The "remastered" maps and campaigns, meanwhile, turned out to be much closer to the how they looked in 2002 than in the 2018 demo. Yes, you can enjoy Warcraft 3 at 200fps, but if you're looking at your army, it looks more like stop-motion." As Fraser wrote in his review: "What really makes the units look a bit odd is their low frame rate. And sure enough, those were obvious in Reforged. But there are asterisks here.īridenbecker did mention in the 2018 panel that there were limitations to animation changes they could make while keeping the new version of Warcraft 3 compatible with the old one. It does have remodeled characters, some remastered maps and campaigns (though 'remastered' is vague enough here to mean anything), and a new custom game editor. Reforged only delivers on some of the promises made in its initial trailer. (Image credit: Blizzard) The reality: Warcraft 3: Reforged shipped with much more conservative changes that were labeled a "downgrade" This was the grand unveiling of Warcraft 3: Reforged, and it's understandably what a lot of fans expected from the game when they booted it up last week. Like the fact that you cannot go hog wild with animations means that you have to actually make it look as high fidelity as possible while at the same time adhering to some of those original time constraints."
We want to allow for players to continue to coalesce together. Producer Rob Bridenbecker: "The version of Warcraft 3 players have have for the past 16 years, that needs to continue to be able to be played with this new version. That's our first mission, to make sure that you guys give us a thumbs up when it ships."īlizzard also showed off the new hero models, talked about making changes to maps, and how Reforged would coexist with the original within the same client. But in so doing, we need to make sure that you guys who are in this room, that core audience that's never left this game and love it to death, and don't want to see us change it so drastically that you don't recognize it anymore.
Producer Pete Stilwell: "It's incredibly important to us to first get it right for the existing community, and then we want to do things to appeal to more people. Looking back at the campaign now, we want the locations that you remember or know from World of Warcraft to match what you see in Reforged, and we want to go through some of the stories and tie the two franchises together in a tighter way." But this remaster represents the company's first return to Warcraft RTS gameplay (save for some dabbling in WoW) in over 15 years.Lead designer Matt Morris: "One of the things we want to do with our campaign is level it up to what people know from World of Warcraft. Outside of WoW, Warcraft has gotten some love with its strong presence in Heroes of the Storm, but it's otherwise been a disappointing stretch for fans of the series' origins.īlizzard hasn't abandoned the RTS genre entirely, as StarCraft 2 debuted in 2010 and has continued to be expanded in the years since. 2003 saw the release of the Frozen Throne expansion. It was originally released all the way back in 2002, two years before the debut of WoW, which would go on to become massively successful. Warcraft 3 is the most recent RTS in the series. Buying it will entitle you to content in other Blizzard games, including Diablo III, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and WoW (where you'll get a meat wagon pet). By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot'sĪ special edition, known as the Spoils of War edition, is now available for per-order.