Age of Empires DE and Age of Empires 2 DE have been built using the old genie engine from 1999 AOE2 but they improved it vastly in order to be able to render 3D graphics and add new features. The result? a gorgeous game thats has been praised everywhere. You can find in google how they managed to create 3D renders using a 2D engine.
And keep in mind those games at launch were only 20 bucks each one
I imagine they took pre-rendered images of 3D assets and used those. 2D games donât require any lighting, rendering, 3D animations, or 3D hitboxes, which makes them much easier to swap in brand new assets without making major changes.
The point here is blaming on the engine is just an excuse. Blizzard isnt an indie dev who struggles to get a game engine to release their game. Not to mention, nowadays theres tons of game engines to use. If they decided to stick to the original W3 engine and didnt turn out well, its their own fault. They didnt deliver in a lot of departments, so you at least expected that the core gameplay and mechanics could at least save the game. But we havent even got that. They had 2 years. 2 years. And now people are excusing them to give 2-3 months more in order to deliver when in that time you can barely fix only the gameplay bugs.
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Upkeep was a horrible idea that should have never left the the drawing board. Part of the whole point of the RTS genre was to create huge armies and unleash them upon your foes, I donât know of any world-class rts game that has anything like it. I might have actually bought Warcraft 3 reforged if they did away with this mistake.
Because ultimately they already released a remaster a few years agoâŚ
You imagined correctly. This is how the games were originally created, over 20 years ago.
The various buildings were 3D models which were then touched up by hand into the final sprites. This is part of the reason the graphics aged so well since the old sprites were very good looking to begin with. Having the geometric accuracy of 3D combined with the artistic details of hand drawn.
How they did the re-re-master I do not know. They might still have the original models floating around which would have been easy to upgrade using software like blender and take at high resolutions, or they might have started from scratch and used pure art skill to accurately recreate and improve the old designs.
Upkeep in part combats the bulldoze problem that most RTS games suffer from when one side gains resource advantage. For example in StarCraft II if you lose too many worker units or army units then you are at a resource disadvantage which cannot be recovered and might as well surrender.
If you build 40 units, the enemy will always have 50 or 60 units which will always win. Of course this does not matter if you hit the population cap, but the enemy knows that so they will attack the instant they are close to the population cap when they still have resource advantage over you. There is literally nothing you can do to recover and might as well surrender.
Warcraft III this is slightly different. As long as you are in no upkeep armies are cheap and quick to replace. If your enemy gets resource advantage it does not matter since they will either stick to the very limited number of no upkeep troops which you can match quick enough for a fair fight, or they push into higher upkeep levels which burn away their resource income and hence advantage. Even if you take more losses due to their larger army size, every loss they take is more expensive to them due to the higher upkeep.
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Imo they should make new game and donât destroy old.
I agree that replacing skins and models on old game with 30gb size of new models is ridiculous.
With new game they could remove old limitations and make something new.
I laugh when see reforged that doesnât even introduce customizable keys.
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But Warcraft III has had customizable hotkeys since shortly after it was releasedâŚ
No UI to do so is another issue.
The âbulldoze problemâ is not even close to being a problem. Resource management is an integral part of the RTS genre and has been for years. Protecting your worker units, and conversely, attacking your opponentâs worker units is an important part of being a competent RTS player.
No, Upkeep was a horrific idea to introduce to RTS gaming and I can only hope that this debacle with W3 reforged will cement the game into the grave, with its malformed system and story, for good.
Except aoe2 de is the same exact thing as hd with better graphics, few improvements and new civilizations.
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You have the game that you deserve. 0.5 metacritic.
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Frankly based on recent experience I do not want blizzard to go near any kind of Warcraft 4. That is a dumpster fire waiting to happen that should remain in a nightmare none of us can experience.
Especially after the near extreme plagiarism of Tolkiens work with how NâZoth was stopped I mean Jesus Christ it was near an exact copy & they even stole the beam hitting a big eldritch creature and going off into a bright light from one of their own products! which is Starcraft 2 Legacy of the void - the final cut-scene for the epilogue. Dont believe me? go watch it. Just type into youtube âkerrigan kills amonâ
Right now blizzards writing teams couldnât be any less incompetent because I do not believe that level of incompetence can existâŚit justâŚcant. They could probably be even lazier though and it would probably land them in court im surprised Tolkiens son Christopher hasnât found out about it yetâŚif hes still going that is last time I checked he had some years on him lol
The bulldoze problem is entirely related to gaining permanent advantage which then gains momentum because there is nothing the enemy can do to recover from it. It is very much a core part of StarCraft and StarCraft II. It can only happen when the number of units one can field is not a limiting problem.
Most other RTS games counter the problem via similar means to Warcraft III. Age of Empires series and Age of Mythology has the population cap, resulting in end game always being mostly worker units with a few rapidly replaced military units trying to gain ground from both sides. If you gained resource advantage early makes no difference late game as both players end up population limited easily enough anyway. In fact the solution to the problem was so effective in these games that to combat it some like Age of Empires 3 put hard limits on the number of workers a player could own to encourage larger armies.
Warcraft III does something similar via upkeep. Instead of hard limiting players to only 50 food, they allow them to go above at a resource penalty. Hence there is no value to having a lot of workers since the food they use decreases their effectiveness.
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WC3 Reforged in a new engine would be a totally different game and you canât compare that to games like Resident Evil 2 because Resident Evil 2 Remake is indeed a totally different game than the old one on the PSone.
If they really wanted to do that, they could have simply developed WC4 instead and sell it for 60 bucks, because why should they recycle the old campaign and stuff and call it a remake if they would have to do all of that from scratch and everything feels and plays different anyway, if the players who want to continue playing WC3 wouldnât be satisfied with it?
I guess everyone of us was hoping that WC3 Reforged would be a huge success so that they immediatly start developing WC4 in a new engine.
All we wanted from Reforged was a graphical update, ported on the modern battle.net (anti cheat) and some small new features like a GUI for hotkey customizability and that they keep patching the game (balance, bug fixes). Thatâs not much to ask for and would be worth 30 bucks to me, I donât understand to this day and never will how you can mess up a project like this so much.
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There are a lot of people who havenât played through the WC3 campaign. Itâs a good story, but the cutscenes are old and the engine is old. Making a high quality campaign, even though itâs basically the same story, would appeal to all the WoW players, classic players, and all other gamers. Theyâd also leave the original alone for the people that enjoy their clunky features.
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Well if they didnt make it on the same engine, how could they push it to everyone who has WC3 classic and still call it Warcraft 3?
Its for one simple reason, WC3 classic needed to die (they clearly dont wanna support it anymore), they know people didnt want it replaced with a new thing, so they smacked new makeup on the same engine and updated the game.
they destroyed w3 classic anyway so whats the point of using classic engine anyway
the goal was that players who enjoyed the classic gameplay can still continue experience the same in Reforged because of the old engine and the switch between new and old graphics, simple as that. If Reforged wouldnât be so buggy then there wouldnât be a need for the old WC3 anymore and they could have shut it down after 18 years.
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Armies of Azeroth is masterpiece compared to Reforged.
Ye all their games sucks. Their engines are single core. There was lag in diablo 3. In wow in raids, which got little better, because a lot people play this. Starcraft 2 was fine in hots, but in lotv it lags terribly even on more than recommended specs and 4 ghz cpu⌠All blizzard games suffer from low performance and overwatch wonât run more than on 60 fps.
Please update engine to support multi core cpus, it still doesnât in 2020 âŚ
Ye they would havent had to touch the story really so much other than adding those few things like they did in the Silvermoon map, but otherwise they should have remade/modernize many of the maps to be more interesting and have new side quests and suchâŚor if not that then atleast fully modernize the cutscenes.
The thing is though had they made FROM THE START very clear that this would be nothing but visual remaster/reskin that would otherwise be 100% identitcal to the original (except for improved Battlenet features) and priced it at 10-15 euros/dollars then I think that would have been just fine and no one would have complained. Certainly many would not have had any interest for just visual remaster (and would have demanded Blizzard to make more of remake than remaster anyway) but atleast if they had not gone and promised something that was more than just a remaster, then none of the current $hitstorm would not have happened and Reforged likely would have had its small, but quite happy customer base.
Anyhow It would have been so very easy to get this right, but somehow they managed to get it all wrong.
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