What went wrong with WarCraft III Reforged

There was a really huge uproar after the release of the WarCraft III Reforged. Fans were furious, developers helplessly tried to defend their work, but could not stem the tide of people's anger. Eventually trolls joined the outraged chorus for the sake of being outraged. Trolls of course could not understand what it was that wrong with the remake of this particular game but yelled the loudest to win approval of the outraged fans. Thanks to their efforts any chance to get to the bottom of the problem seem lost. However, that is the shame. WarCraft III is a game that deserves a proper remaster. However, a proper remaster can only happen if those working on it will understand what went wrong to begin with.

I would say that reasons for the failure of this remake happened mostly because the Reforged developers were simply not familiar with all the tricks, the original developers used to build the world fans love so much. They looked only on models and overlooked other materials, such as concept art, WoW models, cinematic models and so on.

WarCraft II

To begin with I will bring an example from Warcraft II. Warcraft II was a 2D game with 64x64 pixels square models for every unit. This alone was of course not enough to convey an idea of fearsome warriors fighting each other. However, Blizzard figured out just the trick to help them: concept art. It was even in the very menu of the game.

Here you can see an Elven Archer fighting Troll Axethrower. Sure, game engine limits their in-game appearance to just 64x64 pixels, but thanks to this menu art, developers managed to convey the idea that players actually train these cool looking warriors in game and then send them to battle. The manual of the game contained more images for pretty much every unit in the game as well as those for heroes (including those that never appear as playable units in game).

The manual also contained a lot of text, explaining to readers the context of everything in game. It outlined the world and its history, the opposing fractions of Horde and The Alliance. It went further by outlying even sub-fractions within the main fractions, giving each Human Kingdoms and Clans of the Horde, its own name, flag as well as short description of what sets them apart from others.

Just like with the well written book, where readers imagination helps build the world, envisioned by the author from nothing more than lines of text. Here however Blizzard gave people more than text to work with. Carefully placed art allowed people to use their imagination to fill the gaps left behind by technological deficiencies.

Warcraft III

By the time of WarCraft III Blizzard had even more tricks up their sleeves to build their world even further. Blizzard was well aware that due to technological limitations, actual units in game will be almost as bulky and schematic as in Warcraft II. However, they could use their enhanced book of tricks to compensate for that.

They had some new tricks as well. For example, the unit portraits. A separate model of just the unit, face and head to display in a special portrait window of the interface could convince players that units were much better designed than they actually were. 2002 hardware could not possibly handle two dozen of units on screen with this level of fidelity, but a single higher fidelity separate model in a interface screen was possible, and it help the immersion.

Of course, concept art and cinematics also helped to flesh out the world. There was also a campaign screen, depicting one unit of the fraction in a separate high-fidelity model just on that screen. Night Elf Archer turned out particularly well.

Above is a Night Elf archer in Naga's waterly islands zone. Below is Spellbreaker in Outland.

These screens were like an advertisement or a promise of sorts. A showcase of how Blizzard actually envisioned their game and units in it. What they would have done for units in game if technology allowed for it.

World of Warcraft gave Blizzard further opportunities to flesh out all the units. WoW allowed for greater model fidelity and Blizzard used it to implement many units from WarCraft III in WoW. The WoW level fidelity models of pretty much every unit from Warcraft III can be found somewhere in World of Warcraft.

For example, here is WoW model of Dryad unit of Night Elf fraction of WarCraft III

Of course, concept art was also present and was actually displayed in various places in game itself, like for example this Dread lord from the endgame statistics screen.

Or this loading screen Demon Hunter.

Remake we Got

It was only natural that when graphic technology indeed advanced to the level when such graphics could be possible in game and not just on menu screen, fans started to think of remake.

Thus, when remake was announced fans were happy and many preordered.

However, once the game was released, fans were outraged that unit models they got were worse than what they expected to see.

All the examples I outlined above created certain expectations among fans. People expected that units of the remake will look like the above examples or better. They were reasonably disappointed that many units were nothing like them.

Some even list these units as an example for how they could have turned out to be

Remake we Want

However fundamentally people want a good remake of the Warcraft III. Some even make their own fan version, like this Warcraft III Re-Reforged

There is a clear demand for this. However, it has to be made properly to satisfy fans.

It would be only fair if Blizzard will take their time and polish Reforged to the level where fans will love it. Then we all get what we want and can live happily thereafter.

I think it is clearly possible to make one. Quality of models for the current reforged varies from model to model. Animals of various kinds as well as mechanical equipment actually turned out really well. However, some units, especially mages turned out poorly. That suggest that developers simply had poor understanding of what they were supposed to do. Something as common sense as bear of a wolf turned out great, but a more lore specific units ended up a miss by a long shot.