Was there really a reason to make Reforged?

General Discussion
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Since there is no Christmas sale either, or any mention about Reforged in the advertising email, I am just wondering what was the real reason of Reforged…

They could have simply said “after all these years we are going to shut down battlnenet servers” like it happens with many RPG games. It would have been sad, but it would have also been understandable.
We could have got left with a perfectly working game and the ability to host games as we want.
They could have just left the new graphic for 10-15 dollars as a farewell gift.
They could have left the bare minimal game advertising functions on their servers without the ladders and so on workloads.

So what were they trying to achieve with Reforged?
or
Was there really a plan for achieving anything?

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Now that i think about it, Reforged really doesn’t have any reason to exist.

From my point of view anyway, i don’t see Reforged being a reasonable project to be deployed on War3. the main focus of their branding wasn’t even on the most important parts of the game. nor understanding how it evolved.

They just tried to sell an overpriced motion capture ingame cinmatic venture to the “broader Blizzard audience” then didn’t deliver on it.

Its actually funny because it wouldn’t have really helped the game even if they did deliver on it, a success of Reforged as it was originally planned would have still been dependant on the community and the mapmakers and whatnot to cover up Blizzards shortcomings.

Warcraft 3’s features was being a 1.5GB lightweight game that can be crossed over with some USB and be able to read countless numbers of custom games across the board.

Now its a heafty 30GB filled with bloatware models that despite looking good on an abstract form, are a horrible choice for the game it was made for and it actually damaged the modding community if they ever had plans to mass produce reasonably decent high quality models.

Its times like this that i just want to go back to time and ask people as to what would be the best possible solution to an overhaul to Warcraft 3. and i like to think that almost everyone universally would choose a regular by the books humble remaster of the game instead of an overambitious cheap remake.

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I don’t know what the plan was. But I feel like it collides with a huge stop of inefficiency.

What I highlight the most is that at some point the development team was incapable (which I’m sure as individuals are good developers but clearly not as a team) it occurred to them to make the game back from scratch. Instead of modifying the original game. So they wasted a lot of time and money developing things that were already there.

That is the only way that I explain that the Game is not yet at the level of the classic.

Which makes me last even longer. Why are you going ahead with the project? The only thing I can think of is to steal maps and use them in his next game … but the point is that his game has been so bad that it doesn’t even work to test that.

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Personally, I was excited about the possibility of new campaign improvements. The minute they scrapped that I knew the game was a disaster and I said that for over a year now, I was never one of the ones who complained about the new campaign.

I was also excited for UI improvements, and the possibility of increased unit groups (at least for custom games). These things are possible but, it requires a vast amount of work to setup. Same goes for custom campaigns. Of course I am not mentioning any of the bugs right now

I was never excited for skins, but I thought they would be a good way for Blizzard to make money… yet somehow they even gave up on doing those too because they know the visuals are not up to par.

The only positive thing I can honestly say is at the very least, there is a slight bit of renewed interest in the game, at least i think so. We now have people creating new campaigns, recreating WC2 within WC3, more co-op maps too, mods to improve the lighting, mods for ladder, and more.

They did merge the USeast and USWest servers, which is nice, but I wish they left all the servers merged for custom games instead of matchmaking… doesnt really make sense to merge servers for matchmaking, but I assume that will change once the ladder is eventually released. Either way though, they had no reason for segregating the custom games list after it was merged in 2019

Hopefully after they get the ladder and clan stuff released, maybe the game will be enjoyable for casual melee players again. Thats all I care about, I lost all my old profile stuff from the original game, so it would be nice to at least get our clans back and have a solid ranking system besides W3C

I do know several people who enjoy the new game though, including the new visuals. I mean it is a lot easier to play AT than it was before, so thats cool for some of us… IMO overall I dont think its worth the extra $30, especially since the game doesnt get max FPS on Reforged settings unless you have a super PC, so I prefer Classic

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It would have been probably better if they spared the graphic for a possible WC4…

I doubt it will ever be if they don’t re-add at least the features it used to have…

Indeed, the best that came out of Reforged have been the efforts of the community to fix all that they did wrong, like the quencing mod or w3champions or (hopefully soon^^) Retera game. But it seems that Blizzard is making stuff more difficult at every patch…

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Well i was excited to see how they would improve the gameplay of the campaign, not put in some ingame cinmatics that looked “shiny”.

Where is my Manaroth boss fight at the end of Reign of Chaos Orc Campaign ?
Where is Arthas have Retribution Paladin abilities ?
Where is Grom Hellscream not being a reskinned blademaster and having actual warrior abilities ?
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

(just an example of a LEGIT improvement over the campaign.)

I’m glad for the renewed interest but people need to stick togather else it’ll fall apart.

As for the visual performance issues, blame the models, not okay for an RTS game to have models with 30 to 100 thousand polygons and have textures that are dirty and cluttered with details and rely on the ingame lightning engine to look good instead of having handpainted textures that wouldn’t depend so much, and therefore cause less issues.

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well, for me I mostly would want improved AI, or improved co-op features. I like the fan-made co-op campaign but its not a smooth experience. I mean, I realize not everybody will have the same expectations but the story isnt important to me. Gameplay is more substantial

One thing Blizzard did to hurt the game was how they changed the menus without improving it, or the UI. Theres a lot of simple little things they could have done to improve the gameplay experience, such as improved unit control grouping, or improved options and settings for when hosting custom games and setting player options in the lobby of custom games.

QoL features are what this game so desperately needs for the younger generation to not look at this game as being broken, stuff to modernize the game… and its not even complicated stuff considering how they completely changed the entire menu system… they just dont understand the game since Activision took over

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And yet it manages to be a DRM heavy less use-friendly game. especially the UI as you mentioned.

Would you trust Blizzard with a Warcraft 4 after what they did to this game ?

Microsoft, came in, did proper remasters to all 3 Age of Empires games on top of adding content, then and only then plans to introduce Age 4 sometime in the future.

Justice was done to the older games, and even better, their older versions are still not touched, no one took away the original Age 2HD edition, still there, servers are still up and running.

Bloody microsoft managed to make a Warcraft 3 fanatic jealous.

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Lets keep this on-topic… I think we can all agree there are better remasters out there, and there will not be a WC4 anytime soon

Personally, I would rather have a DLC for Reforged. Like a legit fullsized DLC similar to how TFT was a full expansion to RoC, and not just some skins. It could have a few new heroes, maybe a 5th race, some sort of multiplayer mini-campaign mode (like SC2 commanders, but better), and it could have a lot of new features for ladder players if they separated the servers… but obviously they need to finish fixing all the missing stuff in Reforged first

thats what I would like to happen, even though I know its unlikely, but its not impossible

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This game is still alive?

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Dunno, when it comes to “Content” i am not really found of the suggestions that implies Blizzard adding things themselves.

I’m more interested in them providing a bedrock to content makers to be encouraged to continue supporting the game, Sc2 got far more support then Wc3 ever did, yet its more dead then W3. if you create an audience that is dependent on the chief publisher for content, that audience will die away when there is no chief publisher.

What warcraft 3 evolved to be is a self sustaining monster, and wouldn’t have it any other way, however, the only thing i would like as “new” content is improvements to the core game, like an option to switch towards an entirely new and improved pathfinding, more selection cap, increased number of dedicated servers, a co op campaign mode for the singleplayer, and ability for players to create co op campaigns by having an ingame function to support it. themselves. so on.

There are custom campaigns for this game that are totally free, and are in better quality then any content Blizzard will release.

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yeah I mentioned basically all of those things, I think the only thing we disagreed on was the definition of “content” but yea I agree with you on the idea of giving players the ability to create. I dont necessarily think we need Blizzard to give us a co-op campaign, but to give us the tools of making them easier and better. Its just the way I worded it was that it would be sold as a DLC and probably include some “mini-campaigns” like as examples to show creators what is possible with the new features

one thing many people do not agree on is “pathfinding” I think many of the longtime pros do not want the pathfinding changed, at least not for ranked play

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If they did WC4 instead of Reforged, I would never knew so I would trust them and probably end up like this anyway^^

If they followed the path of UT, the reason of Reforged would probably be creating the ultimate editor masterpiece for RTS and similar games.
That’s not far from reality if you think about Starcraft and the SDL library.

The pathfinding does not update correctly according to grid changes. Retera showed me some examples and it really messes it up with the stored waypoints.
It does make sense only in some cases, but not in the general case.

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Ahh, but is Retera game because of Reforged?

Below is a post by Retera about Retera game from 2016, citing that the reason for it is actually because the Blizzard game became known to be capable of passing around viruses at the time:
https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/we-are-back-to-square-one-warcraft-iii-is-unsafe-again.276196/#post-2793154

Reforged fixed that problem though, so at this point I was still going just to have fun, you could say.

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See? Everything they do wrong can spawn something good^^

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So you admit the Reforged devs arent the “they” doing it wrong?

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There are different shades of wrong. Security wise 99% of programs are wrong, but it depends on what you have to do. The main reason of security flaws are not magical bugs. It’s incompetence or negligence. 20 Years ago https was not a strict requirement either…
Reforged instead is a whole development failure, from the interface to the rest…

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I guess reforged is a science project: they want to test how poorly they can do with the game and how much pain the fans are willing to take to continue playing a dead game. And guess what wc3 fans can’t be stopped from playing a dead game, they never quit. Instead of doing the only logical: uninstall and leave they prefer to suffer and play 24/7 a dead game .

I think this can have an influence on future projects: just do poorly no need to develop good games anymore.

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you know Pegade, I actually sort of agree with you on that comment… however, it seems kinda hypocritical of you to talk about how us fans wont stop playing and we should just uninstall right?? ok well why keep visiting this forum and complaining then? isnt that worse then if u just kept playing?

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Well, I stopped playing Dota a couple of weeks ago just because of the crashes and disconnections. It is a kind of respect for the other players, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about^^

Indeed, if you stick to this forum, fight for a better future!^^ (aka revert the game to a stable and playable state)