.

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That is 100% false.

It was the exact same game ported in to a new engine with some name changes and many, many improvements.

I’m not talking about art creation, that’s a separate issue and takes about the same time in both cases. I’m talking about getting a functional product with high quality interface, UI, stability, replays, spectating, social, lighting, asset management, player profiles, modern gameplay, beautiful campaign, etc.

Because they don’t get paid, and it’s not as easy to learn for a beginner. Once you learn to use it though, it’s much easier to make things like high quality cutscenes or change the UI in the Galaxy Editor. It takes someone a couple weeks to become proficient in the Galaxy Editor than WC3’s World Editor. It takes someone many years to learn to re-engineer a game engine. It isn’t even a comparable skillset or cost to hire.

Remaking the campaign with the original for reference would be a breeze compared to trying to resuscitate a 20 year old engine to work with modern PBR models while still being backwards compatible with the original.

That is bullcrap. Among my favorite games are Dark Souls and Fortnite. A lot of people like challenging games, but you want it to be intuitive and fun to play. Fortnite is easy to learn, but has an extremely high skill ceiling. It has changed how building and bloom works to make it more intuitive and funtional over its lifetime, and the game’s more competitive than ever. Dark Souls tweaked how the movement and combat worked with each iteration of that series, and Dark Souls 3 has the best combat and balance and is the most fun to play, despite what a few nostalgic people want to think. Even the Warcraft series made improvements to the pathing and UI with each iteration, except this one.

Upkeep was a core part of the original game design of having smaller bases and armies, which you can see from early Development press meetings. Not being able to see enemy and neutral creep abilities for the purposes of learning or spectating, is not. Slow unit movement and turning and blocking was part of the game’s design, but the terrible pathfinding and inaccurate collision do not hold up. The way the terrain is drawn looked great for 2003, but the wicked texture seams and no transitions between terrain don’t look any better in a higher resolution. Having a massive UI and only rendering half the screen was due to technical limitations and small CRT monitors people played on at that time. Now it looks like a mobile game with buttons you can press with your thumb on a phone screen.

Either they needed to remaster the original game to make it playable on modern hardware with a few QoL improvements and sell it for cheap and not make a big deal out of it, or make a new game in an engine that isn’t so dated, but emulate the original. Not some bastardized version of both remake and remaster where you mess up the original game and leave much to be desired at the same time. They upset and disappointed both the people that wanted to keep playing WC3 TFT and the people who wanted a new Warcraft game for the first time in 16 years.

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