Ehem. This is the type of comment that gets people into trouble. Obviously, we're here to enjoy a make-believe world of swords and sorcery that is quite literally often themed around killing our enemies, but is it possible to word your post differently so that people know you were imagining defeating Blizzard in a game setting and not calling for violence? For example you could upload a video of yourself killing an in-game character named Blizzard, and say "DEATH TO BLIZZARD IN WARCRAFT" or something, similar to those kids who used to always say "in roblox" at the end of their otherwise negative comments. It's subtle but it's also powerful to say that we only want to pretend battle our enemies and not battle them for real, since battling them for real is probably illegal and one must follow the relevant laws.
All of that said, I greatly, greatly enjoyed the last Resyak campaign that I played, to the point where I would maybe even say that it was so much fun it made my day at the time.
I also see that Kenshin credits:
I see that I am also credited here. Is there more detail somewhere? Is this crediting me for any actual MDX file that I created (unlikely) or for the general technology support of "Retera Model Studio" existing? I guess it doesn't matter much, but I would be curious for a more granular breakdown.
Maybe stick to commenting on Kenshin's work, instead of bringing your biased views on Reforged into this.
All things considered, I am a little bit sad when I see a mod like this. Because I think that it's attention-grabbing due to its capacity to remind us all of the endless social media back-and-forth about Reforged, but at the end of the day I probably wouldn't personally play with this mod and would simply play with the classic graphics instead.
Reasons being:
- There's nothing wrong with classic graphics, whereas when an author spends dozens or hundreds of hours gathering together custom files like this, it's almost inevitable that they break the littlest thing, or forget a CollisionShape in one place so we can't click our unit, or something
- Reforged support for mods is bad. It's designed to only let Brad Chan make mods and not us (hence the HD2 folder and slider bars). He can make a mod for "heroes AI upscale" and "unit AI upscale" and turn them on and off, but it's considerably much more difficult to add a slider to my game with "Kenshin Classic+ on and off." Instead we often use the local files hack, and then you can only have one loaded unless you use an external program to swap them, and that's just very annoying. I literally asked to have my custom mod that I worked on for like 12 years hosted on Hive as a hosted project back in maybe 2014, and it was denied on the basis of the fact that one of its files renamed game files to-and-from their original location, akin to using local files and I was told that in order to be accepted, a mod must run from an entirely independent installation that launches the modded game from its independent install location. Then Reforged ruined modding, and now CSW and Quenching and everything are breaking user installs worse than my thing from 2014, and we just have to put up with it because Reforged technology is worse than Warcraft III
- Bothering to install these graphics uses up time whereas if I just play with the originals, I use less time to get that going. But the goal is the same resultant game experience basically
- The mod targets Reforged whereas lately I was probably playing emulators on linux that execute spinoffs of pre-Reforged clients so the model file names might not match
- Artistic criticisms from Kacpa are probably generally accurate, at a glance. For example:
This port looks weirdly "rounded" probably because someone used the inferior Recalculate Normals math from Retera Model Studio which has changed across versions, and doesn't match 3DS max. Maybe someone could ask autodesk for the exact original algorithm. If you look at his hands, you'll see what I'm saying, I don't have to go dig up the model of original Mountain Giant to know that his hands probably pop out and don't look "rounded." This isn't even necessarily a criticism of the geometry or textures -- it's probably an artifact of porting into the Warcraft 3 format.
This guy seems to have tubular arms. It's probably a WoW tauren. There's something about the original Tauren Chieftain where I feel like the colors and style are different than this, and that's popping into my head just by looking at this and without even comparing. I don't know what the artists knew in the early 2000s but sometimes the style of characters had a certain charm. Even if the Tauren Chieftain's face was a square, you could feel that he was this old epic character. The little high-poly face of this guy seems styled differently. I almost thought it was a spirit walker at first, until I remembered that we don't have heroic spirit walkers in base Warcraft III (and when an artist makes all these models, he has to suffer by definition and can't make a custom hero like a heroic spirit walker for fun).
This guy looks small and Reforged-y, similar to how Reforged bears are a bit more lanky (maybe from some attempt at "realism") rather than feeling like the bear is a big chunky
wide tank character. Maybe I'm totally wrong about this but I bet if you measure the shoulder-to-shoulder distance on this guy, and then do the same for the 2002 model, the distance on the 2002 model would be a wider value.
I immediately noticed that you put a different back decal shape and it bothered my brain. This is probably a readability issue for a grandmaster kung fu champion like Grubby when he plays the game. Are you upscaling Warcraft III or are you making a custom mod with new character designs?
The readability of the crypt fiend in this pose seems wrong. The original one is a gray spider. Yours seems to be a large splat of the player color.
The original normal vectors point up/out towards the light, causing the finger tips to render as obvious bright claw shapes. (render color is usually a function of
dot product of normal vector and vector towards light source. The normalized dot product is known to also equal the cosine of the angle between two vectors, and so on a simple 2002 machine this cosine (which is 1.0 for infinitely small angle and 0.0 for biggest angle) is usable as an extremely rough approximation of whether to be light or dark when facing to or away from light source.
This mod appears to include the claw geometry, but is it bright enough to accentuate the known character shape when it really counts?
[Editted] Why is it that after WoW, the "frills" of the Lich always have to look like plastic instead of looking like a cape?
Now without even playing the mod, I was able to post a bunch of criticisms. But if Reforged did an upgrade tomorrow and replaced itself with only this mod and we couldn't play Classic or Reforged graphics anymore starting from tomorrow, and could only play this Classic+, many people would probably uninstall the game. The criticism would be much harsher than what I provided here.
In this way, to a certain extent I feel sorry for whoever undertakes this project. I honestly think the project might be more fun to make than how much fun it is to actually play. The technology and the art graphics are extremely fun. But at the end of the day, if it were me, I would eventually
go back to playing Warcraft III, which I prefer. And I'm okay with how Warcraft III looks, actually. Sometimes I like the simple graphics because it means I can make custom graphics by editing the originals, and then my custom graphics can end up looking good even if we would realize up close that
what I created are bizarre and terrible geometric frankensteins!
Edit:
And, just as a note to whoever is writing these types of Hive promotional front pages, I'm a bit concerned that you'll lose the empathy of your reader when you write something like this:
Instead, the patch left much to be desired, failing to meet expectations and leaving the community craving a true enhancement of the original experience.
Ever since the last group left in late 2022 and new people like Brad Chan and PlaySide studios were hired in, my "expectations" for this company were about like this:
And to be honest, I think that Reforged 2.0 was pretty much in line with these expectations
This parody video of mine is
literally years old at this point.
One of the best lines in the video is when Bedivere the Wise (literally the stupidest character in the whole group that I was parodying as being the "New War3 Team") directly suggests, "Well, look, if we built kinda like an SD+ type of thing" and in response even the main guy in the new team instinctively slaps him across the face. That was great. That was a real joke that I really made, and I made it prior to Reforged 2.0.
Edit 2:
NOTE: The like from
@LongbowMan , a skilled and talented artist, was added to my post here before the previous edit that incorporated the idea of slapping someone across the face for trying to build "SD+" mod(s). This feels a bit like accidental entrapment on my part -- I assume he agrees with my criticism of the readability of models against the original, and probably not as much with the parody video I mentioned from a few years ago. Maybe he would comment and share more at some point, but I wanted to bring attention to the fact that I did not intentionally mean to entrap someone into putting a "like" on something that includes opinions they might deeply disagree with. At times, there have been moments I've actually been rather amenable to the idea that if someone did a perfect graphical upscaling for the game, that could be a cool thing, and if it was entirely unique art files maybe we could package that with a game engine code rewrite or something, and have an entirely open source available-for-anyone version of Warcraft III. But, that's similar to me saying that I wish whenever I walked outside a bowl of mashed potatoes would fall onto the street in front of me in a sealed package delivered by an Amazon drone for my amusement, and to offer me free dinner. It's physically possible for that to happen, but it's also not going to happen.
Edit 3:
Changed the team color on my comparison crypt fiend shots to Violet instead of Purple, so that it matches better to the provided screenshot... Because Violet and Purple are different. Thanks Reforged.
Full mod available at:
