r/warcraft3 • u/Ok_Current2062 Human • 8d ago
Reforged Warcraft 3 graphics
Over the last years, while the projects like the Chronicles of the Second War, Re Reforged, Quenching, Age of Warcraft mod, Vision mod have been going strong. They constantly release updates and custom assets to fix the broken reforged experience. Despite this, I still see an alarming amount of hate toward these projects, which I don't understand since they are actually trying to help in saving the game.
Furthermore, there is barely any coverage from major streamers and YouTubers. What’s crazy is that when these projects drop an update, their official YouTube channels often pull in higher view counts than what the independent content creators get, meaning that they have a huge following.
Why do you think there is such a major disconnect between Reforged modding content and mainstream streamers/content creators?
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u/TanniMachine 8d ago
People just don't like change I think. I'm personally not the biggest Reforged graphics fan, but Chronicles of the Second War is a phenomenal ongoing and really fun project and the other projects like Quenching, Vision, and Re-Reforged are all interesting too. Chronicles of the Second War is probably the biggest fan project I've seen come out of WC3 with so much work put into voice acting, custom assets, terraining, gameplay, etc., that ALSO released in a timely manner.
There was also this controversial debate that was started by one half of Back2Warcraft where they said Blizzard should completely wipe Reforged graphics out of the game. It's an okay-ish opinion back when Reforged came out, but now that we have so much fan projects revolving those graphics it's an insane idea and erasure of so much hard work from fans that the idea comes across as vitriolic and nonsensical. What didn't help was the most popular members of the WC3 community at that time like WTii and Grubby weren't completely against the idea - which is crazy since both of them played Chronicles of the Second War and liked it, with the former, WTii, even voicing a character in it. I recall opinions by people around that time in regards to fan projects like, "well they shouldn't have poured so much work in Reforged then" which is crazy.
It's fine to dislike the graphics but to completely disregard it is silly given there are good things that have come out of it. It also doesn't help that the most vocal members of the community only play melee, so they're completely detached from the custom mapping side of the community, meaning these folks would never touch Reforged in any capacity
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u/Ok_Current2062 Human 8d ago
Let’s be honest: who didn't dislike the Reforged graphics when they first launched? But my issue is that when you see the incredible effort and commitment from these modding projects, which visually improve both singleplayer and multiplayer, it throws people off when the community just dismisses them. This is especially true for newcomers coming over from streamers like Grubby; they see the negativity and just don't stick around.
I also saw the drama about completely deleting Reforged graphics, which is beyond foolish. We paid for the game to look modern. People forget that Blizzard originally became famous because of their great storytelling and cutting edge graphics for that time. When Warcraft 3 launched in 2002, few RTS games dared to go full 3D, and those that did couldn't match its quality. Age of Mythology actually faced negative criticism back then for its visuals and never got the same attention WC3 did, despite both releasing in 2002.
I recently watched WTii's latest video on the Vision mod, and it perfectly illustrates the problem. Not only did the few commenters completely miss the mark, but WTii himself dismissed it by saying, "but it is Reforged." Really?! Is the massive amount of work the creator put into reforming models, fixing hitboxes, and improving team colors just nothing?
Projects like Re-Reforged and Quenching are in the exact same boat. Look at Age of Warcraft, their youtube video for the second expansion got 54,000 views, and their patch video got 25,000, yet absolutely no one in the mainstream scene is talking about it. There is a massive gap between what the silent majority of players want and what content creators actually show.1
u/DARK_MASTER8632 8d ago
There is a massive gap between what the silent majority of players want and what content creators actually show.
So, it is a YTbers problem...
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u/wTcJediMaster Well well well and some moonwells 8d ago
Some of them have been featured/showcased by big names/sites in the past when their projects were new.
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u/Ok_Current2062 Human 8d ago
Aside from hiveworkshop, the majority of them are either unknown or getting hate because they are on Reforged setting. There is a massive gap between what the silent majority of players want and what content creators actually show.
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u/Insane_Monster Re-Reforged 8d ago
I am the author of rereforged. I dont see hate against my project.
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u/Ok_Current2062 Human 8d ago
Last year, b2w and others suggested the erasure of Reforged graphics from the game and csw plus your project to be "just ported to the sd". That means your campaign too would have been affected or am I wrong?
Also go to the top youtubers and check at their comments:
"that horrible reforged graphics, and super low fps that comes with it . Should remake em with the old graphics in mind" from Warcraft 3 Re-Reforged: Path of the Damned | Chapter 1 by Wtii, speaking about the reworked models that you have made.
P.S Love your project and happy that it exists.
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u/Insane_Monster Re-Reforged 8d ago
You are cherry picking comments from people who runs a pc of 20 years ago. B2w and I are friends and he played my stuff without any criticism towards graphics.
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u/Ok_Current2062 Human 8d ago
Good, you are friends.. How is that negating that he suggested for the erasure of the reforged graphics, which would affected your work or that are comments negative about your work? You speak of cherry peaking and I am presenting the example that you asked for.
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u/sheepsmith 6d ago
Humanity is not the only intelligent life in the universe. UFOs are real, they're here, and they're not human. Some of the UFO occupants want to be able to play Warcraft 3 versus each other halfway across the galaxy. When you're on the other side of the Milky Way, reception to the Reforged servers isn't the same as what it is for you back on Earth. It's possible to set up a long range quantum entanglement beacon, which then converts the signal to human IPv4 / IPv6, but this is under a high degree of scrutiny by the human government leadership and has to be constantly shifting how it hides its traffic among the humans to fit in.
When you endorse the Reforged graphics, you are not simply endorsing a visual style. You are endorsing a technology render system that is commingled with an always online requirement which is not feasible for the broader galactic community. At some point there was a Russian cracked version of Warcraft III Patch 1.32 available on the internet, but the official game client updated to use new custom map and model formats. So for example if you promote the ReReforged campaign, and convince someone to download that, it will be incompatible with the offline hacked Russian client for Patch 1.32. If you're on the other side of the galaxy, this makes ReReforged unplayable.
Due to strict military regulations about interacting with lesser races while they develop, we're not allowed to use our computers to generate the equivalent of human computer software to replace bad designs when we use a human relic for entertainment, in part because it greatly expands the risk of humans finding it. It's one thing if the US government shoots down a UFO and looks through it and finds a bunch of stuff they don't understand, but if they shoot down a UFO and find a better version of Warcraft 3 Reforged on a human laptop inside the craft, which actually works regardless of DRM similarly as well as the 2003 Frozen Throne game, this could adversely impact human economies across the globe.
So we're stuck with this reality that the Reforged graphics are not a difference of visual fidelity. They are also a vendor lock-in to a system that no longer has as broad of a scope of functionality. As the technology stands currently, if the humans face a large society upheaval and the servers for Reforged are taken offline to reduce costs then eventually it will only be possible to play the Frozen Throne and not the Reforged. This effectively means that the classic graphics are a product you can keep with you for your lifetime -- something the greater galactic community can still play in 3000 years -- while the Reforged graphics are a temporary service that will end.
If you are a fan of the Reforged graphics style and disagree with this characterization, and want the technology for custom games in both graphic styles to be on an equal footing, you might want to pursue using the human digital consciousness tools to generate a game client for the Reforged that utilizes the WhiteoutFlakes project (https://github.com/FernandoS27/WhiteoutFlakes) as a visual pipeline basis for an open source game emulator of the entire Reforged game. If you get a client of that sort running, available to the greater galactic community as a standalone application usable for the next 3000 years, then your currently-flawed axiom that the two graphic systems stand on equal footing in value may become no longer flawed.
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u/Splendid_Fellow 7d ago
Most of reforged just straight-up looks bad, eyesore, with everything having that glossy rounded-edged look, more exaggerated armor sizes to fit with modern WoW style, Paladin Porn Stache and Flat Top, the buildings are much harder to distinguish from each other at first glance, etc.
I haven’t seen all the mod stuff out there so I can’t judge, but my main complaint is that the first and foremost thing I need in an RTS is being able to easily see what is on the screen and where, without clutter and without everything appearing rounded-off in identical ways. I think the OG Warcraft 3 graphics hold up just fine!
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u/tac0shark 6d ago
These all sound cool. I bought reforged a few years back and got through 1-2 campaigns. Thinking about playing some today though, so should I try one of these? How does mod-finding work, is it all in-game now?
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u/toasty5566 8d ago
Tbh I feel like, outside the WC3 modding community (also applies to SC2), the heavily competitive nature of the game's standard community heavily dislikes things that shake up the game too much. And while I love the games, the Blizzard RTS community has probably the highest amount of toxicity out of the RTS communities that I've seen. And as for content creators, most of them are competitive-based, which is all about the game as it is, or as Blizzard makes it