Worst thing about WC3 Reforged wasn't the broken promises (which are PLENTY), it's the inarguable downgrade of the product, and the incapacity to go back and play our old copies of WC3
I literally could not play the single player the other day, as the servers failed to verify I owned the game. I've owned the game for 20 years and it is tied to my Bnet. Disgusting business practice
Yeah, bad remakes/remasters come out all the time and the argument people give to defend their existence is always "You can still go back and play the original, the remake doesn't effect you if you don't buy it," but for WC3 that's not even true. The only way to access pre-reforged WC3 anymore if you don't already have an old install of it is to pirate it, nice job Blizzard.
Grubby is absolutely right. Heroes get a glow and get bigger to be able to be identified. In SpellForce 3 I can barely distinguish where my heroes are because they just look like random humans...
As someone who's worked in QA in games for 20 years, you just described my entire career. PTSD to the max. I've basically stopped caring about the games I work on, because the people running the show have no idea what they are doing and only care about deadlines and money. Thank you for trying to make WC3 better. On the plus side, every time I get contacted by Blizzard for a job opening, I get to tell them "no you ruined my childhood and favorite game of all time WC3"
@@GrubbyTalks Hi, never worked at Blizzard specifically, but I was at Take 2, Xbox, EA, and now Pokemon. Things you missed in games QA were a combination of low pay, no respect, limited upward mobility, and first to be laid off for contractors or offshoring. It's def not all bad, and I think it was much better than working at a bank or something, but it wears on you over time. However working at Pokemon is a breath of fresh air and truly one of the greatest companies to work for in the world. If only they made better products that I could be proud to have my name on. Nothing is perfect I guess.
My co-workers call it pre-TSD as in you can see the bullshit coming even before it happens. There is nothing you can do because nobody who has power is listening yet you're the one who gets all the consequence.
@@seekittycat That's why you need to run away from projects led by people with "anything else other than making a good game" reasoning for why they are involved. I like the "pre-TSD" Imma start using that one if you don't mind :DD
Not to mention the custom maps. Warcraft 3 was made with so much love. They did not just make a game, they made a 3D remake of the classic warcraft 2, coded in C++ with its own engine. An engine so robust you could launch an editor that did not lag, that allowed you to create whatever you wanted. Not only was warcraft 3 the best game ever made, it had some of the best code in the world. The front-en may be what we remember, but the back-end was perfected.
@@ageoflove1980 It also lead to League of Legends. Some oldtimers might still remember that the first DotA community hub was administrated by Pendragon, who then got a job at Riot and nuked the website.
Blizzard has 7 mil active subscribers just in WoW, not mentioning other popular Blizzard games, meaning it's far from dead, perhaps people who worked in Blizzard and created it - they are no longer there, that's your reason I assume why you said blizzard is dead. On the other hand wc3 is not far from being dead, very low amount of people keep playing it.
@@vladimirkovalcik7504copium is strong with this one. What they meant is, blizzard as a company who cared about their players and were putting their soul in their products is no longer there. The 7 mill (prob much less, but not the point) of the people that still play wow, are in denial about what they dreaming about blizzard to get better is insane. It’s like seeing your pet die and just leaving it’s corpse around thinking it’s going to wake up at any moment
@@vladimirkovalcik7504 wc3 is as dead its been the last 8-9 years haha, its still awsome and is one of the only games i still play. Perfect RTS for someone that think starcraft is 2 fast.
As someone who has worked as a paid video game quality assurance tester as well as a paid Focus Group tester for many games, I get really frustrated and angry at games that treat their customers like testers, expecting them to write up bug reports or give feedback for their beta builds, except for free. There was a time when I gave up my time to give detailed bug reports or feedback on betas of games I loved, in hopes that the game would be better upon release. But I realized that I'm just enabling them to release crappy, unfinished products. Why pay anyone to test your games and fix it before release when they can save money and just release it unfinished and their players will do all that work for free?! So while I can understand your desire to help them and provide all the free consultation, I do not blame you in the slightest for ghosting them in the end when they asked you for hours of work on that huge spreadsheet. That's what employees are for. Value your own time, and when someone asks you for free work, always remember this phrase "Fuck you, Pay me!"
I love how candid this is. I remember watching you play reforged during these tests and you were trying to be fair and optimistic, but we all knew what we were seeing wasn't good. I remember you just trying to remain hopeful, but yeah. This was a really, really cool video. Thanks for this one dude. You're a legend.
It's baffling to me how they managed to get StarCraft Remastered right by doing what could be described as "the bare minimum", but somehow every decision they could've made regarding Reforged, they chose wrong every time.
Koreans didn't allow them to change anything else and they were smart about it. Somewhere is the development of wc3r something went so overblown and undercut. Maybe they believed themselves too much. I still hope they might do something about it, even thought it's so much effort to fix it now that probably nobody will bother. So bottom line is they listened to the community first for SC:R
i replied to someone else's comment with a long explanation but there is an actual answer to the mystery of how bliz can do such a good job remastering one game and then so terribly doing the next one; if remastering the first one made the realize they dont want to remaster games basically scr went about as well as it could have possibly gone & gave the nonces (kotick is on the black book) that run blizzard a clear picture of how much money a wc3 remaster could make and it just, wasn't going to be enough. blizzard doesnt want to make beloved games that people (expensively) play forever, they want to make enough money for the executives to be able to afford to go to Epstein's island and pay to feast on the innocent. so they shitcanned the project -- but being the boss overseeing a project that gets cancelled isn't a career advancer, so instead they just ran the project into the ground to kick it out the door as cheaply as possible (letting an artist do what they want with the visual design is cheaper than making them recreate somebody else's style exactly), and then when it flopped the guy in charge of budgeting who ruined the game by refusing to fund it got to go "see? im a genius for refusing to put money into the ship that i sank", and got a big fat raise out of it.
Hey Grubby, I really like you for RTS content. No joke, when I first saw the way reforged was received on release, the first words out of my mouth were, "Oh, poor Grubby."
This is what you end up with when product designers don't actually use their own product. The gripes about the rally flag make perfect sense from the perspective of utility. But product managers don't play the game and so they think, "Ooh, let's make it animate and move with the unit." They've never played the game competitively such that having it move in that manner and appear different depending on the angle makes it difficult to see and keep track of. It's not just Reforged, it's with a lot of products. It's what happens when they don't eat their own dogfood. And I agree that many of the revised graphics lack contrast or simplicity. That's what happens when you add too much fancy details: they become less recognizable at a glance.
Yeah, the Reforged art style is just downright atrocious. I want to like the new models so badly because, well, the old ones are from 2002. But the new ones just look like they were designed by people who've never made videogame character models before. And the worst thing is that even 2010s Blizzard was perfectly capable of making good models that you can recognize at a glance; see Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, and Heroes of the Storm.
This was incredible! I'm conflicting on the 100s of icons thing at the end . On one hand, they're asking you for unreasonable amounts of feedback without being paid for it and just icons wouldn't be enough to fix the game, but maybe discussing formalizing a paid consulting contract would have been more useful. As you saw, they were interested enough in your feedback to prepare a massive document for you, so maybe they were ready to explore harder-to-change solutions afterwards. It's a shame it didn't work out, obviously they're talented people. Thank you for taking the time to collect all the clips and emails for this video, it must have taken quite some time.
As a graphic designer with experience in item icons, I'm very surprised by Grubby's intuition and general understanding of it... It's much more important for the icons to work well together, rather than to look good individually.
Well yeah, they're all part of a whole. He's also a pro gamer. The original team understood the concept of visual fidelity, and being able to differentiate units. Especially in an RTS that is heavily focused on micro managing units. Reforged graphics work fine in a game like Red Alert. The devs clearly had no idea. Most of them had probably never played more than 2 hours of WC3
also having been involved in these kinds of graphical design processes i can tell you; companies doing remasters of old games hold up them doing new graphical designs instead of just up-ressing the old designs as if it's a value-add, but it isn't; what it actually is is them not being given the budget to recreate the old look if you want a high quality recreation of the old visual design that's far more expensive. you have to first find an artist who has the skill to produce what you're looking for, pay for an initial product to prove that he can get it within a ballpark of what you're looking for, then pay for revisions to dial it in. and there's multiple different types of graphic go into a game like WC3 -- the work you put in to get an art pipeline set up to do the model designs doesn't translate at all to icons, or visual effects, or sounds, or ground textures what instead happens when your publisher or the bosses approving your budget have already decided your project will fail, is they will reject your budget for re-creating the old game's graphical design using expensive but skilled artists whose skills moved them to the first world where they can demand a high price for quality AAA output, and order you to just go buy the services of a mobile phone mill in the third world whose whole sales pitch for their work is that their time is cheap. so you go & look for phone game artists who make asset packs for fantasy themed games, find a portfolio that looks like of like a modern version of warcraft (pretty easy to do since "offbrand warcraft" is a starting point for many graphic designers' portfolios), and when you send the budget for *that* person's B- services alongside their portfolio the boss rejects THAT budget too and tells you to just buy the assets in the portfolio, approving you to have revisions done on the worst of the assets they give you, recieving a product that runs the gammot from a D to a C- warcraft reforged is basically an asset flip, pasted over top one of the most beloved games of all time. probably what happened is the sc1 remaster went too well. essentially it went as well as it could have possibly gone, and didn't make enough money to compete with candy crush (which it was never going to), indicating to the bosses that no amount of effort put in to the wc3 remaster would actually make it worth doing, so they smothered it in the crib -- they've already started on it so it'd be a waste of money to just cancel it (0 ROI doesn't put the boss in a position to leverage a raise for ruining the project), so instead they kick it out as cheaply as possible while still having technically shipped a product. the community will hate it, but the bosses don't care because they and the shareholders don't give a f how the community feels about a project if their feelings about that project can't be converted into billions of dollars of microtransaction sales from children with unsupervised access to their parent's credit cards. plus, if they release it and it is universally hated, it makes everyone who *made* it be universally hated by underfunding it seem like geniuses for having underfunded it if the starcraft remaster had done better they could have imagined that maybe if the wc3 remaster does better it'll outsell fortnite or w/e coke dream they're cobbling together in the boardroom, but it made too visible how much money is in the remaster game for them and they just decided they aren't interested
@@tabula_rosaI think the designers would be very bored just up-rezzing stuff, so they asked for some creative freedom. It worked in some item designs like grubby mentioned, but yes I agree in general it's very difficult to pull off unless the designer is very talented and the proper budget and time for iterations are catered.
I played WC3 an embarrassing amount as a young teenager and even though in the last 18ish years I’ve only touched the game less than 50 times, WC3 gameplay, specifically Grubby WC3, is possibly the majority of content I consume in my free time. I’m very thankful for your efforts! This was an interesting story :) thank you for all your effort and entertainment over the many years! P.S. whenever I’m distinguishing WC3 from WoW to my gf, I tell her I’m talking about “Grubby Warcraft” xD
Goated pro giving his best to help his favorite game get a better re-master, giving us a transparent explanation of events, and recognizing the state of both devs under fire and the niche community trying to salvage a lost company... what a great video!
Actually you can prevent the game from updating your disc copy. When you launch the game just reject connection to battle net. The game will prompt you several times, implying that it is mandatory, but it will eventually stop asking and you can play normally. Of course that means no battlenet multiplayer, but you can still play on LAN.
I reached the same conclusion as Grubby while casually playing the first mission of the orc campaign on Reign of Chaos. The models looked good when zoomed in, but something felt off. Then I noticed. Spirit wolves were small, the headhunters and and grunts were less clear zoomed out, and the different types of enemies were harder to identify. Almost everything looked good, but also more messy.
Blizz Shareholders and Execs: "QUICK RUSH OUT OUR FAILURE FOR QUICK CASH" Public: "This is absolute garbage - refund and enjoy your Dead on Arrival game" Blizz Shareholders and Execs: "LETS DO IT AGAIN!!!!"
i just rediscovered grubby after 10+ years away from SC2 and RTS in general. crazy to see he's still playing WC3, I thought the game was dead. thinking about actually buying reforged now that I see it's in a playable state. its so wild how time flies, watching this takes me back to 2003 😀
I grew up with Diablo 1, Warcraft 2... then came Diablo 2, then Warcraft 3... took me a while to get around to Starcraft... World of Warcraft... but imho by the time activision bought blizzard, the original passionate people that turned blizzard from the underdog to the household name it became, weren't there anymore. It changed too much too fast and started to die, desperate for corporate approval started milking the fanbase more and more as a life line. It's a sad slow painful death.
On the topic of Ogres sleeping, i think they just went with this animation because they do it too in Classic, hence why only ogres have a sleep animation in Reforged
A person named Ralle asked you to play Daemonic Sword once in an interview. If you want to save Warcraft 3, play it off stream and see if you like it Grubby. I promise you, its one of the ways Warcraft has stayed alive for countless years. It is essentially a Hiveworkshop project as I hired a bunch of Hiveworkshop OG programmers and artist to help improve it since Reforge. I'm sort of an underdog apparently, but I've work on it for over 15 years, its now my masterpiece for the world to enjoy although its still not perfect. It was my way of trying to save Warcraft, I game which I love, and always will. I never gave up on wc3, and I hope you dont either. I have huge amounts of respect for you Grubby. Thank you.
Jesus Christ man... They actually thought you would go through that list of items for FREE? That truly shows how deranged their perspective of labor expectations are/was. That is like a week worth of work. Going through every image and explaining the flaws and what needs to be improved. The fact that they even thought of asking you. It's honestly just sad.
They at least could have been a more tactful about it. Sending bits and pieces of the ones they thought were the worse. You can manage doing like 10-20 in an e-mail. Sending a file of like 100+ icons is rough man. Tbh, they really should have hired him properly for just a month or something, so grubby could have improved it
I really appreciate how much effort and energy Grubby has put into Reforged I remember back in 2019/2020 when Reforged released, Grubby was very patient and non-judgemental about the state of the game, hoping that the devs would eventually fix the many issues the game had You really tried Grubby, GG
It's not just nostalgia. I recently got my 8 year old into playing Warcraft 3 campaign (they have previously played a little bit of retail WoW so like the universe already) and when I showed them between Classic and Reforged graphics. They had a gut visceral disgust reaction to the Reforged graphics. They kept asking me "but why are the new graphics worse? Why don't they fix it?"
I played WC3 back in 2002, and havent really touched it since. I just watch Grubby vids because I love listening to people be passionate about things they love.
Thanks for always looking out and advocating for your community Grubby! It was good to see they reached out to you for those few items but when they sent you that MASSIVE list it gave a glimpse on how deep the rabbit-hole of Blizzard workflow problems really went.Llike “hey thanks for looking over those 6 items for us. Here’s 600 more if you could please”
I loved classic Warcraft 3 campaign and lore (and WoW by extension) back then. I discovered your UA-cam channel a few days ago, Even if I'm not into high-level multiplayer games like you, I love watching/listening to your vids ! Great vids !
Thank you for taking the time at 17:00 to explain the issue regarding the poor readibility of Reforged graphics. The fact that you cannot tell what's going on during fights, because everything just blends together and models are difficult to distinguish, is the biggest issue with Reforged graphics for me, right along with the bland, low contrast colors that sucked the life out of the vibrant world of classic warcraft 3
Such a well made video! I've enjoyed your insight, commentary and story telling all throughout the video. Appreciate talks like this I can always listen to rhem while cooking or doing stuff around the house. Take care, cheers!
I still sometimes watch the Reforged Arthas v Illidan cutscene and I laugh. I still can't believe the old cutscenes look more natural than the new ones
Again and again. I have to re-iterate this. Grubby is a really nice person. He seems to act reasonable so often, it's impressive. Thanks for sharing this story with us Grubby!
Diamond of suffering old icon is used on WOW for track undead. A hunter ability that reveals undead in an area around you on the minimap. I have never heard of diamond of suffering, i don’t think i ever saw that icon until i played WoW
1:13:35 I believe the town portal scroll got changed because the hearthstone icon in WoW is blue, and in the new icon also has the same symbol as on a hearthstone. In WoW it is used to teleport to an inn you saved your hearthstone in, a bit like a town portal scroll returning you home
@Grubby It's a very concise & largely accurate depiction of the evolution phase of Warcraft 3 from Classic into Reforged. Some of the faulty game mechanics you highlighted in reforged have merit above most of what was discussed. What most need to understand is Reforged was developed by personnel that where never part of the original team that developed Classic. Blizzard today, is nothing of what Blizzard was. Understand that.
Game dev for 13 years here.. You have a very strong sense of gamedesign. You said in some video you almost ventured into this kind of profession. You totally have what it takes.
rally point is a huge indicator of the great quality of wc3 and of how modern devs can't even think about improving their games something like Black Mesa also couldn't copy some simple things from 1998 and 2004 games after 15 years of development
This sounds like part of the bugs I reported enough in the HotS forums to be invited to a close collaboration with the QA team there, I think like 20-30 of us in there at one point. It was nice and fun while it was around. Still was around after big HotS cut happened, but was basically dead about a year before the game was officially dead.
It really was a fun and learning experience, as often I was told if something felt wrong they needed me to explain like you did/are doing in the video.
So I've been lurking on your content for a while, and I started watching you when you began your Dota 2 hero by hero playthrough. But this video finally got me to subscribe, and I don't just throw subscriptions to people. Your analysis of Reforged was perfect. You covered literally everything I myself hated about it. I refunded the game. I just wish they'd cared more about one of their flagship legacy titles than argue internally over finances or other.
Hey Grub, I wonder how much of classic you found to be actually awesome and well thought only because you did those analysis on Reforged, and that made you love classic even more. xD
1:16:50 -- just because it looks "higher definition" doesn't mean it "looks better" unless its a 1:1 ratio of design. but the PotM aura icon needs to be the SAME. it's NOT a nostalgia problem... and the drums on the left have 0 design on the drum head. most of them that are same item 1:1 design just shinier may "look better" but honestly... i can't think of any new reforged designs in-game look better.
I follow a lot of WoW and Diablo content, so Blizzards inability to capture the genius of the original devs isn't new to me. But videos like this show that they can't even stop themselves from ruining their older, fan-cherished games. Having to play this new and downgraded version of the old masterpiece is such a slap in the face. Fuck current Blizzard.
Honestly, they should've just kept the infrastructure updated, focusing on ladder, ping, network connectivity, maybe balance updates, etc. The graphics looks pretty good to me, even if it's from 2003 :)
36:25 That’s also a movie trope, in lots of movies set in the Middle Ages they just put a thin layer of straw on the roof rather than thatching it, as well as on the floor.
How can one of the most Legendary Game Studios mess up one of the Legendary RTS Games? It's so confusing to me. You only need 2 mllion dollars to fix this. Which is nothing that Activision Blizzard (now Microsoft) has.
people are important. companies are not. dont trust companies. creators are getting old, leave companies. companies become different enteties when time pases and people go. stop trusting brands and look for products/people. Larian made BG3, great project. But what if their staff goes away, like 90% of it and Sven is going away? Should you trust them? No
Because the people that made those legendary games are mostly gone. Microsoft can potentially pour some money into fixing this, but that's on them. Would you rather risk that amount of money to salvage a product with a tarnished reputation or would you rather invest it in something that is new that will potentially give them a higher chance of making profits? That's pretty much what they are thinking. Granted they did express interest in reviving old titles so there is a possibility that wc3 could get fixed, but I'm not holding my breath. It's better to move on to greener pastures and accept that the old Blizzard is dead and play other games worth your time rather than keep setting yourself up for disappointment. If we are proven wrong that they do fix their products, then great! We have a reason to come back. Otherwise it's time to move on.
Nope. You can't fix this mess. You have to go back and start from WC3 again. That costs definitely more than just 2 mil. The whole design approach is different. WC3 focused on the playability of the game. Grubby explains many things don't look because of art reasons the way the do. WC3 reforged tried to look good and take a lot from genres where you navigate a 3d environment. What ends up happening is that you simply have no clue what is happening an the screen. It's like trying understand what is happening in a raid. It's not that the mechanics are complex but effects and people are all over the place. You have zero visibility and without addons and understanding of them simply no clue what is happening around you, not to speak of a birds view and you trying to understand what every unit does individually. The best way to do this is take the old engine and improve it for modern hardware. That way you have the old graphics at low settings and have modern textures for higher settings. But that way you are also limited by the old engine and can't replace models the way they did it. But let's be honest, no one wants them with worse gameplay anyways.
What's the problem with hiring some professional gamers/influencers and paying them enough compensation to let them advise on game development? Why don't we do this more often? That's such simple and community-oriented feedback.
im so glad i burned on a disc a copy of my wc3 client back in 2016, before the pre-reforged patches, with lots of custom games. been enjoying this old client i rediscovered lately
1:11:33 How do you think anything of quality ever gets made? (...) Petty is just another word for a quality consideration that another person thinks is beneath them to spend time on because they are not passionate about it or they don't think it's important or don't do that kind of quality control
What Blizzard did should be illegal. You PURCHASED those CDs, they shouldn't be able to make it so that you auto download a new version of the game you PURCHASED.
I have not watched the full video yet. Have any of the developers that worked on the project come forward and talked about how it ended up the way that it did?
Don't let anybody tell you that you were "too picky" about the things you gave feedback on. Completely spot on feedback, almost all of it. It's a different thing how much they're ACTUALLY gonna want to or be able to fix (well we know now), but you were trying to uphold the standard that classic WC3 had set, and as you too said, a standard that Reforged should have held as a minimum.
I started playing war3 melee only since late 2022, and playing with classic graphics it's also hard for me to select inured militia behind my hero or behind a big golem to send them home, how it was explained in 27:00 Does it have to do with mouse lag? Or did I zoom out the camera too much? (2200) I was trying to fix this for so long and still hadnt
I hope grubby also watches back to warcrafts look at WC3/Sc Ex Blizz Dev Sam Didier doing work on stormgates creeps. In 1 design he demonstrates everything grubby was saying about reforges grapphic design. Including the designs being distinct like the footman or grunt. Looking at units from above, team colours. Keeping things simple and uncomplicated. Such as copy pasting and mirroring the legs to save time and only putting detail on say boss units. Keep it simple
And lets not even start by how they broke the map editor, when i got back into some of my old maps there was so much broken, from animations, and effects and scaling issues. For example Star fall: In Classic, you could edit the special effect of the small stars falling on units, but in reforged , it always does the small stars, even when you change the ability effect to something else. Or that some special effect like thunderclap never stop, in classic you used "create special effect" and it would play the special effect once, but in reforged the effect stays forever, so you get a constant thunderclap effect on that spot that never stops.
hahaha that old patch was funny before the fix , thank you for your kind contributions to the community. you are the reason the reforged is playable today. thank you once again
Honestly reforged feels like it had alot of passion and good ideas behind them, but they were all half-assed and unrefined to the point where it makes it worse. Like a 3D rally flag is a fun idea, they have the technology so why not use it. But then more minor issues arise like the jittering and disappearing and they just stop there and say "well we tried, let's just leave it at that" or theg ran out of time and thats where it went wrong. They had good ideas, but failed to follow them up, refine them and finetune them so they are in a state where they enhance the readability abd enjoyment, rather than hinder it.
i love how precice you are with everything, because yeah for sure it might be some small details how with a flag point for example, but it's just tied up in a tight working system that you can't just cnahge it without a notice
I like this video a lot. You're raising very good, sensible points and I don't think at all that you're overexaggerating or being petty. You're being factual and speaking from an angle that focuses on readability and quality of life. It's perfectly valid to raise these concerns, and it makes Blizzard seem that much more careless and ignorant of all of the feedback they undoubtedly received over the production of WC3:R.
The reason Invisibility is less readable is the previously established readability problem, in classic, the colors and models were more vibrant, noticable and easy to read so when they're toned down due to the transparency from invis, you notice it quickly, but in reforged, the colors are more muted, giving way to the minute details on the fancy new models, which you wouldn't notice unless you zoomed in, so when all that turns transparent, the difference is not big enough to catch our eyes.
I appercaite insight and opinions on this matter. very informative and educational as the process and devolpement as well generla wc3 info. Im trying to watch more of your videos for tips and trick on how to get better. Seems ill deff need alot more paractice.
There are so many things we don't really appreciate because they work so well that we don't even notice them. It really reminds me of how Street Fighter 4 decided to give everyone exagerattedly huge hands and feet so that ranges can be distinguished easier.
The problem with new icons is that they thought adding shadows to everything equals improvement. Even when you leave design out of discussion, the readable of new icons suffers bad from those shadows.
45:34 I feel like StarCraft II actually did Invisibility here best - the game applies another, bluish semitransparent texture called a glaze, which at the same time makes it clear a unit is cloaked. The units also have highly distinguishable animations, which instantly help you recognize what unit is is even with the less visible units. As for the portraits: In WarCraft III Classic and StarCraft II, the unit portraits are always doing some gimmicky thing - they are always blinking their eyes, fiddling with their gadgets (Banshee puts down visor when cloaked, puts it up when decloaked), bobbing their heads up or down, shaking their heads, and so on. When the units speak, its clear some Blizzard artist took their time to detail the body language a highly social person might use when saying those things. In acting, this kind of study of body language and implementation alongside speech helps to grab the audience's attention, but in Reforged this is absent and is extremely noticeable as the previous iteration had done it differently.
I grew up playing classic and go back at least once every year or two to beat the campaign and I genuinely like the new graphics. Don’t really get all they hate for the graphics. The other really technical stuff must be something for multiplayer cuz I don’t really get it. Either love ur videos keep doing what ur doing!
The change 1:14:37 for town portal scroll was better, the yellow suggests thats its some sort of healing scroll while the blue does match the animation effect. I wish you didnt get them to change it.
They still have time to save it, even tho they probably wont... Just remove WC reforged completely and make the NEW WC3 with just enhanced graphics from the old models and maps and wrap it up there.
![The War Within - First Chapter - Full Version [Lore]](/img/n.gif)
Worst thing about WC3 Reforged wasn't the broken promises (which are PLENTY), it's the inarguable downgrade of the product, and the incapacity to go back and play our old copies of WC3
Yup , right there
I literally could not play the single player the other day, as the servers failed to verify I owned the game. I've owned the game for 20 years and it is tied to my Bnet. Disgusting business practice
Good thing they learned their lesson by Overwatch 2...
Correct. The fact you can’t play tft anymore was the worse thing in the whole reforged saga
Yeah, bad remakes/remasters come out all the time and the argument people give to defend their existence is always "You can still go back and play the original, the remake doesn't effect you if you don't buy it," but for WC3 that's not even true. The only way to access pre-reforged WC3 anymore if you don't already have an old install of it is to pirate it, nice job Blizzard.
Grubby is absolutely right. Heroes get a glow and get bigger to be able to be identified.
In SpellForce 3 I can barely distinguish where my heroes are because they just look like random humans...
As someone who's worked in QA in games for 20 years, you just described my entire career. PTSD to the max. I've basically stopped caring about the games I work on, because the people running the show have no idea what they are doing and only care about deadlines and money. Thank you for trying to make WC3 better. On the plus side, every time I get contacted by Blizzard for a job opening, I get to tell them "no you ruined my childhood and favorite game of all time WC3"
I used to want to get into (Blizzard) QA because it kinda fits me. Tell me three things I missed out on?
@@GrubbyTalks Hi, never worked at Blizzard specifically, but I was at Take 2, Xbox, EA, and now Pokemon. Things you missed in games QA were a combination of low pay, no respect, limited upward mobility, and first to be laid off for contractors or offshoring. It's def not all bad, and I think it was much better than working at a bank or something, but it wears on you over time. However working at Pokemon is a breath of fresh air and truly one of the greatest companies to work for in the world. If only they made better products that I could be proud to have my name on. Nothing is perfect I guess.
excellent game. the only problem with the old w3 was people using Map Hak. I couldn't play
My co-workers call it pre-TSD as in you can see the bullshit coming even before it happens. There is nothing you can do because nobody who has power is listening yet you're the one who gets all the consequence.
@@seekittycat That's why you need to run away from projects led by people with "anything else other than making a good game" reasoning for why they are involved. I like the "pre-TSD" Imma start using that one if you don't mind :DD
Not to mention the custom maps.
Warcraft 3 was made with so much love. They did not just make a game, they made a 3D remake of the classic warcraft 2, coded in C++ with its own engine. An engine so robust you could launch an editor that did not lag, that allowed you to create whatever you wanted. Not only was warcraft 3 the best game ever made, it had some of the best code in the world. The front-en may be what we remember, but the back-end was perfected.
Yeah thats probably the reason custom maps were such a big part of WC3 with of course DotA even leading to a whole new genre of games itself.
Where can I look at the code of WC3?
@@ageoflove1980 It also lead to League of Legends. Some oldtimers might still remember that the first DotA community hub was administrated by Pendragon, who then got a job at Riot and nuked the website.
because warcraft had an actual lore with real deal story tellers prior to wow everything elese is the fallout
It's because of MOBA's and being scared of that happening again.
I will never get tired of listening to Grubby talk about wc3
this
this story has everything from character development, to the plot twist, to the betrayal arc and finally the epilogue
It's OK Grubby, Blizzard died years ago, you have to let them go
The fact that this comment is hearted speaks volumes.
Blizzard has 7 mil active subscribers just in WoW, not mentioning other popular Blizzard games, meaning it's far from dead, perhaps people who worked in Blizzard and created it - they are no longer there, that's your reason I assume why you said blizzard is dead. On the other hand wc3 is not far from being dead, very low amount of people keep playing it.
@@vladimirkovalcik7504copium is strong with this one. What they meant is, blizzard as a company who cared about their players and were putting their soul in their products is no longer there. The 7 mill (prob much less, but not the point) of the people that still play wow, are in denial about what they dreaming about blizzard to get better is insane. It’s like seeing your pet die and just leaving it’s corpse around thinking it’s going to wake up at any moment
@@vladimirkovalcik7504 wc3 is as dead its been the last 8-9 years haha, its still awsome and is one of the only games i still play. Perfect RTS for someone that think starcraft is 2 fast.
@@ivandovranic5834 FYI he tends to use the heart button as a "I read this already" marker rather than agreement
As someone who has worked as a paid video game quality assurance tester as well as a paid Focus Group tester for many games, I get really frustrated and angry at games that treat their customers like testers, expecting them to write up bug reports or give feedback for their beta builds, except for free. There was a time when I gave up my time to give detailed bug reports or feedback on betas of games I loved, in hopes that the game would be better upon release. But I realized that I'm just enabling them to release crappy, unfinished products. Why pay anyone to test your games and fix it before release when they can save money and just release it unfinished and their players will do all that work for free?! So while I can understand your desire to help them and provide all the free consultation, I do not blame you in the slightest for ghosting them in the end when they asked you for hours of work on that huge spreadsheet. That's what employees are for. Value your own time, and when someone asks you for free work, always remember this phrase "Fuck you, Pay me!"
I love how candid this is. I remember watching you play reforged during these tests and you were trying to be fair and optimistic, but we all knew what we were seeing wasn't good.
I remember you just trying to remain hopeful, but yeah.
This was a really, really cool video. Thanks for this one dude.
You're a legend.
Subbed when you asked me too.
You're my influencer grubs
It's baffling to me how they managed to get StarCraft Remastered right by doing what could be described as "the bare minimum", but somehow every decision they could've made regarding Reforged, they chose wrong every time.
I would say it's more of 'don't fix what isn't broken' instead of the bare minimum. ;)
StarCraft Remaster was made by the same team that later made remaster for C&C. For Reforged Blizzard hired other ppl.
Koreans didn't allow them to change anything else and they were smart about it. Somewhere is the development of wc3r something went so overblown and undercut. Maybe they believed themselves too much. I still hope they might do something about it, even thought it's so much effort to fix it now that probably nobody will bother. So bottom line is they listened to the community first for SC:R
i replied to someone else's comment with a long explanation but there is an actual answer to the mystery of how bliz can do such a good job remastering one game and then so terribly doing the next one; if remastering the first one made the realize they dont want to remaster games
basically scr went about as well as it could have possibly gone & gave the nonces (kotick is on the black book) that run blizzard a clear picture of how much money a wc3 remaster could make and it just, wasn't going to be enough. blizzard doesnt want to make beloved games that people (expensively) play forever, they want to make enough money for the executives to be able to afford to go to Epstein's island and pay to feast on the innocent.
so they shitcanned the project -- but being the boss overseeing a project that gets cancelled isn't a career advancer, so instead they just ran the project into the ground to kick it out the door as cheaply as possible (letting an artist do what they want with the visual design is cheaper than making them recreate somebody else's style exactly), and then when it flopped the guy in charge of budgeting who ruined the game by refusing to fund it got to go "see? im a genius for refusing to put money into the ship that i sank", and got a big fat raise out of it.
😢
Hey Grubby, I really like you for RTS content. No joke, when I first saw the way reforged was received on release, the first words out of my mouth were, "Oh, poor Grubby."
still crying for him (and ourselves) a lil bit every time I remember..
This is what you end up with when product designers don't actually use their own product. The gripes about the rally flag make perfect sense from the perspective of utility. But product managers don't play the game and so they think, "Ooh, let's make it animate and move with the unit." They've never played the game competitively such that having it move in that manner and appear different depending on the angle makes it difficult to see and keep track of.
It's not just Reforged, it's with a lot of products. It's what happens when they don't eat their own dogfood. And I agree that many of the revised graphics lack contrast or simplicity. That's what happens when you add too much fancy details: they become less recognizable at a glance.
Yeah, the Reforged art style is just downright atrocious. I want to like the new models so badly because, well, the old ones are from 2002. But the new ones just look like they were designed by people who've never made videogame character models before. And the worst thing is that even 2010s Blizzard was perfectly capable of making good models that you can recognize at a glance; see Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, and Heroes of the Storm.
This was incredible! I'm conflicting on the 100s of icons thing at the end . On one hand, they're asking you for unreasonable amounts of feedback without being paid for it and just icons wouldn't be enough to fix the game, but maybe discussing formalizing a paid consulting contract would have been more useful. As you saw, they were interested enough in your feedback to prepare a massive document for you, so maybe they were ready to explore harder-to-change solutions afterwards. It's a shame it didn't work out, obviously they're talented people.
Thank you for taking the time to collect all the clips and emails for this video, it must have taken quite some time.
Sleepers of agility were called "socks of Spider Man" in Russian community for ages :D
Lol I call them the same but I'm not Russian 😅
Sleepers of agility 😂
You mean slippers of sleeping?
@@Trendsthismonth Sleepers of Slippin'
As a graphic designer with experience in item icons, I'm very surprised by Grubby's intuition and general understanding of it... It's much more important for the icons to work well together, rather than to look good individually.
Well yeah, they're all part of a whole. He's also a pro gamer.
The original team understood the concept of visual fidelity, and being able to differentiate units. Especially in an RTS that is heavily focused on micro managing units.
Reforged graphics work fine in a game like Red Alert.
The devs clearly had no idea. Most of them had probably never played more than 2 hours of WC3
He really gets it
I feel like Blizzard outsourced the new icons to a designer with the task to make a fancier modern version of the existing ones
also having been involved in these kinds of graphical design processes i can tell you; companies doing remasters of old games hold up them doing new graphical designs instead of just up-ressing the old designs as if it's a value-add, but it isn't; what it actually is is them not being given the budget to recreate the old look
if you want a high quality recreation of the old visual design that's far more expensive. you have to first find an artist who has the skill to produce what you're looking for, pay for an initial product to prove that he can get it within a ballpark of what you're looking for, then pay for revisions to dial it in. and there's multiple different types of graphic go into a game like WC3 -- the work you put in to get an art pipeline set up to do the model designs doesn't translate at all to icons, or visual effects, or sounds, or ground textures
what instead happens when your publisher or the bosses approving your budget have already decided your project will fail, is they will reject your budget for re-creating the old game's graphical design using expensive but skilled artists whose skills moved them to the first world where they can demand a high price for quality AAA output, and order you to just go buy the services of a mobile phone mill in the third world whose whole sales pitch for their work is that their time is cheap. so you go & look for phone game artists who make asset packs for fantasy themed games, find a portfolio that looks like of like a modern version of warcraft (pretty easy to do since "offbrand warcraft" is a starting point for many graphic designers' portfolios), and when you send the budget for *that* person's B- services alongside their portfolio the boss rejects THAT budget too and tells you to just buy the assets in the portfolio, approving you to have revisions done on the worst of the assets they give you, recieving a product that runs the gammot from a D to a C-
warcraft reforged is basically an asset flip, pasted over top one of the most beloved games of all time.
probably what happened is the sc1 remaster went too well. essentially it went as well as it could have possibly gone, and didn't make enough money to compete with candy crush (which it was never going to), indicating to the bosses that no amount of effort put in to the wc3 remaster would actually make it worth doing, so they smothered it in the crib -- they've already started on it so it'd be a waste of money to just cancel it (0 ROI doesn't put the boss in a position to leverage a raise for ruining the project), so instead they kick it out as cheaply as possible while still having technically shipped a product. the community will hate it, but the bosses don't care because they and the shareholders don't give a f how the community feels about a project if their feelings about that project can't be converted into billions of dollars of microtransaction sales from children with unsupervised access to their parent's credit cards. plus, if they release it and it is universally hated, it makes everyone who *made* it be universally hated by underfunding it seem like geniuses for having underfunded it
if the starcraft remaster had done better they could have imagined that maybe if the wc3 remaster does better it'll outsell fortnite or w/e coke dream they're cobbling together in the boardroom, but it made too visible how much money is in the remaster game for them and they just decided they aren't interested
@@tabula_rosaI think the designers would be very bored just up-rezzing stuff, so they asked for some creative freedom. It worked in some item designs like grubby mentioned, but yes I agree in general it's very difficult to pull off unless the designer is very talented and the proper budget and time for iterations are catered.
Reforged feels like an AI attempt at recreating a game
holy shit, it does
wouldnt be surprised if they did use ai
I learned that when Grubby says something's "not very good", that's actually just his nice way of saying it's "utter and complete rubbish" 😂
I played WC3 an embarrassing amount as a young teenager and even though in the last 18ish years I’ve only touched the game less than 50 times, WC3 gameplay, specifically Grubby WC3, is possibly the majority of content I consume in my free time. I’m very thankful for your efforts! This was an interesting story :) thank you for all your effort and entertainment over the many years!
P.S. whenever I’m distinguishing WC3 from WoW to my gf, I tell her I’m talking about “Grubby Warcraft” xD
Warcraft 3 just needed HD textures, models, portraits and that's it! Even today it would help.
Goated pro giving his best to help his favorite game get a better re-master, giving us a transparent explanation of events, and recognizing the state of both devs under fire and the niche community trying to salvage a lost company... what a great video!
Actually you can prevent the game from updating your disc copy. When you launch the game just reject connection to battle net. The game will prompt you several times, implying that it is mandatory, but it will eventually stop asking and you can play normally. Of course that means no battlenet multiplayer, but you can still play on LAN.
I reached the same conclusion as Grubby while casually playing the first mission of the orc campaign on Reign of Chaos. The models looked good when zoomed in, but something felt off. Then I noticed. Spirit wolves were small, the headhunters and and grunts were less clear zoomed out, and the different types of enemies were harder to identify. Almost everything looked good, but also more messy.
Blizz Shareholders and Execs: "QUICK RUSH OUT OUR FAILURE FOR QUICK CASH"
Public: "This is absolute garbage - refund and enjoy your Dead on Arrival game"
Blizz Shareholders and Execs: "LETS DO IT AGAIN!!!!"
i just rediscovered grubby after 10+ years away from SC2 and RTS in general. crazy to see he's still playing WC3, I thought the game was dead. thinking about actually buying reforged now that I see it's in a playable state. its so wild how time flies, watching this takes me back to 2003 😀
I grew up with Diablo 1, Warcraft 2... then came Diablo 2, then Warcraft 3... took me a while to get around to Starcraft... World of Warcraft... but imho by the time activision bought blizzard, the original passionate people that turned blizzard from the underdog to the household name it became, weren't there anymore. It changed too much too fast and started to die, desperate for corporate approval started milking the fanbase more and more as a life line. It's a sad slow painful death.
On the topic of Ogres sleeping, i think they just went with this animation because they do it too in Classic, hence why only ogres have a sleep animation in Reforged
so the creeps actually sleeping at night was just another undelivered promise?
A person named Ralle asked you to play Daemonic Sword once in an interview. If you want to save Warcraft 3, play it off stream and see if you like it Grubby. I promise you, its one of the ways Warcraft has stayed alive for countless years. It is essentially a Hiveworkshop project as I hired a bunch of Hiveworkshop OG programmers and artist to help improve it since Reforge. I'm sort of an underdog apparently, but I've work on it for over 15 years, its now my masterpiece for the world to enjoy although its still not perfect. It was my way of trying to save Warcraft, I game which I love, and always will. I never gave up on wc3, and I hope you dont either. I have huge amounts of respect for you Grubby. Thank you.
Jesus Christ man... They actually thought you would go through that list of items for FREE? That truly shows how deranged their perspective of labor expectations are/was.
That is like a week worth of work. Going through every image and explaining the flaws and what needs to be improved. The fact that they even thought of asking you. It's honestly just sad.
Really, WHAT THE HELL? Even I, as Blizzard was a broke indie company, I would pay Grubby a proper salary for this.
They at least could have been a more tactful about it. Sending bits and pieces of the ones they thought were the worse. You can manage doing like 10-20 in an e-mail. Sending a file of like 100+ icons is rough man. Tbh, they really should have hired him properly for just a month or something, so grubby could have improved it
I think they were more desperate than deranged.
I really appreciate how much effort and energy Grubby has put into Reforged
I remember back in 2019/2020 when Reforged released, Grubby was very patient and non-judgemental about the state of the game, hoping that the devs would eventually fix the many issues the game had
You really tried Grubby, GG
It's not just nostalgia. I recently got my 8 year old into playing Warcraft 3 campaign (they have previously played a little bit of retail WoW so like the universe already) and when I showed them between Classic and Reforged graphics. They had a gut visceral disgust reaction to the Reforged graphics.
They kept asking me "but why are the new graphics worse? Why don't they fix it?"
100% made up
art direction will always be more important than visual realism
Did he Karen, did he say that?
Don't force they pronouns on 8 year olds.
Why don’t they fix it… from the mouth of babes.
The thumbnail of Grubby putting out the flames was like a scene from an MCU movie.
I played WC3 back in 2002, and havent really touched it since. I just watch Grubby vids because I love listening to people be passionate about things they love.
🥲Getting ghosted by Grubby would've been the final straw from trying to work on it lol.
Thanks for always looking out and advocating for your community Grubby! It was good to see they reached out to you for those few items but when they sent you that MASSIVE list it gave a glimpse on how deep the rabbit-hole of Blizzard workflow problems really went.Llike “hey thanks for looking over those 6 items for us. Here’s 600 more if you could please”
It's carrying the rally to battle so it moves with the ghoul! He's the commander of wood gathering!
I loved classic Warcraft 3 campaign and lore (and WoW by extension) back then.
I discovered your UA-cam channel a few days ago,
Even if I'm not into high-level multiplayer games like you, I love watching/listening to your vids ! Great vids !
Oh hi Mark!
Thank you for taking the time at 17:00 to explain the issue regarding the poor readibility of Reforged graphics. The fact that you cannot tell what's going on during fights, because everything just blends together and models are difficult to distinguish, is the biggest issue with Reforged graphics for me, right along with the bland, low contrast colors that sucked the life out of the vibrant world of classic warcraft 3
Wow that was a nice story. This is the type of story a QA listens before bed time. This is how a QA gets inspiration to save the world :D
Stayed just for the unit sound impersonations - 10/10. Besides that, the analysis is excellent, as always :) Keep up the great work quality, Grubby !
Such a well made video! I've enjoyed your insight, commentary and story telling all throughout the video.
Appreciate talks like this I can always listen to rhem while cooking or doing stuff around the house. Take care, cheers!
As a fellow non-autistic person I aporeciate the attention to detail 😅
I still sometimes watch the Reforged Arthas v Illidan cutscene and I laugh. I still can't believe the old cutscenes look more natural than the new ones
Impressive how well grubby can articulate his thoughts on stream, this is why is so entertaining to listen to him talk Warcraft
Again and again. I have to re-iterate this. Grubby is a really nice person. He seems to act reasonable so often, it's impressive. Thanks for sharing this story with us Grubby!
Diamond of suffering old icon is used on WOW for track undead. A hunter ability that reveals undead in an area around you on the minimap. I have never heard of diamond of suffering, i don’t think i ever saw that icon until i played WoW
watched this like sitting down and watching a movie. thank you for all your work putting this together
1:13:35 I believe the town portal scroll got changed because the hearthstone icon in WoW is blue, and in the new icon also has the same symbol as on a hearthstone. In WoW it is used to teleport to an inn you saved your hearthstone in, a bit like a town portal scroll returning you home
@Grubby It's a very concise & largely accurate depiction of the evolution phase of Warcraft 3 from Classic into Reforged. Some of the faulty game mechanics you highlighted in reforged have merit above most of what was discussed. What most need to understand is Reforged was developed by personnel that where never part of the original team that developed Classic. Blizzard today, is nothing of what Blizzard was. Understand that.
Game dev for 13 years here.. You have a very strong sense of gamedesign. You said in some video you almost ventured into this kind of profession. You totally have what it takes.
rally point is a huge indicator of the great quality of wc3 and of how modern devs can't even think about improving their games
something like Black Mesa also couldn't copy some simple things from 1998 and 2004 games after 15 years of development
Oh when the archers in Reforged used to die in a mass fight I had to lower the volume.
You would lower the volume
I would increase it
We are not the same
@@Dhomden mom n neighbours
Sometimes I don't even care which side you're on. You're just so good at explaining things
You just care a lot more than their managers Grubby. From the outside looking at this totally objectively this fact is very apparent.
I've been Influenced. Thank you Professional Gamer/Streamer/Content Creator
This sounds like part of the bugs I reported enough in the HotS forums to be invited to a close collaboration with the QA team there, I think like 20-30 of us in there at one point.
It was nice and fun while it was around.
Still was around after big HotS cut happened, but was basically dead about a year before the game was officially dead.
It really was a fun and learning experience, as often I was told if something felt wrong they needed me to explain like you did/are doing in the video.
So I've been lurking on your content for a while, and I started watching you when you began your Dota 2 hero by hero playthrough. But this video finally got me to subscribe, and I don't just throw subscriptions to people. Your analysis of Reforged was perfect. You covered literally everything I myself hated about it. I refunded the game.
I just wish they'd cared more about one of their flagship legacy titles than argue internally over finances or other.
I appreciate your efforts. They really did War3 dirty and I got the same ghosting. We'll see what happens under Microsoft.
Hey Grub, I wonder how much of classic you found to be actually awesome and well thought only because you did those analysis on Reforged, and that made you love classic even more. xD
Thought you were about to go off with the Fresh Prince theme for a second, lol
1:16:50 -- just because it looks "higher definition" doesn't mean it "looks better"
unless its a 1:1 ratio of design. but the PotM aura icon needs to be the SAME.
it's NOT a nostalgia problem... and the drums on the left have 0 design on the drum head.
most of them that are same item 1:1 design just shinier may "look better"
but honestly... i can't think of any new reforged designs in-game look better.
Tabbing to the shot of Thrall k.o.ed in the cinematic is so appropriate
I follow a lot of WoW and Diablo content, so Blizzards inability to capture the genius of the original devs isn't new to me.
But videos like this show that they can't even stop themselves from ruining their older, fan-cherished games.
Having to play this new and downgraded version of the old masterpiece is such a slap in the face. Fuck current Blizzard.
First 3 seconds had me thinking Grubby was about to start rapping The Fresh Prince theme
Honestly, they should've just kept the infrastructure updated, focusing on ladder, ping, network connectivity, maybe balance updates, etc.
The graphics looks pretty good to me, even if it's from 2003 :)
He Grubbs, just wanted to say that I really enjoy listening to your stories and opinions - great Chanel!
36:25 That’s also a movie trope, in lots of movies set in the Middle Ages they just put a thin layer of straw on the roof rather than thatching it, as well as on the floor.
How can one of the most Legendary Game Studios mess up one of the Legendary RTS Games? It's so confusing to me. You only need 2 mllion dollars to fix this. Which is nothing that Activision Blizzard (now Microsoft) has.
Thinking of incorporating loot boxes & subscription with wc3 😂
people are important. companies are not. dont trust companies. creators are getting old, leave companies. companies become different enteties when time pases and people go. stop trusting brands and look for products/people. Larian made BG3, great project. But what if their staff goes away, like 90% of it and Sven is going away? Should you trust them? No
Because the people that made those legendary games are mostly gone. Microsoft can potentially pour some money into fixing this, but that's on them. Would you rather risk that amount of money to salvage a product with a tarnished reputation or would you rather invest it in something that is new that will potentially give them a higher chance of making profits? That's pretty much what they are thinking.
Granted they did express interest in reviving old titles so there is a possibility that wc3 could get fixed, but I'm not holding my breath. It's better to move on to greener pastures and accept that the old Blizzard is dead and play other games worth your time rather than keep setting yourself up for disappointment. If we are proven wrong that they do fix their products, then great! We have a reason to come back. Otherwise it's time to move on.
Nope. You can't fix this mess. You have to go back and start from WC3 again. That costs definitely more than just 2 mil.
The whole design approach is different. WC3 focused on the playability of the game. Grubby explains many things don't look because of art reasons the way the do. WC3 reforged tried to look good and take a lot from genres where you navigate a 3d environment. What ends up happening is that you simply have no clue what is happening an the screen. It's like trying understand what is happening in a raid. It's not that the mechanics are complex but effects and people are all over the place. You have zero visibility and without addons and understanding of them simply no clue what is happening around you, not to speak of a birds view and you trying to understand what every unit does individually.
The best way to do this is take the old engine and improve it for modern hardware. That way you have the old graphics at low settings and have modern textures for higher settings.
But that way you are also limited by the old engine and can't replace models the way they did it. But let's be honest, no one wants them with worse gameplay anyways.
What's the problem with hiring some professional gamers/influencers and paying them enough compensation to let them advise on game development? Why don't we do this more often?
That's such simple and community-oriented feedback.
Really cool video, it was good to hear in depth about the changes that you worked hard for
im so glad i burned on a disc a copy of my wc3 client back in 2016, before the pre-reforged patches, with lots of custom games. been enjoying this old client i rediscovered lately
1:11:33 How do you think anything of quality ever gets made? (...) Petty is just another word for a quality consideration that another person thinks is beneath them to spend time on because they are not passionate about it or they don't think it's important or don't do that kind of quality control
What Blizzard did should be illegal. You PURCHASED those CDs, they shouldn't be able to make it so that you auto download a new version of the game you PURCHASED.
If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing. :)
I have not watched the full video yet. Have any of the developers that worked on the project come forward and talked about how it ended up the way that it did?
Just watching the full video, and feel likeI want more, Grubby, thanks, really, for your thought on lots of different things, starting to love it!❤❤❤
You can't help someone who doesn't acknowledge or want to listen
Don't let anybody tell you that you were "too picky" about the things you gave feedback on. Completely spot on feedback, almost all of it. It's a different thing how much they're ACTUALLY gonna want to or be able to fix (well we know now), but you were trying to uphold the standard that classic WC3 had set, and as you too said, a standard that Reforged should have held as a minimum.
This video really makes me appreciate the details and love poured into the original WC3
Blizzard deserved that everyone PIRATED warcraft 3.
“This is the one topic I’m expert on.” I fucking love you, Grubby.
I started playing war3 melee only since late 2022, and playing with classic graphics it's also hard for me to select inured militia behind my hero or behind a big golem to send them home, how it was explained in 27:00
Does it have to do with mouse lag? Or did I zoom out the camera too much? (2200) I was trying to fix this for so long and still hadnt
I hope grubby also watches back to warcrafts look at WC3/Sc Ex Blizz Dev Sam Didier doing work on stormgates creeps. In 1 design he demonstrates everything grubby was saying about reforges grapphic design. Including the designs being distinct like the footman or grunt. Looking at units from above, team colours. Keeping things simple and uncomplicated. Such as copy pasting and mirroring the legs to save time and only putting detail on say boss units. Keep it simple
Another epic 2 hour video talking about rally points , you should really do Rally point rank video !
And lets not even start by how they broke the map editor, when i got back into some of my old maps there was so much broken, from animations, and effects and scaling issues.
For example Star fall: In Classic, you could edit the special effect of the small stars falling on units, but in reforged , it always does the small stars, even when you change the ability effect to something else.
Or that some special effect like thunderclap never stop, in classic you used "create special effect" and it would play the special effect once, but in reforged the effect stays forever, so you get a constant thunderclap effect on that spot that never stops.
hahaha that old patch was funny before the fix , thank you for your kind contributions to the community. you are the reason the reforged is playable today. thank you once again
Honestly reforged feels like it had alot of passion and good ideas behind them, but they were all half-assed and unrefined to the point where it makes it worse. Like a 3D rally flag is a fun idea, they have the technology so why not use it. But then more minor issues arise like the jittering and disappearing and they just stop there and say "well we tried, let's just leave it at that" or theg ran out of time and thats where it went wrong. They had good ideas, but failed to follow them up, refine them and finetune them so they are in a state where they enhance the readability abd enjoyment, rather than hinder it.
i love how precice you are with everything, because yeah for sure it might be some small details how with a flag point for example, but it's just tied up in a tight working system that you can't just cnahge it without a notice
I like this video a lot. You're raising very good, sensible points and I don't think at all that you're overexaggerating or being petty. You're being factual and speaking from an angle that focuses on readability and quality of life. It's perfectly valid to raise these concerns, and it makes Blizzard seem that much more careless and ignorant of all of the feedback they undoubtedly received over the production of WC3:R.
The reason Invisibility is less readable is the previously established readability problem, in classic, the colors and models were more vibrant, noticable and easy to read so when they're toned down due to the transparency from invis, you notice it quickly, but in reforged, the colors are more muted, giving way to the minute details on the fancy new models, which you wouldn't notice unless you zoomed in, so when all that turns transparent, the difference is not big enough to catch our eyes.
Damn, you have great attention to detail. Thanks for all your efforts!
I appercaite insight and opinions on this matter. very informative and educational as the process and devolpement as well generla wc3 info. Im trying to watch more of your videos for tips and trick on how to get better. Seems ill deff need alot more paractice.
There are so many things we don't really appreciate because they work so well that we don't even notice them. It really reminds me of how Street Fighter 4 decided to give everyone exagerattedly huge hands and feet so that ranges can be distinguished easier.
The problem with new icons is that they thought adding shadows to everything equals improvement. Even when you leave design out of discussion, the readable of new icons suffers bad from those shadows.
45:34 I feel like StarCraft II actually did Invisibility here best - the game applies another, bluish semitransparent texture called a glaze, which at the same time makes it clear a unit is cloaked. The units also have highly distinguishable animations, which instantly help you recognize what unit is is even with the less visible units.
As for the portraits: In WarCraft III Classic and StarCraft II, the unit portraits are always doing some gimmicky thing - they are always blinking their eyes, fiddling with their gadgets (Banshee puts down visor when cloaked, puts it up when decloaked), bobbing their heads up or down, shaking their heads, and so on. When the units speak, its clear some Blizzard artist took their time to detail the body language a highly social person might use when saying those things. In acting, this kind of study of body language and implementation alongside speech helps to grab the audience's attention, but in Reforged this is absent and is extremely noticeable as the previous iteration had done it differently.
Great Video. I'm a software Quality assurance Engineer instead of "Petty" we call it Detail Oriented
also as a wc3 nerd my whole life I would of much perferd if they just made classic with better graphics rather than a junky Reskin of everything
Muy buen trabajo querido Grubby, espero Blizzard te considere mucho todo el apoyo que das a este maravilloso juego que disfrutamos
There is a Reforged Campagin where you play Tides Of Darkness in old Blizzard quality. I absolutely recommend to play!
I grew up playing classic and go back at least once every year or two to beat the campaign and I genuinely like the new graphics. Don’t really get all they hate for the graphics. The other really technical stuff must be something for multiplayer cuz I don’t really get it. Either love ur videos keep doing what ur doing!
forcing original players to downlad reforged and not even let use it killed the fanbase, myself included
The change 1:14:37 for town portal scroll was better, the yellow suggests thats its some sort of healing scroll while the blue does match the animation effect. I wish you didnt get them to change it.
Huh? Nothing about yellow indictates healing in WC3, that's green. TP has always been yellow and should stay yellow.
They still have time to save it, even tho they probably wont... Just remove WC reforged completely and make the NEW WC3 with just enhanced graphics from the old models and maps and wrap it up there.
Watching this whole video is worth it just to listen to Timmy the Villager dying sound 1:01:58