Recent Tides of Warcraft 3

Warcraft 3: Reforged's "New Grunt" Model by Wanmin Gee. Taken from ArtStation.

It's been a while since I really thought about Warcraft franchise, no matter what game or other form of media we're talking about. Even though I stopped actively tracking out Blizzard's news for a long time now, some echoes regarding various games still reached me since many of my friends still keep an eye out and joke about some of that stuff. This includes Warcraft 3 as I have a few friends who still try to play the game on regular basis. I'm also still watching Grubby's videos, so that also helped.

Despite taking notes of some interesting development around tormented real-time strategy, I was very hesitant to actually brought it up in this blog since I wanted to have a prolonged break from these topics. However, completely cutting myself off from it seems counter-intuitive. Especially since all of my most successful Ilko's Hall "articles" are all directly related to Warcraft 3. I might not care about getting a massive amount of readers, but it's logical and not completely depressing to make sure your most popular post this year would have more than ten views.

So it's time for catch up. Look at these aforementioned details in order to see what it could mean for Warcraft 3. This time it should feel more definitive in comparison to "The 'rocPortraits' Mystery" that I initially conceived as a part of a series that would've followed further developments with those "Classic+" Portraits (I'll get to them later on though).

Unexpected Sign.

It all started with a survey that Blizzard has sent out to a select few. Similarly to other bits of news that I'm going to cover here, none of them really caught attention of broader media and gaming audience. They don't care about Warcraft 3 and these notes aren't controversial enough to fake engagement to follow current trends and have a foundation for jokes. As cynical and pretentious it sounds, there's really no other way to word it. I don't really like it personally, but I would rather just be honest with you here.

All of this buzzword is simple to explain why you might've not heard about any of it. The survey itself covered a wide range of questions related to current version of Warcraft 3: your experience with Reforged, the likelihood of you playing it, how much certain aspects of the game affected your desire to play Warcraft 3. As you look into the screenshot at previously linked thread on Hive Workshop, you get to the more interesting questions that ask a user about what features interest him and his opinion of "soft-relaunch of Warcraft 3: Reforged". Yeah, that's a direct quote. You can check it yourself if you don't believe me.

However, you might be skeptical and ask a valid "why does it matter?" question. I believe, the correct saying here is "once an accident, twice a coincidence, three times a pattern". Blizzard has been using those patterns at least for World of Warcraft for a while now. Things like Burning Crusade Classic and Season of Mastery were effectively teased through similar surveys. And that's really a thing about these things: it's not actual an actual survey that's a company creates to gather feedback about potential product and/or changes. Sometimes it's useful as a marketing tool to heat up community's interest in similar way datamining often did for World of Warcraft's crowd.

I'm being lazy here right now, but you can dig up more example of Blizzard's surveys related to Classic, expansion and Retail versions of their ongoing MMORPG. At the top of my head, I also recall surveys related to Dark Portal Pass and level cap revamp that was implemented with notorious Shadowlands expansion. In other words, it means that something is coming for Warcraft 3, and it's not just more patches in style of what the game was getting recently-ish. It's not the matter of "if", but "when" and "what".

Grunting Point.

Return to the linked Hive Workshop's thread dedicated to Warcraft 3 survey and scroll it down just a bit. Once you do that, you'll stumble into the thumbnail for this "articles" and two more screenshots of the game's Grunt. You'll immediately notice that this orc looks drastically different from the Reforged's art style. This Grunt is close to the original visuals of the game and just more pleasing to look at. What's both interest and sad is that this is an official Blizzard concept done by Wanmin Gee, very talented 3D Character Artist (as evident from his Heroes of the Storm work) who worked for the company at the time.

"New Grunt" Model by Wanmin Gee. Taken from ArtStation.

Supposedly (since I can't provide you with "proper source"; I believe it was Kam in Hive or Warcraft 3 United Discord server), "New Grunt" was created at the early stages of Reforged's development when Classic Games Team tried to pick an art style for this remaster. Most of you are aware of how that turned out. The copywrite mentioning 2020 definitely threw me off that explanation as I assumed it should've been more like 2017 or 2018, but I'm not a developer and have no idea how these things work behind the scene.

What's even more interesting, however, is that both Town Hall and Farms also look new: all the other elements on "in-game mock screenshot" combine visual models of Reforged and Heroes of the Storm (with some minor changes to footman's shields to match Warcraft 3's design) into something curious. To be honest, I was surprised to find out that Grunt's post at ArtStation is public again. Sometime after it was shared at "Blizzard Survey Indicates Potential Relaunch for Warcraft III: Reforged" thread, the publication was hidden from public eyes... Although I can't really back up this statement either. There's only one archived page at Wayback Machine and it's a bit funky, so you can't be sure whenever it was an ArtStation error or an archive issue. So take that with a grain of salt as well.

Upside-Down Lead.

This leads us to the final peace of the puzzle. As most people, I've learned about it through Grubby's video where he brought up an Investor Webinar Transcript from the Australian video game developer company PlaySide Studios. That's when they were allowed to mention that they've been working on Warcraft 3 as a part of Work for Hire partnership. Gerry Sakkas, co-founder and CEO of PlaySide Studios, talks about how they're the sole developer in this project and why it's so cool to work with Blizzard directly.

After doing some lazy digging, you can discover that this collaboration has started in the first half of February 2022. Considering the lack of additional details, at this point of time we can assume that PlaySide Studios worked specifically on current version of Warcraft 3 since the start of their partnership with Blizzard Entertainment. The first few months were probably spend on learning the development tools that were used by now defunct Classic Games Team, considering that Patch 1.33 was on Public Test Realm for a couple of months before getting a proper release on August 18, 2022. Meanwhile, the patches that followed walked the same path for around a couple of weeks or almost a month.

Since then, PlaySide Studios publicly tested and released three major patches for Warcraft 3. All of these updates focused on reintroducing some aspects of the game that were phased out when Reforged was initially released. In other words, they literally picked up where Classic Games Team forcefully left off and PlaySide was able to follow a (relatively) consistent release schedule for Warcraft 3's updates with some great reimplemented features. Of all the details covered here, it certainly is the most significant one here.

Conclusion.

Just as I started to slowly write this post, I was surprise to see that Blizzard has decided to include Warcraft 3: Reforged into their 2023 Summer Sale and even mentioned it in separate article on their official site. The reason why you couldn't spot it with a discount before was because Blizzard kept a generous refund policy for the game that allowed people to easily return their money after playing current version of Warcraft 3 for extended period. If anything, this shows that you likely can't really do that... or so I thought. Thanks to a timely tip from JediMaster, I discovered that this policy is still active (for now).

Well, what all of this actually means? We should pay heed to these prophecies, for the Reign of Chaos is returning... Okay, sorry for this cheesy reference. The point I'm trying to make that something is coming, and I'm oddly confident about that. I'm well aware that drawing a conclusion around a survey is rather foolish, but Blizzard has used them before to essentially tease new projects and changes. My prediction about so-called "Classic+" portraits ended up getting very close to the reality, but seeing the return of Tournaments with its chat icons in Patch 1.36 was something I just couldn't anticipate. While I did make an argument that they should be brought back, I didn't expect that to actually happen.

Tournament's "Classic+" Portraits from Patch 1.36.

Basically, I have a weak excuse to be somewhat hopeful and I'm sure as heck will hold on to it. Timing is also somewhat encouraging since 2024 will bring us 30th Anniversary of Warcraft franchise and this is the perfect opportunity for Blizzard to apply this latest "Diablo release formula" to their most popular series as a part of company's big comeback. We know that Blizzcon 2023 is happening, and now I have an actual reason to wait for it. While I don't give a damn about Dragonflight, Wrath of the Lich King Classic and Warcraft Arclight Rumble, I can totally see Blizzard teasing Patch 2.0 for Warcraft 3 as a soft-reboot for Reforged in 2024 at an upcoming event. Developed primarily by PlaySide Studios.

"A Year of Warcraft", if you will. Only time will tell what kind of "soft-reboot" it ends up being, but you can always look back at aforementioned survey in order to make some prediction and/or manage your expectations. I had some ideas about how Blizzard Entertainment could've pulled this off, but I doubt PlaySide Studios are going that far. I would like to be surprised though. As it stands now, however, the reasonable expectation would be just a massive patch that's meant to be Warcraft 3's return alongside a release date for Arclight Rumble and major update for both versions of World of Warcraft.