Warcraft 3: I am ready to stop being angry

[Satan915-1871]

Wow, someone else recently made their own thread about this AND brought attention to many of the past threads about this. I didn’t realize there were this many:

26gigabyte for a 2g game -
Blizzard you need to roll back this update!
It's downloading, even though I didn't buy it
Why am I still being forced to download GBs of Reforged assets?
I didn't buy Reforged. Why is it forced on me, and where is my classic client?
Forced to download reforged?
Reforged is a forced downgrade for classic users - #153 by DrSuperGood-1327

Of course that doesn’t count all the people that agree but have not made a thread about this or don’t use this website, or all the news articles that mention this as a criticism. Clearly this isn’t just some “dumb” complaint. A lot of people agree about this, even if at the same time many people don’t care.

@Triceron-1519

Nah. 30gb is a bit ridiculous even now. If you actually look at the files, a lot of what’s in there is heavily unoptimized. Most of the art files look like they come straight out of work files and aren’t optimized well for performance or space.

They split up each unit into multiple texture maps which really aren’t necessary, and each is so high res that it really makes no sense to have in an RTS unless they were really planning to keep the up-close cutscenes that they originally planned for.

It’s laziness to not have the game optimized and cut down to a more appropriate size. They’re just leaving in all the base high-res textures in there for the sake of it, and most of the time they’re not even being used since no one plays the game scrolled in close to units at all times.

That at least partially explains why they take up so much space. But yes, all the more reason why it’s a waste of space.

@Templarfreak-1580

In theory this is possible for singleplayer, but definitely not for multiplayer. Or at least, you can’t use LITERALLY all of Blizzard’s HD graphics in an SD map. As far as my knowledge goes, there is no functional difference between SD and HD graphics, they just have the two modes that can switch which vanilla graphic set is being used. Anyway, you couldn’t use literally the entire HD graphics set because maps online are limited to about 100MBs or so.

That answers that then. So then, going back to your original post, you’re saying that people who didn’t buy Reforged can play custom maps in HD mode (with Reforged assets) due to still having the Reforged assets downloaded? Again that seems like a big loophole and even less reason to buy Reforged. But if that’s the case, then to satisfy both sides, they just need to have the Reforged assets be an optional download, so people who want to play HD maps without buying Reforged still can, and people who don’t just wouldn’t be able to play them. They could even have an error message for people who still try like “You need to download Reforged data to play HD maps.”