True Tragedy of Warcraft 3: Reforged

Warcraft 3: Reforged logo.

Let's talk about Warcraft 3: Reforged. That's not the first time I go on about this 'remaster' released at the end of January 2020. It really showed (yet again) that there's nothing left of Blizzard Entertainment, besides the name... and Heroes of the Storm team. There's only Activision Blizzard now and many people blame them for everything that happened. However, if anything, they actually help of helped Warcraft 3... That's complicated.

It's not to say that they're not to blame: Activision's desire for profit is well-known and it's quite obvious that Classic Games team was damaged by their "cut costs" philosophy. Not to mention the lack of updates and terrible advertisement of Reforged. But, unlike many other people, I want to dive deeper into this situation and give everyone credits where its due: not just publisher, but developers, community and others. 

There's more to this story than simple "it's just higher-ups" and I want to tell all of it in full detail. I did it before, but this time shall be the final one.

Classic Games Team.

I'll start from the beginning. Classic Games Team was created within Blizzard to "revive" its classic games, such as Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and Starcraft. Headed by Robert Bridenbecker, this small team of a dozen induviduals started off with releasing a few new patches for previously mentioned games in order to make them more accessible on modern machines. Of course, all of that lead to their first big project - Starcraft: Remastered.

It's worth mentioning that both Warcraft 3 and Starcraft were remastered, not remade... Although even then using the term "remaster" in regards to them might be not quite right. Unlike most remasters and remakes, both Remastered and Reforged were built upon the original games. Not enhanced on different engine or completely reimagened from scratch.

Anyway, the reception was mostly positive. Of course, there're issues that weren't fixed to this very day, but I'm not really into Starcraft and that's not the main topic. What I want to mention is how members of Classic Games Team talked about the legacy of this game in comparison with Warcraft 3. In an interview to Yahoo Esports, Pete Stilwell said such things as:

"...so moments like that added clarity of, like, what we have to do right and what do we have make sure to maintain because this is like a classic car, right? Where there are certain elements that define what it is that you don't want to change just because you have modern engines and modern brakes, and things like that doesn't mean we should, we should do that and that those trips that we took that we've taken, I think, eight trips to Korea over the past year. You have added that clarity of 'don't mess with the gameplay'. It's okay that Dragoons are derpy and, and that occasionally a Reaver shot won't go off. Like, those are things that make the game exciting. Those are the things that, that separate a really great player from a mediocre one and so we started there with just 'don't touch the gameplay', 'leave it alone', but it's, it's not just that.

Like, players that have been playing this for so long visually had programmed a silhouette, a type of animation. You know, cues in their brain, what they should be doing and when. So even as we approached remastering the art, you know, we sat down with the art team and we're like 'just look at the profilies, watch the animation'... like, you have to get them to be one-to-one. We don't want people to have to relearn the game. We don't want the game to appear differently. It needs to be the core of what may has made Starcraft great."

<...>

"Yeah, so that where our server team has been amazing. We've bridged basically the classic services with the modern ones because there isn't an example of a chat channel at the moment and, again, when we, when we did our research and found out how important that is, we didn't want to lose that as we, as we brought the game over to modern Battle.net. So, we essentially created a bridge and we've done a bunch of, you know, server and infrastructure work to, to make it possible to have modern chat channels that, you know, look the same built into that, to the legacy chat channel. So you can still have, you know, your old buddies next to your new ones, depending on whether you're on modern or a legacy Battle.net account."

<...>

"So, one of the greatest things that, that we're bringing along are your, your classic accounts. We didn't want players to lose potentially 20 years of history and the, the, the guys who have logged in every 90 days make sure that those accounts didn't expire. We wanted those to be paired to their, their new modern account so that they won't lose them and that's the cool part. You get to keep that name that you loved, the associated wins/loses and all that, and then it will be paired forever to that modern account.

Think, you know, like a WoW server where you just keep the gateway and then underneath that you have the characters, right? So, similarly, you'll be able to log in to US West or Kr1 and, and just select 'this is the one I'm gonna play today' or I wanna link my old one to it and then that will be forever saved."

<...>

"That's another place where we were really lucky. Blizzard has a number who has created the original game that still work here. So Brian Sousa, who's our lead artist, worked on the original game and he worked on Starcraft 2. Like, he, he's the soul of this world, right? He's this universe and so it was easy for him to sit down and be like 'here are the things, here's where we changed between the games, here's where we need to make sure we maintain, here are the units that are unique to this game' or that and really the art style itself, right. The Starcraft 1 and 2 have a different saturation and just generally have a slightly different aesthetic, and part of that is because one is 2D and one is 3D. But, in general, it's just, you know, the way things have evolved over time. So, having Brian know what, what the ultimate outcome should be to be true to it made it really easy to impart on our team how to achieve these goals."

Pete Stillwell. Taken from Game Informer.

Words like that really show that he's really passionate about his job. You would've thought that Classic Games Team actually learned a thing or two from all this... Sadly, that's not what happened. Instead of going in easy and right route of Remastered, team decided to not involve the community with Reforged until after the fact. 

Why? I suppose that Brian Sousa, Lead 3D Artist for Starcraft: Remastered and Lead Artist of Warcraft 3: Reforged at the time, didn't liked how community members affected his work and not allowed to do what he wanted. During GDC 2018, he participated in "Game Art Remastered" panel and talked about development process of Starcraft's remaster. I believe that was a foreshadowing of what's to come:

"And don't change the look. Um, this was kind of surprising to us, but the fact that Starcraft looked a certain way was really key to the players."

<...>

"...we extracted all of the original assets and then scaled them up 400% to see, like, what kind of resolution we're working with. And when we did this, we found out there's no consistent cameras or lighting. I don't know what those artists were thinking, but we had to eyeball everything to make sure that the perspective was right for the game and not right for what you would think.

So, what did we do? We went-... First, we said 'Let's, let's get out style down' and we worked with battlecruiser. Battlecruiser is big, it's badass and it's iconic. Everybody knows the battlecruiser. So this is our first test: we set up a huge style guide about how we did it and what we were going for, and we showed these to our... ou-uh... our group, our focus group. They hated it. It wasn't what they wanted. They already thought we were screwing up the game and so, like, we had to rethink. And so we came up with second battlecruiser, which, as you can see, is more in line with the original."

<...>

"...One of the things we had is, uh... We had a protos portrait and his eyes were supposed to be blue, and I think we changed them to red because in Starcraft 2 his eyes were red. And immediatly, like, in a focus group I was like 'How do you even know what the prottos' eyes color is', but they're like 'Hey, it's supposed to be blue' and so we actually re-rendered it all, and, and put that in there because it's one of those things if somebody notices it, then we did it wrong. That was the main focus, was not to do anything that people noticed."

Brian Sousa. Taken from Warcraft Wiki.

That last line is especially interesting since Blizzard ended up squeezing in as much of Starcraft 2 as they could into Starcraft: Remastered. Either focus group wasn't involved at that point or art team didn't showed them everything they're worked on with Lemon Sky Studios.

With that in mind, let's see what was said in regards to Warcraft 3: Reforged during Blizzcon 2018-2019:

Brian Sousa: "...So, after we worked with a little bit of style, a little cartoony, we noticed that a lot of games out there have that kind of similar style, a lot of games are doing that more cartoony look; and so we sort of took a step back, and we said: You know what? What really speaks Warcraft to us?

And for me personally, the Mists of Pandaria cinematic with the Orc and the Human really nailed Warcraft to me. I was like this is what I believe an Orc looks like, this is what the Humans look like. Stylized, but still had that realistic textures, the funnest tone. So we went back to the drawing board. We took these concepts as our base, and then we redid the Orc until we got to a point where we really liked them..."

<...>

Grubby: "I understand that Warcraft 3 was Blizzard's first 3D game. Now you see that." *laughs*

Jay Patel: "Same engine."

Grubby: "Same engine?"

Jay Patel: "Little change to lots of between there, but yeah. War 3 was our first 3D required game and it started with graphics cards that could only draw one texture at the time and *laughs* so you can see that there has been a little bit of a change. Now we have shaders and compute shaders, raytracing is coming down the road. So yeah, we're given the artists a lot more to work with than we straight had it back in 2002."

Grubby: "And Arthas has a neck now?"

Jay Patel: "He does!"

Rob Bridenbecker: "Why is Arthas so like, like four feet tall? And now he's like nine feet tall?"

Grubby: "Proportion."

Brian Sousa: "Perspective."

Matt Morris: "Art."

Brian Sousa: "Art. That's the way they 'art-ed' back in a day."

Brian Sousa: "...Because Warcraft 3 was the first 3D game that Blizzard did that and so, you know, the technology wasn't really there. The characters had very low polygon and they did what they could with what they had. Now that we're looking at that we were like 'Well, we can do anything. We can go at any direction.' and the nice thing about Warcraft is if you go from cute but deadly, up to the Warcraft movie, an orc is recognizable as Warcraft orc, you know, as long as you have that style. So, we had like a full spectrum to work with..."

Brian Sousa: "So, the, the most we had to focus on where there's basically, um... looping animations that you can interrupt. Like, if you're just standing there and you do a walk then it'll interupt the stand and you'll start walking. But there's certain things like that are uninterruptible, like the attacks. So, like at a certain time in the attack is when the damage happens and so that has, that animation has to play at least until that point you need to watch it, but after that, because the rest of the animation is just him like resetting into his stand, we had a little bit of leeway on the timing of that, so we could make it a little bit longer to make it a little more natural when he's coming back into his resting state versus before. Like, the, the animations were so quick that it just looped, it just went back to stand really fast *thinks* and when the art was so, like... I don't know, um... *giggles* low quality?" *laughs*

Pete Stilwell: "Woah, woah, woah!"

Brian Sousa: "Woah, woah, woah."

Grubby: "Um... Shorter! Shorter."

Brian Sousa: "Shorter. Now, like, the standart doesn't... the definition, right? Um, so everything was... You, you really didn't know what was happening a lot of time because the characters were so, um... nondescript. Now that you we have, like, these characters that you can really see and they're fully realized, um... It makes a lot, it makes it look a lot better now that we have a little bit more timing on it."

At the same time, they also how they didn't want to "break the game", which didn't exactly matched with reality and I'll talk more that later. After all of this, there's one question that comes to my mind: "Where's Samwise Didier?"

He helped Classic Games Team with Starcraft: Remastered at least a little bit, but wasn't involved with Reforged at all. To me, an original art director of Warcraft 3 is a better fit than the guy that didn't even worked on the game back in a day. His influence on the series and Blizzard as a whole is invaluable. Of course, I can't say for sure what kept him away from Reforged: another project, personal reasons or behind the scenes drama, but two things I'm about to mention move me towards the latter:

• 

  "BTNTemp" icon. Taken from Warcraft Wiki.

  Originally Samwise wasn't mentioned in Reforged's credits, besides the "Blizzard Development Family" category with all members of the company. "Special Thanks" section included a few important to Warcraft 3 people, like Mike Morhaime, Chris Metzen, Rob Pardo (also Bobby Kotick, because of course), but not Didier, despite his role being just as important. Like, "Power of the Horde" is playing in the background. Come on. People took notice of it (myself included) and after that Blizzard fixed this mistake. At least that's something.

• "BTNTemp" icon is quite famous within Warcraft 3's community. It uses Samwise's face, everyone knows that. Some expected Blizzard to update it accordingly, but instead they replaced it with a face of some unknown women. 

Some of Samwise's words from the time period when Reforged was announced and worked on are just as interesting. In Game Informer's material he talked about the inital plans for Warcraft 3's visuals that are ironic when you look at some of Reforged's issues and during GamerHubTV's interview Didier made an interesting comparison when talking about working  in gaming company:

"The first thing everyone wanted to do was make Warcraft III more realistic," says Didier. "So everything was smaller. Then we saw it in game, and we were like 'Everything looks dumb.' So we started making the colors simpler, decreasing the shading, adding flat colors. We scaled the characters back up and made them bigger and bulkier so they read from that top-down camera. That’s one of the reasons we started doing that style, because it read better, but also because everything felt huge. Everything felt heroic and mightier."

"...If you're trying to, like say, to go to a company like Blizzard, make some art that we would look at and go 'Oh, that fits in our game!'. Don't try to come into something that, you know, with this super realistic or looks like it could be on a space shuttle where you know... maybe Starcraft that might fit, but probably not, you know. Try to, try to aim at, even if that's something you really love doing, if you're looking at the company, doesn't have to be just Blizzard... Try to make what they're making and show them that you can be a part of the team and in fact show them that you're the part of team and you know their stuff better than they do..."

Perhaps I'm looking too much into this, but it reminds me of Mark Hamill when he talked about Star Wars: The Last Jedi... Oh yeah, Brian Sousa left Blizzard around two weeks after Blizzcon 2019. There's a chance he was "let go", but him jumping off this ship at the last moment doesn't make him look good. Even if someone made that decision was made for him.

Another issue that Reforged has when it comes to words are changed translations for all languages (besides English) and removal of some voice lines. Obvious example for me is Russian localization that wasn't particularly right in some places, but it has the soul and players really loved. From what I've heard from both players and voiceovers, new official translation just lacks that spirit of the earlier counterparts. I don't know why they didn't followed the World of Warcraft: Classic approach and left localization as they were back in a day.

Lastly, I want to point at post-release Development Updates since they're misleading for someone who's not familiar with the game. Using terms like "legacy Warcraft 3" (like in one about  supports the common misconception that Reforged is a remake, which is not true. By referring to it as a new game and not another chapter in Warcraft 3's life, uninformed audience is going to be less demanding and more acceptable to Blizzard's decision making and slow pace of delivered patches with those changes and bug fixes.

Lemon Sky Studios.

This one is simple: it's not their fault. Blizzard worked with them on Starcraft: Remastered and everything went well. Even though it seems that realistic style is more closer to them, Lemon Sky did exactly what Classic Games Team asked them to. They just did their job and it's just both pointless and stupid to blame them for something they didn't control over.

Lemon Sky's involvement in Warcraft 3: Reforged's development.

Supposedly, some members of that outsource team reached out to community on r/Warcraft3 to get a feedback from them directly. If we assume that it's actually them (which I kind of do), we'll get yet another confirmation of the terrible job that was done by Reforged's art team:

"While working on the assets, they were almost always looked at head on. It is difficult to say if it was us or them that decided it, but it became part of our work flow."

Warcraft 3: Reforged.

Before moving forward, I want to talk more about the game itself. I've already talked about art before, but this time I'll be more specific: it's a mess. There're problems with visual consistency, rotation, scalling and file sizes of Reforged models that make them extremely hard to use for custom maps as they need to be overhauled in order to look somewhat good in new "HD" style. It's almost impossible to make map look good in both visions, so it's only one or the other. On top of that, Blizzard just removed some old models from Warcraft 3 and screws over already existing maps even more as some of them used, for example, Orc Marine. This game has been around for more than 18 years and it's just downright disrespectful towards original creators and community surrounding it.

Visual comparison from "Warcraft 3: Reforged What's Next" panel from Blizzcon 2018.

Recreation of visual comparsion from Blizzcon 2018 by StormKnight.

I probably don't need to tell you that Warcraft 3's original art style still holds up to this very day and it works very well for an RTS game. The main issue with Reforged's art style is that it's simply not Warcraft 3. Originally Blizzard moved away from realistic graphics because they saw what problems they would create for the game, but it didn't stopped Classic Games Team from not doing such a mistake. Realistic graphics age horribly and you can see that Reforged is affected by it already. It's just mind-boggling!

Now let's go to something more (or less) surprising: missing features. This time it's not the case of "less is more" and the absense of these things are a downside of Reforged. It's worth mentioning that things weren't looking good pretty such since Warcraft 3 started getting new patches from Classic Games Team. Each major patch in "pre-Reforged" era (1.29-1.31) initially broke the game in some way while trying to add something new. That created a situation where people just decided to stick with one of stable patches (1.29.2, 1.30.4, 1.31.1) to this day in order to have stable Warcraft 3 experience without any issues.

In Patch 1.31, Classic Games Team diactivated Reign of Chaos ladder (with its Battle.net servers) and Automated Tournaments due to technical issues they couldn't fix. Instead of trying to maintain them for people that enjoyed them and deal with hacking and game client shenanigans, Blizzard just pulled the plug. After Reforged's release, they released the famous Development Update. The one where they were "sorry to those of you who didn't had the experience you wanted". There they addressed Automated Tournamets for the first time and said how it and Reign of Chaos ladder were "underused elements", hoping that the option to play custom maps with original ruleset would satisfy people. It wasn't enough, and some data gathered by a member of Reign of Chaos community contradicts Blizzard's claim.

Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne Profile Icons for Battle.net.

Clans were ignored as well and some groups that didn't migrated to Discord weren't warned about this. Player profiles are still absent and its 3D unit portraits will be probably replaced with reused Reforged icons with highly reduced number of available portraits in comparison to Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne. Some of the icons that originally were rewards for winning said amount of games for specific race were moved to campaign awards, so that Medivh portrait for 1500 Human wins in Reign of Chaos is now available to everyone who spams the right cheat code.

Speaking of campaigns, their background screens were also downgraded from 3D to 2D and that has an effect on custom campaigns. Not only because those aren't available, but some of them had their own backgrounds that simply wouldn't work with current Chromium based menu because Classic Games Team thrown away old menues. Also, while its understandable why you can't play the original campaigns with new visuals, it's still a problem that goes against the idea of remastering a game. Creating new campaigns with "cinematic cutscenes" that should be more closer to eternally inconsistent World of Warcraft is even worse and ironic, as WoW didn't really bother to keep the continuity with Warcraft 3 pretty much since their development.

Community.

"Last Spell, Last Arrow, Last Orc" by Samwise Didier. Taken from DeviantArt.

This one is more complicated. Truth be told, they've suffered the most from this mess. Everyone can see that. Great opportunity to bring new blood into old and slowly stagnating community was wasted, while remaining players either given up or about to so. Some became desperate like they're long time World of Warcraft players waiting for Blizzard to do something and be glad that they kind of remember about their existence.

I'm mostly an "outsider" here: I can't call myself part of Warcraft 3 community as I didn't play this game as much as I should've and neither I was really sticking around said community until after Beta version of Reforged first surfaced, which is something I regret. I've been watching some Discord servers and others places around Internet related to the game from that point on, and that's when I started to notice something worrying. Not just its slow descent into madness and total autism that came with it, but also the fragmentation within them.

Seriously, some people were complete psychos. Attacking random developers that didn't had anything to do with how Reforged turned out to be because they're not the ones who were behind decision making and simply did their job the best they could. There're better ways to express your discontent than death threads, doxxing and other crazy things... These idiots only make things worse as some people often prefer to perceive those retards as a representation of the whole community, therefore discrediting the constructive criticism from normal people due to their "toxicity".

Warcraft 3's community is kind of divided, especially after Reforged's release. Not everyone treats this game for what it is, that being a classic RTS with Esports scene and solid custom map/campaign community. In particular, I've seen many players and creators that neglect Warcraft 3's genre and treat it as a World Editor's engine: a sandbox platform like Garry's mod or Roblox... What the hell is Roblox? I didn't notice any "melee players" expessing something similar towards their neighbors, but, just for the sake of probity, let's assume the opposite. Because, in some way, it's probably true.

Remember how I talked about Blizzard's communication with community? Well, we know that Classic Games Team reached out to them at least twice to learn what they would like to see in Warcraft 3 with no mention of a remaster. Unknown competitive players in China were contacted first. After that, a member of Hive Workshop community voluntarily reached out to Blizzard and succeessed! Which is curious, as something tells me that they wouldn't had contact otherwise. Kam and other staff members of the site gathered as much feedback from the people as possible in order to make a document they would hand over to Classic Games Team. It's all well and good, however they decided to "purposely left out melee balance changes since the competitive players have already discussed that with them." 

That mistake greatly demonstrates the fragmentation of Warcraft 3's community. Why not gather all feedback from players? We don't know what players they talked to in China and having suggestions for all aspects of the game would've been even better. It wouldn't hurt anyone to show that you care about Warcraft 3 as a whole, but they didn't. The document contains mostly map-making side of things with some "general suggestions", like proper widescreen support. All this only proves that, and I feel really bad for saying this, they had it coming. Its like cooking: you forget about one ingredient and your precious dish is ruined.

The fact that projects like "Re-Reforged" and "Chronicles of the Second War" are the only things sites like WowHead mention regarding Warcraft 3 nowadays only help its heritage to lie dead in grave. General audience doesn't seem to care about Warcraft 3 (which I'll talk about later), only the Reforged. Which is used by those sites in order to lure in readers. There's been many Warcraft 3 custom maps and campaigns throughout the years that are worth mentioning, but instead only recent Reforged projects got that spotlight. That just shows the sad truth where core community of Warcraft 3 is just left to itself as majority of people still wear rose-tinted glasses when it comes to Reforged's visuals.

Such overstatement, not gonna lie. Taken from Hive Workshop.

It's not to say that said projects don't have rights to exist. At least it shows that, in some way, community is still there and they're willing to stick around for now. These devil's advocates either try to stay positive or just care about things they like that stayed more-or-less stable in thier eyes, such as visuals or some new World Editor functionality. They prefer to stay in their bubble and show empathy only to specific part of the game instead of full damaged package.

But there're some good things to mention here as well. W3Champions shows perfectly that  there're still people that love and care about Warcraft 3. Ladder for community by the community. Matchmaking, profiles, tournaments and that's only just the beginning. There's much more to it, but I just wanted to give it a quick shout-out since W3Champions definitely deserves it.

Others.

Although some of the things I'm about to mention can be also implied to members of Warcraft 3 community, I decided that they're more related to newcomers, World of Warcraft players and other types of people who don't know this game too well. As a result of bad communications from Blizzard and hype that's been generated (especially in comparison to other reveal from Blizzcon 2018), many people are convinced that Reforged should've came out in its original state and be much more of a remake than the final product. They've been asking for many features and changes that simple don't fit into an old classic game like Warcraft 3 or have been added already thanks to community, but they ignore their work simple because "it's not the official content made by Blizzard".

Many (if not all) of the features can be summarised by one completely made up definition I've created in order to easily categorize this phenomenon - "Starcraft 2-fication", which is a movement (or idea) of introduting various aspects of Starcraft 2 into Warcraft 3 that ultimately destroys its own identity. In fact, this process has already started:

• Only newest ruleset is available for players.

• Upcoming ladder is similar to Starcraft 2's, which Blizzard admitted themselves.

• Chat is much smaller than it was and moved to bottom right corner of the screen.

• Much like Starcraft 2's, Warcraft 3's map folder is now a complete mess.

Now let's go over some thinks that people want Blizzard to add and/or change. First of all, Co-op mode. That's not really an issue as there's already plently of maps made by the community that provide Co-op experience, but, as I've mentioned before, some people tend to ignore it as it's not something that Blizzard created themselves. They want to have a copy of Starcraft 2's Co-op and its microtransaction elements in Warcraft 3 simply because "they really love it". Despite the fact that this decision would affect already damaged custom map scene of Warcraft 3 as people would much rather make the most out of the money they've spend. Therefore, Co-op will take all the attention from the players instead of custom maps. That's not an issue in Starcraft 2 since I wouldn't be surprised if some of you didn't even knew that that game has a map editor too. The one that's not as user friendly as Warcraft 3's, which is why it's so nonexistent and. Not to mention that adding microtransactions into 18 years old game that you already have to buy is a terrible idea on its own and it's not as simple as "Oh, just don't buy it". There's already Starcraft 2 for all that.

Another thing is increasing unit selection from 12 to higher or even unlimited number of units. It would be a great option for World Editor and all those big scale maps that could really use that, it's not great for Warcraft 3 itself... or "melee", if that's what you prefer to call it. Why? Gameplay mechanics. This game is more micro focused with emphasis on keeping low Food count to avoid getting punished by Upkeep. It makes Warcraft 3 much more tactical by focusing on small groups of units and keeping balance between aggressive gameplay and safety of your troops. Pathing is another "feature" of Warcraft 3 and should be kept the same because of that. If new players have problems with understanding how this game works, it's not Warcraft 3's issue. They should overcome these struggles and simply "get good". Increasing unit selection cap goes against the basics of this game and will only encourage players to not learn how to play and get punished as a result. It's not Warcraft 3 who should adapt by simplifying gameplay, which on itself would be disrespectful towards longtime pro-players.

I'm not saying that Starcraft 2 is a bad game by any means. I'm not really into this franchise and I don't plan to play it. However, I'm sure that we don't need two exactly identical games since Warcraft 3 has its own uniqie identity that should be kept as it is instead of changes just for the sake of it.

Conclusion.

What did we get at the end? Good old Warcraft 3 diappeared and Reforged with all controversy surrouding it took its place in gaming industry. It's both sad and ironic as Warcraft 3 was the game that defined Blizzard Entertainment and it did that yet again. They didn't forget about it, even if they pretend they do. This distorted seed spreads its roots throughout once promising franchise that continues to endure its own damnation from those who have no respect for it. Warcraft 3 (and true Warcraft with it) is slowly and painfully fades away with the help of both developers and audience. However, there're people that love this game. Those who want it to be the best it can be and do anything they can to achieve that.

Pete Stilwell: "16 years ago Warcraft 3 found me. The art was vivid, the gameplay immersive, the stories kept me in their thrall... pun intended. Warcraft 3 changed me. Because of this game, I wanted to create the experiences with the power to move people. Because of this game, I became a developer and, because of this game, I joined Blizzard and I stand before you today. Like, epic!"

Pete Stilwell: "So, understand that's part of our dialogue, guys. Like, we're... we're open to being wrong and we want to share that, and we want to hear from you, guys, when we are. We appreciate it."

Pete Stilwell: "You're the bedrock of why we shop up to work everyday and we, we appreciate you so much. We love your activity, we love your honestly. Please keep being honest with us, keep us on point."

I believe that were people within Classic Games Team, such as Pete Stilwell, wanted only the best for Warcraft 3. They didn't wanted all this to happen and I'm sure they made all they could (or allowed) to make things right. Not to mention that people like Grubby will make sure that the game will still be around for as long as possible.

Pete Stilwell and Manuel "Grubby" Schenkhuizen during an interview.

These hidden icons that's been discovered in game's files seem like a sign of hope. They look a lot like "Lich Abilities" portraits from Heroes of the Storm, which is great. But it's really hard to say when they were made and for what purpose. Could it be a sign of Blizzard working on "true HD models" for this game? Maybe it's something from early days of Reforged's developement or much older than that. It's hard to tell and I'm not sure we'll have answers for that.

Hidden Icons in comparison to their Reforged's counterparts.

"Frost Nova", "Frost Armor", "Dark Ritual" and "Death and Decay" portraits from Heroes of the Storm.

That would've been the end of it, if not for "recent" events...

Vicarious Visions.

Their merge with Blizzard and dismantle of Classic Games Team has come as a intriguing, but well-timed surprise. These news serve as a potential confirmation of a rumor that Vicarious Visions worked on Diablo 2's remasters, referred to in Bloomberg article as Diablo 2: Resurrected. Well, I hope it's a remaster and them calling it a remake is just another case of misunderstanding the meaning of those terms.

Why would I be slightly excited about this? Let's go back to GDC 2018. Besides Brian Sousa, there was Cory Turner - a Senior Character Artist of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy:

"I'm a character artist by discipline and some of my previous work at, um-m-m... VV was to intergate Bowser and Crash into Skylander games. Uh... Doing this gave me some practical experience: trying to meet a goals of new and different product... uh-h-h, while respectful of brand's heritage.

I personally think it's wise to recognize the meaning iconic franchise characters have to their audience and to their fans..."

<...>

"Because we were rebuilding these games from scratch, part of the question becomes 'Where do we pull our style and insipation from'? This kind of can become a dilemma. It could be easy to go down the path into full remake or reimagining territory, uh, where changes that are not carefully executed could lead fans to question the intent of a product, uh, the game like ours. <...> ...but the point is, like, we would want to try to avoid evoking that kind of disconnect with what we were making. That we wanted people to feel comfortable that what they were looking at is what they remembered and what they cared about."

<...>

"We tried to keep our ear to the ground and observe how people responded to gif-... different game remakes, um... or how they had discussed our previous Crash efforts. Our solution was to kind of preserve the essential angularity of the 32-bit models, of the vintage look. Get the character designs right by being faithful to the classic looks the majority of audiences would have nostalgia fo-fo... for without actually creating low-poly art ourselves.

When I say 'essential angularity', uh, I tend to mean the major movements of the shape and silhouette. So, you know, these are, we feel, people respond to on a kind of core level. So artists needed to not be selfish. Had to let go of our previous styles and any desires to really heavily reinvent these characters. We kind of had to reverse engineer them back to their core, not overdesign or 'fix' them. These characters have a lot of appeal in their own way and we should polish and not try to lose that, kind of, core essence."

<...>

"Speaking, at least, to our project. Uh, QA was absolutely headed up by an enourmous. Um, so key QA people on the project were people who were very big fans of the franchise and the expectation was to be checking it against the original game, and be mindful of things like that. Absolutely."

Because of the merge, he's now a Lead Character Artist at Blizzard Entertainment. You know, it's sad that Vicarious Visions ended up in current Blizzard, but at the same time I'm kind glad that there're people like that now. It reminds me of true Blizzard, much like Heroes of the Storm team, and I hope that they wouldn't be corrupted by them any time soon.

It's also worth mentioning that a Starcraft 2 update (that was released in the same day when Team 1 was reorganized) was written by Robert Bridenbecker, who was a head of Classic Games Team before it stopped existing. At the time, it reinforces my worries about Starcraft 2-fication.

Vicarious Visions potentially working on Diablo 2 assures me that this game will get the treatment it deserves. We don't know who works on Warcraft 3 as of today, but with previously mentioned icons, known reorganization within the company and arrival of people that know how to do their job right, I want to believe that there's a room for hope and optimism. That, at least in some way, Warcraft 3 will be restored.

Thanks for reading this massive text. (^: