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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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
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 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.
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...
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
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."
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.
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!!!!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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
Dear Grubby, no one could ever save Warcraft 3: Reforged. This game it's the biggest disaster that ever occurred in gaming's history. Sure, there are other disasters and fails, but nothing comes close to this.
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.
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?
A LOT of people tried HARD but the overwhelming majority at the game dev department could NOT properly do their work.. underpaid, overworked, understaffed, overexpectations. they did pull it off... to a degree. but to deprive millions upon millions of people who bought RoC AND TFT on CD then switched to digital CDKeys; EVERYONE LOST RoC permanently... no matter what. and that's not right. RoC was still popular even when TFT was dying or essentially dead on ladder... due to the massive influx of zMap Hackers and that came with drop hack... which blizz denied the existence of a disconnect hack = win for hacker and loss for real player for 10+ years. lastly, there IS a game dev that's made a youtube channel named Thor if someone replies i'll try to find his real channel name and you can find him talk bout it from time to time. his father worked on EVERY SINGLE WoW Cinematic trailer. so he of course wanted to do the same kind of work as his dad (programming/game dev) to the point he works on other projects. i think he works on heartbound and a few other things. he's extremely popular for a game dev.
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!
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 😀
Effects in Warcraft 3 usually scale relatively to scaling of the unit it belongs to. So bloodlusted TC should also have a bigger lightning shield. Maybe the scaling difference from bloodlust is bigger in reforged 🤔
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
I loved classic Warcraft 3 campaign and lore (and WoW by extension) back then. I discovered your RUclips 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 !
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.
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!
On the subject of remasters, the only successful example that satisfied the original audience that I can think of is Brood War. Demons souls fans say the remake lost artistic subtelty necessary for the environmental storytelling. Master chief collection repeatedly destroys the mood on the flood levels. Re4 fans prefer the original. Ff7 remake is making people mad... Just leave games alone. Stop destroying them. I cant play wc3 as it was anymore. How is that legal???
Didin't they outsource the models? That's why it looks like a mobile game models instead of Warcraft models. If you look at the faces like Crypt Fiend it looks nothing like a Crypt Fiend from Warcraft universe. Same with every other unit.
23:27 I hate when stuff that are suppose to be solid move like its a living breathing thing. Its the same in Hots , everything is programmed to have that breathing effect, even sgt hammer.
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.
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.
I feel really bad for WC3 players. It's such a great game, and reforged was the worst product I had ever seen. It's the easiest sale EVER for blizzard to me, yet I never even bought it to this day. SC remastered was near perfectly done. Vote with your wallets, kids. Stop buying games mindlessly
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
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
There was a time when I considered blizzard as a symbol of PC gamers at least in the type of games they pursue, they are like a game development company on a different level from gameplay to cutscenes in games, they are really great. But look at them now, it's like they're losing themselves more and more every day. so sad!
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 :)
Blizzard literally forcing us to pirate their game, I have the CD, had them for almost two decades now but installing them gets me the old pre update version. If I install the legit version it will instantly update the game to the reforged patch, if I pirate the game I can get the last version pre reforged and play the game I want to play.
oh, i forgot to mention how Blizzard's "balancing" of the races SOLELY revolved around the "pro scene in esports" Where the SAME 32-36 people would sign up for WCG [the biggest tournament at the time] and at some point, the last person to beat 4kMooN/FoXNEWSMooN was MaDFroG when he did dk/ghoul creepjacking using boots and dust, while moon did AoW Creeping, as well sending skeletons to harass wisps. then later gargs at tier2. then at t3 he'd have dk/lich+orb/cryptlord. vs archer/talon dk/kotg. eventually Moon figured out Panda was the absolute BANE of all t1 units with its flame combo... even gargs got owned by it. i didn't see Moon lose a tournament since. Except perhaps a half dozen times over the 15-20 years of watching. Well not watchin replays but seeing the results and "highlights" of the plays since Blizzard actually cared back then. To a SMALL DEGREE. Since their payouts were mad low. Moon was still the MOST paid player in Wc3 history.
Comparing the Reforged and Ressurected is just so sad. Diablo II got such a great remake and we could have had that for WIII as well. Instead we got this.
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
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 think the most agregious aspect of the whole debacle was that they couldn't even _remake_ WC3. They broke many promises of new and changed content, which was bad, but, they couldn't even just remake a game that was already fine! It's a bit like giving someone an old car, and they promise to repair and improve it, but instead they give you back a broken bike. If you weren't going to live up to the promises, you could at the minimum just remake an already made game, but they couldn't even get that right. Truly embarrassing.
zooms in on one image but doesn't on the other lol... look idk i've had no problem picking up on seeing individual units in reforged lol the flag thing is kinda meh imo it doesn't matter one way or the other to me particle effects are guaranteed to be known its on something but its so short it isn't worth keeping up with you're better off hitting auto heal targets so they try to heal themselves instead of the ones taking real damage also your mouse was *under* the chest not on it lol you just have to get better at... clicking the center of mass lol nothing moves fast enough for it to be an issue unit sizes have been an issue even in the original that never changed it goes as far to impact the game's pathing which is one gripe i never saw fixed as for readability... its never changed lol you can 100% hide units behind other units from a particular camera angle the sizes aren't randomized either tbh you can still see a clear difference when you compare them to the same races obviously it will look a little different when you start comparing different races the new d shield is not only better looking but stands out significantly lol not sure how you'd mistake that for a town portal teleport tbf lol if the color is the only thing you notice im shocked cause its the runes that give it away for me but some of those ability affects were too big or not big enough etc most of the icons generally looked fine to me but i def agree with the potions
Honestly this video really highlights why I think a compeitive focus for RTS games makes it much more difficult to make cool and immersive stuff for single player. I think a lot of the points made here are very valid, but for example with sizing thing. Is it more competitively useful if an archmage on a horse is the same size as a human? Yes... But it also looks a lot worse and that kind of thing that really annoys me personally. I think trying to make WC3 reforged a faithful remaster was a mistake. Making it a complete overhaul/remake and cutting all ties to the original would have allowed them to much more freely reinvent thing and properly rebuild the campaign. What I was hoping for was an expansion of the RPG mechanics in the campain, far more detailed maps, new events, that kinda thing.
You and W3Champions try to save Reforged which should be treated like SC2 imo (skinwise). BIG PATCHES is the way to make the game looks cleaner and lighter !
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
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
a big part of it was the toxic positivity surrounding that. i remember getting called out on your stream for being not enthusiastic about their deadlines
@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.
1:19:30 It took me a while to realize that's Spider-man, Dr. Strange and Captain America. Like, yeah two of those were always a joke, but it seems that even Robe of the Magi, in hindisght, was a Marvel dig. Plus it completes STR, AGI, and INT.
oh no, there's no allegedly understaffed and overworked. Thor worked with blizzard just like his father before him. and he says the work environment at blizzard under activision was absolutely HORRIBLE and thus we got reforged... and we lost our ability to play our CD versions even with digital cdkeys..
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 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
Warcraft 3 is such an icon. Arguably the best video game ever developed, by arguably the best developer in the world (at the time), so far ahead of others, genre defining etc... yet, it got reforged for reimagining... I wish wc3 would've got the same treatment as resident evil 4 by Capcom.
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.
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
the whole section of "Readability" i can just sum it up to "you can't tell YOUR army vs OPPONENT's army" as well as the items in your hero inventory MIGHT "look nicer" to some but overall HORRIBLE as a whole. a full inventory... you quite possibly wouldn't know what does what until its too late. they wanted everything to look so nice and "more up-to-date" in terms of graphics.. as grubby says "look cooler" but what made people fall in LOVE with wc3 in general is the original designs. NO OTHER GAME looks the way wc3 did... the original graphics just look beautiful with their "clunkiness" if they wanted to make a "beautiful looking game" they could have VERY EASILY made a game to add to their business that was an RTS - hell, they could have done THIS kind of "remaster" with WC2 where there's ONLY TWO RACES Humans vs Orcs and you'd be able to tell the difference. however, 4 races and still not being able to distinguish the difference between ANY of the races... it's annoying. I tried SO HARD to play on the new "reforged" graphics and i simply could not play it... individually the heroes/units/creeps look GOOD due to engine updates... but Army vs Army, multiple heroes? it's just an eye-sore utter mess. Same with hero inventories and items... they either look too much alike or just terrible together.
oh man at 24:10 mark, the resizing of units is also a HUGE problem with not being able to tell the difference. just look at the lvl1 AM with TP, it's MAINLY BRIGHT BLUE with a dash of white. you would NEVER think that's your standard TP from wc3.
also during the pause on the AM at 25:30 mark (around about) - everyone in twitch chat agree that the AM's portrait looks absurd as hell. most portraits looked WAY too off. then blizz did the worse thing of all (micro transactions) such as being able to buy different gendered heroes... for some reason, i switched to normal graphics but my DK still has female voice...
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.
Reforged feels like an AI attempt at recreating a game
holy shit, it does
wouldnt be surprised if they did use ai
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
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
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
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.
😢
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'
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 story has everything from character development, to the plot twist, to the betrayal arc and finally the epilogue
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" 😂
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!"
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.
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.
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 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
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...
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?
🥲Getting ghosted by Grubby would've been the final straw from trying to work on it lol.
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..
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.
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!!!!"
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. :)
As a fellow non-autistic person I aporeciate the attention to detail 😅
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.
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.
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.
You just care a lot more than their managers Grubby. From the outside looking at this totally objectively this fact is very apparent.
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.
forcing original players to downlad reforged and not even let use it killed the fanbase, myself included
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
Dear Grubby, no one could ever save Warcraft 3: Reforged. This game it's the biggest disaster that ever occurred in gaming's history. Sure, there are other disasters and fails, but nothing comes close to this.
and yet they got my money... i played 3hours before giving up. Sad
Counterpoint, Starfield.
1946 Hiroshima comes pretty close to wc3 reforged tbh
@@gabenvandenbrink9114 How is that a gaming history fail?
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.
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
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?
I appreciate your efforts. They really did War3 dirty and I got the same ghosting. We'll see what happens under Microsoft.
You tried, but Blizzard didn't really try...
eh, we can blame Bobby.
A LOT of people tried HARD
but the overwhelming majority at the game dev department could NOT
properly do their work.. underpaid, overworked, understaffed, overexpectations.
they did pull it off... to a degree.
but to deprive millions upon millions of people who bought RoC AND TFT on CD
then switched to digital CDKeys; EVERYONE LOST RoC permanently... no matter what.
and that's not right.
RoC was still popular even when TFT was dying or essentially dead on ladder... due to
the massive influx of zMap Hackers and that came with drop hack... which blizz denied
the existence of a disconnect hack = win for hacker and loss for real player for 10+ years.
lastly, there IS a game dev that's made a youtube channel named Thor
if someone replies i'll try to find his real channel name and you can find him talk bout it
from time to time. his father worked on EVERY SINGLE WoW Cinematic trailer.
so he of course wanted to do the same kind of work as his dad (programming/game dev)
to the point he works on other projects. i think he works on heartbound and a few other
things. he's extremely popular for a game dev.
@@Broockle and activision
The question is how can we can make them hold accountable, as right now we can't do anything in fact forced to play this downgrade version of the game
Warcraft 3 just needed HD textures, models, portraits and that's it! Even today it would help.
Thought you were about to go off with the Fresh Prince theme for a second, lol
It's sad to see Grubby addicting to COPIUM
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!
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 😀
Effects in Warcraft 3 usually scale relatively to scaling of the unit it belongs to. So bloodlusted TC should also have a bigger lightning shield. Maybe the scaling difference from bloodlust is bigger in reforged 🤔
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
You can season turd all you want but it wont make is beef. - Some homeless guy that was living near my house, 2022.
I loved classic Warcraft 3 campaign and lore (and WoW by extension) back then.
I discovered your RUclips 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!
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 killed Hots, StarCraft 2 and now wow classic with cataclysm release let's see what's next
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!
On the subject of remasters, the only successful example that satisfied the original audience that I can think of is Brood War.
Demons souls fans say the remake lost artistic subtelty necessary for the environmental storytelling.
Master chief collection repeatedly destroys the mood on the flood levels.
Re4 fans prefer the original. Ff7 remake is making people mad...
Just leave games alone. Stop destroying them. I cant play wc3 as it was anymore. How is that legal???
AOE2 was a fantastic remaster.
Didin't they outsource the models? That's why it looks like a mobile game models instead of Warcraft models. If you look at the faces like Crypt Fiend it looks nothing like a Crypt Fiend from Warcraft universe. Same with every other unit.
I have always found it dumb that I had to download new graphics even though I can't use them
I have always found it dumb that they merged the clients at all.
23:27 I hate when stuff that are suppose to be solid move like its a living breathing thing. Its the same in Hots , everything is programmed to have that breathing effect, even sgt hammer.
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.
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.
I feel really bad for WC3 players. It's such a great game, and reforged was the worst product I had ever seen. It's the easiest sale EVER for blizzard to me, yet I never even bought it to this day. SC remastered was near perfectly done.
Vote with your wallets, kids. Stop buying games mindlessly
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
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
There was a time when I considered blizzard as a symbol of PC gamers at least in the type of games they pursue, they are like a game development company on a different level from gameplay to cutscenes in games, they are really great. But look at them now, it's like they're losing themselves more and more every day. so sad!
Wc3: made with love, passion and 'out of one hand'.
Reforged: outsourced bullshit.
I'm bugging. I thought grubby was playing on the reformed graphics this whole time. Seeing them looks cartoonish
I've been Influenced. Thank you Professional Gamer/Streamer/Content Creator
Reforged is trash. But we can’t ask more from untalented, low skill designers and developers that Blizzard is hiring now.
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 :)
Blizzard literally forcing us to pirate their game, I have the CD, had them for almost two decades now but installing them gets me the old pre update version. If I install the legit version it will instantly update the game to the reforged patch, if I pirate the game I can get the last version pre reforged and play the game I want to play.
oh, i forgot to mention how Blizzard's "balancing" of the races SOLELY revolved around the "pro scene in esports"
Where the SAME 32-36 people would sign up for WCG [the biggest tournament at the time] and at some point,
the last person to beat 4kMooN/FoXNEWSMooN was MaDFroG when he did dk/ghoul creepjacking using boots
and dust, while moon did AoW Creeping, as well sending skeletons to harass wisps. then later gargs at tier2.
then at t3 he'd have dk/lich+orb/cryptlord. vs archer/talon dk/kotg. eventually Moon figured out Panda was the
absolute BANE of all t1 units with its flame combo... even gargs got owned by it.
i didn't see Moon lose a tournament since. Except perhaps a half dozen times over the 15-20 years of watching.
Well not watchin replays but seeing the results and "highlights" of the plays since Blizzard actually cared back then.
To a SMALL DEGREE. Since their payouts were mad low. Moon was still the MOST paid player in Wc3 history.
Comparing the Reforged and Ressurected is just so sad. Diablo II got such a great remake and we could have had that for WIII as well. Instead we got this.
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
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 am the only person who likes the reforged graphics
yes
For my yearly campaign run , I enjoyed it , for multi-player.......yeah maybe
Yes.
If you play blind then yeah
I think the most agregious aspect of the whole debacle was that they couldn't even _remake_ WC3. They broke many promises of new and changed content, which was bad, but, they couldn't even just remake a game that was already fine!
It's a bit like giving someone an old car, and they promise to repair and improve it, but instead they give you back a broken bike.
If you weren't going to live up to the promises, you could at the minimum just remake an already made game, but they couldn't even get that right. Truly embarrassing.
zooms in on one image but doesn't on the other lol...
look idk
i've had no problem picking up on seeing individual units in reforged lol
the flag thing is kinda meh imo it doesn't matter one way or the other to me
particle effects are guaranteed to be known its on something but its so short it isn't worth keeping up with you're better off hitting auto heal targets so they try to heal themselves instead of the ones taking real damage
also your mouse was *under* the chest not on it lol you just have to get better at... clicking the center of mass lol nothing moves fast enough for it to be an issue
unit sizes have been an issue even in the original that never changed it goes as far to impact the game's pathing which is one gripe i never saw fixed as for readability... its never changed lol you can 100% hide units behind other units from a particular camera angle the sizes aren't randomized either tbh you can still see a clear difference when you compare them to the same races obviously it will look a little different when you start comparing different races
the new d shield is not only better looking but stands out significantly lol
not sure how you'd mistake that for a town portal teleport tbf lol if the color is the only thing you notice im shocked cause its the runes that give it away for me but some of those ability affects were too big or not big enough etc
most of the icons generally looked fine to me but i def agree with the potions
10:04 gender reveal castle
I feel massively influenced to click the like and subscribe.
Great! My "influencer" job is done then :D
@@GrubbyTalks You can go sleep soundly tonight. Good job!
Honestly this video really highlights why I think a compeitive focus for RTS games makes it much more difficult to make cool and immersive stuff for single player. I think a lot of the points made here are very valid, but for example with sizing thing. Is it more competitively useful if an archmage on a horse is the same size as a human? Yes... But it also looks a lot worse and that kind of thing that really annoys me personally.
I think trying to make WC3 reforged a faithful remaster was a mistake. Making it a complete overhaul/remake and cutting all ties to the original would have allowed them to much more freely reinvent thing and properly rebuild the campaign. What I was hoping for was an expansion of the RPG mechanics in the campain, far more detailed maps, new events, that kinda thing.
You and W3Champions try to save Reforged which should be treated like SC2 imo (skinwise). BIG PATCHES is the way to make the game looks cleaner and lighter !
The pictures on the right on the icon comparison had a waaaaay worse resolution than you find in the game. Just go to the classic battle net wiki.
look at those joke game 'journalists' im sorry but who is going onto these websites and giving them clicks and money
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
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
a big part of it was the toxic positivity surrounding that. i remember getting called out on your stream for being not enthusiastic about their deadlines
The thing that always get me is how good they did the broofwar remastered. JUST BETTER QOL AND GRAPHICS. But for wc3 absolute mess
It's carrying the rally to battle so it moves with the ghoul! He's the commander of wood gathering!
@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.
1:19:30 It took me a while to realize that's Spider-man, Dr. Strange and Captain America. Like, yeah two of those were always a joke, but it seems that even Robe of the Magi, in hindisght, was a Marvel dig. Plus it completes STR, AGI, and INT.
Most of those attribute items are obviously superhero or DND lifts. Blizzard has never been anyrhing like shy about referencing other IPs.
oh no, there's no allegedly understaffed and overworked.
Thor worked with blizzard just like his father before him.
and he says the work environment at blizzard under activision
was absolutely HORRIBLE and thus we got reforged...
and we lost our ability to play our CD versions even with digital cdkeys..
that and the fact we can't play RoC no matter what is what really did it for me.
i preferred RoC by MIIIIIIIILES. millions upon millions of miles.
How to prevent a defamation lawsuit? Just add "allegedly" at the end 👍
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.
You can't help someone who doesn't acknowledge or want to listen
Remaster does suck... but the floating glowing chests is DEFINITELY NEEDED so Grubby and the other pros stop leaving goddamn loot behind =P
After all this, I still wonder if Grubby has autism 🤔
Forced upgrade was the worst decision ever.
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
Stayed just for the unit sound impersonations - 10/10. Besides that, the analysis is excellent, as always :) Keep up the great work quality, Grubby !
Warcraft 3 is such an icon. Arguably the best video game ever developed, by arguably the best developer in the world (at the time), so far ahead of others, genre defining etc... yet, it got reforged for reimagining... I wish wc3 would've got the same treatment as resident evil 4 by Capcom.
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.
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
timmy cant even die in reforged...
Crazy.
Hoping they don't make the same mistakes with warcraft 4
You really have any hope for Warcraft 4 at this point? Oh my sweet Summer child......
I wish I still had enough optimism to believe there will ever be a WC4.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢
the whole section of "Readability" i can just sum it up to "you can't tell YOUR army vs OPPONENT's army"
as well as the items in your hero inventory MIGHT "look nicer" to some but overall HORRIBLE as a whole.
a full inventory... you quite possibly wouldn't know what does what until its too late.
they wanted everything to look so nice and "more up-to-date" in terms of graphics.. as grubby says "look cooler"
but what made people fall in LOVE with wc3 in general is the original designs. NO OTHER GAME looks the way
wc3 did... the original graphics just look beautiful with their "clunkiness"
if they wanted to make a "beautiful looking game" they could have VERY EASILY made a game to add to their
business that was an RTS - hell, they could have done THIS kind of "remaster" with WC2 where there's ONLY TWO RACES
Humans vs Orcs and you'd be able to tell the difference.
however, 4 races and still not being able to distinguish the difference between ANY of the races... it's annoying.
I tried SO HARD to play on the new "reforged" graphics and i simply could not play it... individually the heroes/units/creeps
look GOOD due to engine updates... but Army vs Army, multiple heroes? it's just an eye-sore utter mess.
Same with hero inventories and items... they either look too much alike or just terrible together.
oh man at 24:10 mark, the resizing of units is also a HUGE problem with not being able to tell the difference.
just look at the lvl1 AM with TP, it's MAINLY BRIGHT BLUE with a dash of white. you would NEVER think that's
your standard TP from wc3.
also during the pause on the AM at 25:30 mark (around about) - everyone in twitch chat agree that the
AM's portrait looks absurd as hell. most portraits looked WAY too off.
then blizz did the worse thing of all (micro transactions) such as being able to buy different gendered
heroes... for some reason, i switched to normal graphics but my DK still has female voice...