Is Warcraft 3: Reforged fun?

Author: Chen Feng

In July 2002, "Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos" was released. For the first time, the game perfectly integrated RTS and RPG gameplay. The excellent game quality and advanced design concepts have gradually become a "phenomenal" game that is popular around the world. Today, there is no need to use too many words to praise "Warcraft III". After all, its achievements and quality are enough to become the uncrowned king in the hearts of players.

On January 29, 2020, "Warcraft III: Reforged Edition" was officially released - or "tested". However, compared with the grand scene of empty streets 18 years ago, the scene today is quite bleak. : A lot of players have been refunded, and the comment section on the official website is also full of dissatisfaction. Perhaps it really confirms the old king's words: "Kingdom has no eternity, my child." Warcraft 18 years ago was like the high-spirited Prince of Arthas, but when the remake returns 18 years later, it has become a death knight, stabbing its creator with another meaning of Frostmourne. ——Blizzard Entertainment.

So far, the scores of "Warcraft III: Reforged" on the Metacritic website are 63 points from the media and 0.5 points from players. "Warcraft 3" is the memory of many people born in the 80s and 90s in China, and it carries too many joys, sorrows and joys. After so many years, I believe many players are like the author, hoping that Blizzard can use modern technology to recreate the past story, but unexpectedly it backfired, and the remake turned the myth into a joke.

Compared with the 2002 "Warcraft III", the graphics of the remake have made a qualitative leap. All units, buildings, heroes, monsters, and maps have been re-modelled and produced. The entire picture is no longer a blurry mosaic, but you can clearly see the detailed processing of every plant and tree. Zooming in on the camera, you can carefully observe that the characters and scenes are all very delicately crafted, with gurgling water and long grass and flying orioles.

Most of the character models in the remake have been improved to suit their own image. The King of the Hill is more majestic, the Elf Archers are more charming, and of course, the Abomination is more disgusting. In addition to the improvement of models, some popular characters have also added female skins, such as the demon hunter and death knight who once fought to the death under the throne, and they are also walking together on the road to girliness.

Although most of the models have captured the essence of the characters, it is inevitable that some characters are overturned, either in their image or in the look and feel of the actual operation. Here are some examples. :

The white cow model has a problem with the void and solid models. The transparency of the white cow in the void state is too high and it is difficult to distinguish on the map.

The undead units are too dark and depressing, and it is difficult to distinguish the units during group play. When the troops are fighting, it is difficult to distinguish between ourselves and the enemy, and it is very difficult to distinguish.

The boneyard model has been redone, the broken dragon inside has become a pure skeleton, and the frost dragon has also changed from a bone dragon to a flesh dragon.

In addition, the light and shadow effects of the game are currently far from the effects of the carnival demonstration.

On February 2, Lemon Sky Studio, which is said to be responsible for the art work of "Warcraft III: Reforged", opened a post on the Reddit forum to communicate with players. According to the studio's statement in the post, they were responsible for nearly 70% of the model production for the remake. But it also said that the studio will send the parts it is responsible for to Blizzard, and Blizzard will give feedback.

"We have no control over how Blizzard uses the content we create."

"This is their (Blizzard's) project and we don't know what's going on. A project of this scale It's very huge, and we are just a small part of the entire project. It has been previously reported that Blizzard outsourced many of the models in "Warcraft 3: Remastered Edition" to Lemon Sky Studio in Malaysia. Players were also concerned about its quality, denouncing Blizzard for cutting corners. Now it seems that this outsourcing project has become one of the few highlights of this remake of the game.

The new round of testing of the Chinese server has lived up to expectations. Compared with the previous test version, a new campaign mode has been added. Players can experience more than 60 single-player missions across Azeroth. But when I entered the game with full expectations, I was filled with disappointment: many cutscene CGs have not been remade. What they looked like 17 years ago is still what they look like today. When Sal woke up from his sleep, his big green face frightened the author who had stayed up all night to write the manuscript, and he was completely sleepy.

Although the eye-catching duel under Ice Crown has been remade, it is really not flattering in terms of its level. Not to mention that the full close-up cutscene of purifying Stratholme in the demo never appeared in the entire campaign - it was directly castrated.

At the same time, there are serious bugs in the campaign mode. It cannot even be fully displayed on the loading interface. There are large swaths of shady scenes, and only the progress bar reminds me that the game has not crashed. What’s even more embarrassing is that when entering the game, character dialogues have serious text overlaps and text errors. It’s hard to imagine that Blizzard, a major company, would make such a low-level mistake.

Plot summary of "Warcraft III: Reforged": Erganis forced Arthas to make a father-like decision. Arthas abandoned the torture and pulled out the weapon that was fucked by the elephant. With his sword, he gained the power of Yongsi, and then Kel'Thuga came to assist Arthas. The soul of Chief Thrall received Medivh's prophecy and led the orc tribe to a few miles away on a ship, but was unable to do so. He was separated from his father, Hellscream, and could only find them along the way...

There are still some small creativity in the campaign mode. For example, players can play among the cursed sect characters. You will find a ghoul named Timmy. He is the child that Arthas saved from the gnolls in Chapter 1. Killing him will drop a Ring of Superiority with all attributes +1. Timmy won't attack anyone, but would you choose to kill him for an item?

These little easter eggs will bring something else to the journey, but they cannot cover up Blizzard’s perfunctory treatment of the entire campaign mode. It was originally promised that all campaign cutscenes would be remade, and there would also be additional content for Jaina, Popular characters such as Sylvanas will have more roles, and the plot will be slightly modified to fit in with the setting of "World of Warcraft". But now, all this is nothing more than a moon in the water and a flower in the mirror.

When talking about memories of Warcraft, the wide variety of RPG maps must be one of them, such as Chenghai 3C, Guarding Sword Pavilion, and Xiaobing’s Story. It can be said that these extremely creative RPG maps have greatly extended the vitality of "Warcraft" in the post-RTS era. In the remake, many players are looking forward to reviving these excellent RPG maps, but unfortunately, this wish will also be ruined by Blizzard.

After "Warcraft III: Reforged" was officially released abroad, foreign media PCGamer discovered that Blizzard had made some changes to the terms of custom maps.

In the terms, Blizzard stipulates the ownership of custom games in detail and comprehensively. The terms point out that the ownership of all custom games in "Warcraft III: Reforged" belongs entirely to Blizzard, not the map author. Simply put, the author transfers all rights in the custom game to Blizzard; in the event that the author is prevented or restricted from transferring for various reasons, the author will grant Blizzard an exclusive, perpetual, global, unconditional, royalty-free, irrevocable License; to the extent transfer is prohibited by applicable law, the author waives any rights to the Custom Game without compensation to the fullest extent permitted by law.

At the same time, Blizzard can take any action on the custom map. Not only that, all games in "Warcraft III: Reforged Edition" cannot be "remade" into an independent version anywhere else. This means that if the next game like "Dota" is born from a certain map of "Warcraft III: Reforged", Ice Frog will not be able to take the work to another company after the negotiations are fruitless.

In addition, other third-party copyright materials cannot be used in custom maps, otherwise they will be banned. This means that some RPG maps may not appear in the remake.

In the past, because domestic agents sold game discs and CD KEYs separately, and sold more than one KEY, many players became victims of genuine games - even if they purchased genuine games, they were unable to connect to Battle.net. It can be said that most people rely on various domestic battle platforms to complete their Warcraft battles. In the remake version, a very convenient and fast online battle function has been added.

Matching battle supports five modes: 1V1, 2V2, 3V3, 4V4 and melee. Players can freely choose race or random. If you don't like the too competitive battle mode, you can choose to customize the game, where you can join other players' rooms or create your own room.

However, there are still big problems in online battles, with insufficient optimization and common lags and frame drops. There will be a noticeable lag when clicking on the button to build a building. As a game reset with an old engine, it still suffers from lag on computers with two decades of mainstream configuration. It can only be said that Blizzard may not have paid attention to this problem from the beginning.

Although this remake has a low rating among players, looking at this game from an objective perspective, is it really that bad? Not really. The quality of "Warcraft III: Reforged" is still remarkable, but it is too far away from the ideal. The bad thing is that Blizzard made a pie that was too big, but in the end it failed to make it round. The bad thing is that it shoulders the glorious heritage of Warcraft, but its virtue is not worthy of its place, and its quality is not worthy of its reputation.

The author, like many fans, once cheered for the 2018 Warcraft remake. I thought it would be a phoenix reborn, but it turned out to be a failure. Perhaps after the "StarCraft 2" "After that, Blizzard has poured out the last bit of creativity for RTS. Now I just hope that in future updates, Blizzard can fulfill its promises bit by bit and give fans a reason to love it again.

Your Majesty is about to fight to the death, why do you surrender first?

-END-