Warcraft 3 Retold?

General Discussion
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Hello dear community, hello dear developers. It has now been 4 years since the disastrous release of Warcraft 3 Reforged. I don’t know how you feel, but when I think of the release, it still deeply shakes me. No game in my 20 years of gaming experience has ever shaken me, made me so angry, and disappointed me as much as Warcraft 3 Reforged. Now I would like to make a request here, in the hope that the developers will see it. The servitude under the old corporate structure is now over (at least I hope so) and you have certainly learned from past mistakes. Microsoft has been very successful with their Age of Empires series and has proven that good remasters are well-received. I have been wishing for so long that Warcraft 3 would finally get the updates it should have received from the start. Maybe you even have something bigger planned? Who knows. I have been dreaming of a Warcraft 4 for 10 years, although my hope is slowly dying.

But if you are open to the idea of reviving Warcraft 3, or perhaps retelling Warcraft 1-3/4 in a new form, within this outstanding gameplay principle, then I and surely many others would be thrilled by this news. Please consider exchanging ideas with the colleagues from AoE / AoM. You are all now part of the same company, and I hope that Microsoft will support you as much as possible in becoming the Blizzard you once were.

No matter what you do, if anything at all, please at least update that dreadful interface in W3R, as it takes up more than half of the screen. I would much prefer what was shown at the Blizzcon demo in 2018 :slight_smile: And yeah, maybe you can add more campaigns and add some races? Or Maybe just do Warcraft 4 xD I mean even it would tell the same story as World of Warcraft, where is the problem? I would love and play it forever :slight_smile:

So, that’s it for my dreaming. I hope someone from Blizzard reads this and takes it to heart. One can always dream :slight_smile:

Thank you for reading my too long thing of a text haha

4 Likes
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Sadly blizzard is probably not making more support to WC 3 reforged despite small fixes and balance changes, meaning no new content like campaigns or modes. Not to mention original RTS devs are no longer in blizzard. It’s a good thing that microsoft is there and that bring hopes for something new for the future.

It would need to be a WC IV in my opinion. They could very well start telling the world of warcraft stories post WC 3 FT through RTS - like one+ chapter telling WOW classic story, one chapter telling burning crusade, and so on. There is so much rich story there from the characters we love.

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LOL NO! Let the game vanish with dignity. There is no need to dig up the grave and show the corpse again. It will only add insults and embrassment.

And your idea or Retold, I wonder where that is coming from. :slight_smile: (already pre-ordered btw)

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new RTS game Storm Gate

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Seems to me that you are the problem in this situation, to let social media affect you like that. The release was basically the same as the beta from 2019, with the addition of the campaign in a manner consistent with what was described/presented leading up to the release.

Being shaken to the core means you were living as a social media user rather than a Warcraft 3 user. Do you not agree?

Pop “ghostwolf’s code come alive” into a YouTube search. I uploaded a video montage where I rewrite the code portion of Warcraft 3 in a new code project, and you can see it come together. I was always twiddling things, changing designs, playing with ideas, etc, and I was typically public about this. At time 1:59 in the video montage you can see that I tried out the minimalist UI similar to 2018 demo, but with some Night Elf gameplay. At time 3:51 you can see I tried out loading Reforged graphics on my open source rewrite of the game.

And, unlike Activision, my remake – that is truly a remake and no a reskin of old code, since I don’t work at Activision Microsoft – is freedom software, with all of the code available for free on GitHub under the AGPL copyleft license. So you can compile and run your own spinoff of Warcraft III using this code.

Unfortunately, my work is not finished. This was always just a hobby project for me, and – like Microsoft – I have other things to do. Like Tichondrius, I might mutter that I have better things to do.

But when you focus on a negative, and focus on what you don’t like about Reforged, instead of focusing on a positive and on rewriting this game how you want to rewrite it – even if you didn’t originally know how, like me – you get a worse outcome. I would like to think I focused on a positive, and I got a better outcome. You chose to post on Activision’s Reforged forums, not Retera’s Warsmash forum. You are ultimately responsible for where you put your time and attention, and the consequences of those decisions, apparently, shake you to the core.

If you can see where you are part of the problem, maybe you can conjure a reasonable solution. Unfortunately, regardless of who owns Activision, destroying your favorite games and replacing them with Arclight Rumble is still more profitable than selling you a product or maintaining a product that you have previously purchased, because on this planet in many cases the economy is broken and/or the users are stupid. If you try to blame that as the source of your frustration, then you will be blaming some abstract concept that you cannot fix.

But if you blame specific technical bugs on Warcraft III, and then do your own remake from nothing on your own that does not have those bugs, we can make a sort of public statement and educate other humans. Otherwise, they’re just going to go back to their social media, go back to being harvested, go back to playing League of Legends and buying the skins with the biggest reproductive organs in the hopes that the endorphins that will conjure will save them from the suffering of their own poor decisions.

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…what?

What kind of ridiculous response is this, bro?

He’s expressing a very common sentiment amongst fans of Classic War3; the release of Reforged was a massive let down full of broken promises and missing features. Suggesting that devs from other RTS teams within Microsoft could collaborate with Blizzard is perfectly reasonable and actually indicates a certain level of hope on his part.

What is this Thesis you’re pushing about ‘sOc14L m3d!A!!!11’?

Like to assume much? Shoehorn your talking points into whatever discussions you can and talk about how awesome you are because you’re 'rewriting the game from scratch all by myself, AND YOU SHOULD TOO (but it’s not done yet; sadly I only have so much time!).

Get over yourself.

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I’m a game programmer. There is a way to restore this gem. The only legally and technically viable solution is reverse-engineer the old game client, and make an open source version of it. It then could be a fully open source WC3. Players would have to provide files with copyrighted assets (MPQ), similarly how DevilutionX (Diablo 1 open source) works. With custom private servers, this would allow to have a thriving WC3 community, without any Blizzard supervision. Having private online servers, Blizzard could probably force them to shutdown, but maybe they wouldn’t do it.

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I am not a game programmer. I’m just some guy. I didn’t bother doing reverse-engineering on binaries. Instead, because Warcraft III’s code is just some hacked together nonsense, I tried to hack together my own nonsense in its image. And in a lot of ways, the garbage that I spat out is likewise similar to the original.

And as you have said, on my version players have to provide files with copyrighted assets (MPQ). I wrote this using my layman understanding of online descriptions of “lock step networking,” and then I created a server where players can go online and play together. I’m not sure if I would call it “private server” since it’s accessible to anyone.

But there isn’t a thriving WC3 community on my server. Almost nobody uses it. And “Blizzard” (the Microsoft Activision company) has not tried to take down my server, since it doesn’t matter to them.

Then I got a direct message on the Hive Workshop modding site from someone asking me how to customize the color of their Reforged particle emitter graphics, because that’s what players really care about. They would rather to lock themselves into PopcornFX like Activision wants, so that they can never escape to my MDX based game that I wrote and never play their works on my server. Because the user is dumb. The users do what is easy, not what is ideological. Who am I to blame them? It’s easier to download Reforged than to try learn how to link the copyrighted assets with my rewrite.

Does my existence literally disprove what you’re saying, or am I just doing it wrong? I’m honestly not sure.

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I didn’t say anything about marketing. The technical side is one thing, and making it popular, is another thing. I’m also not sure, if there is enough demand for such an open source WC3:TFT. It’s a very old game, and maybe we should just allow it to rest in peace. I would prefer them to do it the D2:R way: keep the old client online, and make a separate WC3:R client. You probably worked a lot on that project, but sometimes people just don’t care, and you can do little about it. Send me a link to your server.

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In Bliz’s house? That wouldn’t be wise.

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If you are indeed a programmer, you could realize Reverse-engineering is really Not a solution !
The solution is to make old game code public (buy somehow from Blizzard), then study it & re-make game engine then add artwork on top of it.