A lot of work had been done by HotS team in the Alterac scenario:
All units still look modern and easily distinguishable. I understand that hit boxes and units blocking work differently between the two games, but we could argue about how much development time would require to simulate warcraft’s units behaviour in HotS (and SCII) engine.
For me I find it very obvious why these assets were not used. The reason is that nobody assumes what they are doing will end up “bad” or “wrong” or “hated” by others. And so if you start from this assumption that if you go to do something then by extension you are going to do it right, it follows that making new assets instead of re-using the HotS assets is the more respectable thing to do.
I gave one of the Reforged employees a suggestion a during the year prior to Reforged’s announcement about how I was worried on their project, and I wanted them to release a small Warcraft III DLC “expansion” with some additional World Editor content that could generate revenue to help fund whatever kind of cool remaster they aspired to – without a lot of effort on their side. And this person honestly replied to me,
Blizzard polish is important, we would never release an “empty” expansion
So, I know that for you looking at this, maybe social media can put you in circles until you get upset and cry out to the world or to no one in particular, asking “Why didn’t Reforged reuse Hots assets?” instead of publishing “bad” assets or whatever it is that you believe. But what I am trying to express, and I know that if you have lived in an echo chamber long enough this might be hard to believe even though I personally think it was true – is that the people making Reforged honestly believed that what they were creating was better than what would have existed if they ported a bunch of HotS assets and re-used the existing assets.
But I’m biased. What I have learned since Reforged came out was that even if Reforged had high fidelity assets that were visually identical to the original 2002 game (other than having more polygons and higher resolution textures) then for me personally I would still be roughly as frustrated by Reforged’s lack of funding as I am now. It would not have changed much in my particular social circles and activities. And the reason I believe that is because of the technology, and because what I enjoy doing is modding the game which is something really complex and difficult to get right in a game system, and when the funding gets cut on that system it’s even harder. You’re complaining about how Reforged assets look, apparently, but when I go to actually work with them to create content what bothers me more sometimes is that each Reforged asset has 3 copies of itself inside itself that are all not used, since everything was made in such a hurry. This makes it annoying when I load these files and try to customize them compared to their 2002 counterparts.
Likewise, changing the game away from MPQ technology and moving to something where I cannot as easily fundamentally replace the internal assets of the game for my own offline mod build is another thing that makes life harder for me when modding Reforged. Because if we actually did not like the art of Reforged, but if we were allowed to mod the game and replace the art, I think someone would make a “purist” Reforged art pack pretty quickly, and the modded game installation would only be 4-5 GB instead of 26 GB once we deleted all the repeat data and other unused nonsense like animated CollisionShape nodes from the Reforged HD format.
But this can’t happen because of the technology. There is just always going to be an error handling your request, unfortunately. People look for reasons to hate on Reforged, but I tend to actually believe all of this hate didn’t start when this content was released during the Beta, but rather it started on January 28, 2020 when the Battle.net Launcher began aggressively deleting Reign of Chaos/Frozen Throne installations from peoples’ computers. And to me that really tells me something. It tells me that you can go and complain about the art in some echo chamber all day, to feed yourself whatever content you want, but what actually got the majority of people upset with Reforged was not the art but rather the loss of the easy access to the Warcraft III 2002 game system. And to be honest, Warcraft III Patch 1.31 has most of the problems that I just cited in Reforged already added to it. So there was that patch that was basically Reforged, but it still looked like the old 2002 Reign of Chaos in the menus and in the way the modding technologies worked. And I did not hear nearly as many people complain about that, because it was technologically sort of pretending to be the precursor and supporting it a little bit better, and the installation was only 2 GB.
So, I’m not even sure that people would complain about the things that bother me. It seems that they would not. I published a video in 2018 before Reforged was announced that I titled “Please Save Warcraft III” advocating against some of the changes in Patch 1.30. But nobody did what I advocated. Instead, we have more of the same and we got Reforged. So, I suppose the data shows that in my case what I wish was different on Reforged is different than what you wish was different and what people in general wish was different. But I really do believe that despite all of our separate viewpoints and ideas, I do believe that the Reforged developers wanted to do a good job, and it simply did not occur to them that what they were doing would be constantly thrown under the bus by the hate train until eventually basically every single thing they did was either overlooked or disliked.
Dragon Shire, Haunted Mines, Garden of Terror and Towers of Doom were all Warcraft inspired maps originally.
Seems better for warcraft 4
was it the same bot brained person who used to reply:
Blizzard does not support custom maps
?^^
bc this project was screwed by the people in charge of Actiblizz who basically murdered this remake, Reforged was meant to be far bigger than a SCR type of thing, it was meant to be a full modernization of W3, with new cutscenes, improved gameplay, additions to the story, and so on…and yeah that didnt end so well…
Honestly From your post I feel that the project was genuinely started with good faith, and ended up being ruined by deadlines. I’m willling to bet that if it was up to the dev team, they would have taken at least several more months to release the game, but Blizzard/Activision made a promise pretty early on about when the game was going to come out, and held them as closely to it as they possibly could. Then the resulting disaster and subsequent events later at Blizzard ended up derailing most of the future plans.
As someone who has worked in the industry, I think the actual developers (the people who are actually working on the games, as opposed to the administrative staff and corporate bigwigs and investors etc), most of the time, are interested in their projects and care about them and want to see them to fruition. But good work takes time and for the business side of the operation, time is always a precious commodity , and often they fail to see when imposing a strict deadline (“fix it in a patch!”) can be a lot more damaging than cost of spending extra time.
Completely different engines, you can’t just cut and paste models into different engines.
but you can parse them…
3D models are not generally engine specific. Most game engines can accept certain file formats of 3D models. while there are some proprietary ones, there are also standards that have been in use for a long time.
Warcraft 3 does not follow the standards at all, though, which contributes to why players have too many FPS problems on Reforged. The misuse of the MDX format by Reforged developers because they shoved data into the format that it was not built for shows a lot of signs of people who wanted to believe what you were saying, and then given unreasonable demands by management to force models into the Warcraft 3 engine that it could not process at all. Look at how CLID chunks are all animated on Reforged HD assets. This is a comedically wasteful decision for them to have made that causes problems for unit selection in versus mode, since CLID is used for unit selection. It’s not standard to any other system at all, and it misled Blizzard’s own Reforged team.
So, are you advocating for a Reforged product that is not based on the Warcraft 3 engine and does not support content made with Warcraft 3 world editor? It would appear that you are absolutely advocating this, even if by accident.
The MDX format was updated to support Reforged. It also appears to be a chunk based container holding various types of model information so I doubt the format was the problem. Sure it is unlikely to be optimised for DirectStorage, but then again Warcraft III Reforged does not even use DX12.
They also did some work to update the engine to support such models, including moving to more efficient D3D11 from the D3D8 API calls used before, and moving to Metal for MacOS users. This is likely at least partly the cause of many of the issues experienced since this would undoubtedly change at least some behaviour.
Unit selection in Warcraft III has always been comical. There was a reason DotA Allstars used limited map file space (was limited to under 8 MB at the time) to import an edited void stalker model instead of using the standard one. The void stalker moves a lot with fine geometry when doing some animations and it had no hit spheres to aid targeting, this meant that trying to target unit such model was miss-click prone.
Yes. The voidwalker has translation animations in its CLID chunk. Why does every Reforged model have animations in CLID chunks likewise?
I’m convinced its a bad idea. Do you have some reason to believe the engine was updated so that this wasn’t a bad idea?
What about the untargetable additional model of the hydralisk?^^
Long time lurker on these forums & a huge WC3 fan.
As far back as when the project was originally announced - I was so excited at the prospect of them using the style/models from HOTS. As you say, clearly distinguishable and they have that nice ‘bold’, crisp ye’olde Blizz style to them.
Still hopeful that we’ll hear something about the plans going forward for reforged after D2:R launches. Can’t help but feel that part of the reason the game has been absent from sales is because they intend to revisit it. Fingers crossed!
At this point it is best to assume that there are no developers in W3R since the game was released and even much earlier.
It would be insulting to think that at least 1 single person is working on correcting the W3R. Because well … we already saw what mods can do with much less resources.
I’m not defending their overall behavior during the months since the release, but there have been various patches to the game since, so the statement “there are now developers since the game was released and even much earlier” is categorically untrue. It became true later as the entire original Classic Games Team was fired (and replaced with a new one which is currently focused on another project), but “since hte game was released and even earlier” is definitely not.
Combination of project being more or less outsourced then retrieved to ‘touch-up’ then coming to the realization that it’s actually a pretty significant project that needs a proper team to develop.
Whoever thought to push it clearly thought it was as easy as reskin, retexture, and move on. Instead we got a game that everyone refunded (myself included) and a battle.net with less features and worse functionality across the board.
Comparing what the Mods or the Indis Games achieve and being from the programming category.
I see offense to think that there were people dedicating 8 hours a day to the game during the first months.
It would be like considering that these people were incompetent.
So out of respect for them I say that I assume that the Project was abandoned or even before leaving. Leaving some part-time programmers or even less in the Project. Or maybe leaving people who were neither programmers nor specialized in only one very specific thing.
There is a few nice documentaries that talk about how because of the access to technology, artists and well, whoever people are in charge of visuals or designs for movies and games, end up just following trends or rely on dumping needless level of details into something without ever having the same creative craftsmenship that some older artists do/did.
Its usually not about what you’re able to do with all the worlds tech and resources at your fingertips, but what you can do when you are limited, for Warcraft 3 when it was being developed this limitation caused a lightning in a bottle, definitely not perfection, but a very sturdy and solid visuals that stood the test of time, with custom games people are making on the classic visuals, a decent level of re-touch to the models while maintaining their overall design philosophies easily makes them look new and fresh again.
Only thing i can say is the visual work of Reforged was just an abject failure of understanding what were the key things that made the original great. key things that still hold up true for their other titles including Hots, Overwatch, Sc2. not exactly aligned, but the gist of it is there.
But hey, you can zoom on the individual fingers of the Footman and see how they’re spaced in between, and how each finger has a thousand polygons. 